9 ms·

It makes me sad that FF browser share has continued to decline steadily. The past couple years of releases have been some its the best in terms of my own UX, s

by trts 5y ago

It makes me sad that FF browser share has continued to decline steadily. The past couple years of releases have been some its the best in terms of my own UX, since perhaps the Phoenix era. It's pretty fast these days, the UI is good, has a lot of great extensions and privacy features. I use Brave at work to have a better chrome-based experience with gsuite. It's also a fast, excellent browser with good privacy features, built-in ad/tracker blocking and for the time being seems to be user-not-revenue-first. But using a non-free browser feels like a trap to me. Just as what happened with Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Netscape before, being the middle man between the user and the rest of the internet is just too tempting for any company not to try to leverage for their own advantage. FF hasn't been always perfect, but for 20 years now they have made a browser that didn't have a shady corporate agenda. It feels like the writing is on the wall though. Even people I know who care about FLOSS are using Chrome as their daily driver these days. Mozilla is great and I hope they continue to focus on building a best-in-class browser.

dont__panic 5y ago
I still ask myself: has FF browser share actually dropped that much, or has FF's privacy focus caused browser share estimates to mostly miss FF users in their counts? Most of these stats come from the exact kind of skeevy companies that I (and many other FireFox users) are using FireFox to avoid.
- ksec 5y ago
  > FF's privacy focus caused Even before the whole privacy focused thing FF was already in decline to sub 10% market on Desktop. If you think about it the other way around, it is still hanging on to 5-10% of Desktop market after all is actually quite good. At its peak, Firefox was closing to 40% in some European countries. If you consider IE in Business Cooperate usage and Firefox are not available in those settings, 40% is a really big deal.
- doomrobo 5y ago
  Unfortunately that's not a likely explanation. If you do even the simplest possible measurement, which is just recording user agent strings and IPs, you won't end up undercounting Firefox clients
  - boomboomsubban 5y ago
    Either uBlock Origin or Matrix comes with user agent spoofing, it's not like the practice is that rare.
    - unityByFreedom 5y ago
      Does uBlock Origin turn that on by default? That's the only way I could imagine such stats being wrong by a wide margin.
    - unityByFreedom 5y ago
      Matrix used to do this but doesn't anymore [1] and uBlock never had that feature. Please don't make stuff up. [1] https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/issues/927 https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/issues/927
      - boomboomsubban 5y ago
        I don't think it's fair to call not knowing that a feature was removed from a discontinued app "making stuff up." I was clearly wrong, though it is easy to change your user agent it's unlikely that many Firefox users have done it.
        unityByFreedom 5y ago
        You're right, I misunderstood your comment. I interpreted what you said as in, you can get this feature via either Matrix or uBlock. I see now you meant one of those has the feature and you weren't sure which one had it. Sorry about that. In my defense I think it can be read both ways. I'd add there is a large gap in usage between uBlock and Matrix. uBlock has over 10 million users whereas Matrix is somewhere over 100,000.
    - executesorder66 5y ago
      By mozilla's own metrics only 30% of their users use any addon at all.
- boomboomsubban 5y ago
  Firefox users avoiding those tracking sites would result in an always low user share, it would not really explain the user share dropping. Maybe an increase in privacy minded users could explain a percent or two, but not most of the drop.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- indymike 5y ago
  Firefox has less users than desktop Safari. It shouldn't be that way, but it is. When you factor in mobile it gets worse because Chrome (the Android default) and Safari (the only real choice on iOS) are so dominant. Also, the market share numbers reported by client side trackers like StatsCounter are very close to log file collection and analysis by companies like Kinsta.
  - darig 5y ago
    ALL my homies use Firefox. You didn't address the OP's point... how can anyone know how many Firefox users there are when Firefox users refuse to be counted? You think that the subset of people willing to install a client side tracker and the subset of people who choose to use firefox are representative of the whole? You want to believe it is that way, but it isn't.
  - eric_cc 5y ago
    How are you so sure? You really didn’t address OP’s point about content blocking and privacy tools.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - indymike 5y ago
      Content blocking does not change requests to the originating server. Firefox would have much better market share in log file analysis method studies than it does in client side tracker based studies if the OP was correct.
  - jamie_ca 5y ago
    iOS Firefox is actually quite nice, I've been using it as my default for a year now. Biggest win for me is tab sync, so it's pretty easy to open a tab I had loaded on my phone in my desktop browser. Sure, it's using Safari as a renderer, but these days that's hardly where the differentiating value is.
- gilrain 5y ago
  Do you trust Mozilla? They share the numbers. https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity I’ve watched the decline for years, straight from the source. These usage numbers are not affected by privacy settings.
- jakub_g 5y ago
  My take on FF "decline" is that FF user share (%) dropped because the pie started expanding (especially on mobile). New internet users are likely to be Safari or Chrome users for whom the browser they have is good enough. And Firefox on mobile is simply not as fast as alternatives (the bar set by Chromium Android is very high), kinda painful to use unless you have a highend device, esp. JS heavy sites like Twitter work much better on Chromium. This doesn't fully describe situation, but over last 3 years, mobile users went from 50% to 75% users in my prev company's data. And Firefox is nowhere in those mobile stats.
  - PostThisTooFast 5y ago
    It doesn't help that Apple effectively bans competing browsers from iOS, by forcing them all to use abysmal WebKit. So they're little better than re-skinned Safari. "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks." HACKER NEWS, YOU'RE JAGOFFS. SHOVE YOUR DISRESPECT FOR USERS STRAIGHT UP YOUR ASS. THANKS.
  - gilrain 5y ago
    Number of Firefox users is dropping, not just Firefox market share.
sverhagen 5y ago
I'm sad too. I wonder if it demonstrates how rare it is to get a second chance.
starik36 5y ago
> FF browser share has continued to decline steadily Is that really a fact though? I read somewhere that >80% FF users have Ad Blocker installed. Wouldn't that keep it hidden to Google Analytics and similar outfits that come up with browser usage stats?
- sorry_outta_gas 5y ago
  whatsmybrowser.org returns firefox for me with some privacy plugins and ublock origin installed
  - kennywinker 5y ago
    it even knows the exact version of firefox I'm running (92.0)
- nerdponx 5y ago
  HTTP servers can still see the clients' user agent strings.
  - darig 5y ago
    just go to about:config and set general.useragent.override to anything you want. everything still works fine. most people just set it to the latest chrome default "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/93.0.4577.63 Safari/537.36" to blend in with the crowd. It is meaningless.
- gilrain 5y ago
  Yes. Do you trust Mozilla? They share the numbers. https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
- executesorder66 5y ago
  It's actually about 30% that have any kind of addon : https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/usage-behavior https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/usage-behavior
46756e 5y ago
Just out of curiosity, what are some of Chrome's shady dealings? I'm not too informed on the subject.
- skinkestek 5y ago
  > Just out of curiosity, what are some of Chrome's shady dealings? A parent company that could and would literally put ads for it on the front page of Google? (i.e. before a sesrch term has been entered) This is a place where I'm not aware that anyone else has been allowed to put anything, so if this isn't abuse of market power then I don't know what. Same with other Google web properties that magically work better in Firefox if you change the request headers..!
  - techrat 5y ago
    A company putting an ad for its own product on its own website is not an example of a shady tactic. "Allowed?" Next you'll tell me that Microsoft should be forced to exclusively advertise other browsers other than their own on Bing before search... > so if this isn't abuse of market power then I don't know what. Abuse of market power would be preventing the mention of any other browser when using search and Google has never done that. Or how about a better example: Apple actively preventing any third party web browsers on iOS, then later only allowing third party web browsers to use the Safari Engine. THAT is anticompetitive. Google simply has the better product in this case.
    - skinkestek 5y ago
      Thanks for explaining your position. I'll try to explain in some more detail why this is a problem and how governments has stepped in before: > Abuse of market power would be preventing the mention of any other browser when using search and Google has never done that. Another way to abuse market power is to use ones dominance in one maket to crush competition in another market. Microsoft was punished for this after they bundled IE with Windows back in the day. Google has gone extremely much further down the road of abusing market dominance in one market (search, ads) to crush competition in browsers. Also: did you forget my point about how Google web properties work better if you fake the headers and pretend to be Chrome? > Or how about a better example: Apple actively preventing any third party web browsers on iOS, then later only allowing third party web browsers to use the Safari Engine. THAT is anticompetitive. The value is not in the engine. The engine is something you make to get an advantage in customers mind. Many browsers, both historic and present are just skins on top of other browser engines. > Google simply has the better product in this case. So you say Tree Style Tabs work in Chrome now and it doesn't eat memory for breakfast, lunch and dinner? That's news to me ;-)
eric__cartman 5y ago
I would love to continue using FF, but on my machine with an Nvidia card (sigh) the scrolling in Firefox gets very choppy when using two different browser windows open on the dual monitors. And for some reason this bothers me more than it should. Maybe one of these days I should try using it again. It's been over a year since I last tried it. It's odd because the Firefox on the desktop machine with the Nvidia card and a six core AMD CPU is way choppier than on my 7 year old Thinkpad with a dual core i5 and integrated graphics.
- kvark 5y ago
  We see issues with NV multi-monitor configurations, and are still trying to figure them out. Also, the whole story of multi-windows should improve in the future: there is a good opportunity to share WebRender context between them, but we aren't doing this yet.
  - moralestapia 5y ago
    >but we aren't doing this yet Or anything at all it seems ...
- xnyanta 5y ago
  Damn, I have this exact same problem and never suspected it was NVIDIA related :/
mdoms 5y ago
Every time I use Firefox I find some other stupid issue that just doesn't fly in 2021. Today it might be a top 50 website that doesn't work properly, yesterday maybe it's excessive cpu usage, day before maybe pinch to zoom doesn't work. Who knows what dumb crap is happening tomorrow. Life is too short to muck around with half baked software.
- techrat 5y ago
  Firefox is a dumpster fire half the time. I use Firefox still for exactly ONE website: Facebook. To keep it sandboxed. I still have to restart Firefox at least once every other day because it leaks and becomes a runaway process. No plugins/addons. As stock as it gets. One single website only... and it still pukes all over itself.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - kaba0 5y ago
    Are you even using an updated version? Because I have firefox instances running for months with tremendous amounts of tabs open on 8GB of RAM laptop and has absolutely zero problem with it.
    - techrat 5y ago
      64GB Desktop. Apt runs weekly. Firefox still blows.
      - dralley 5y ago
        Something is F'ed with your system. I have 10 extensions installed, nearly 900 tabs (most of which aren't actually cached) and my Firefox stays open for weeks and it still never uses more than a few GB of RAM.
        techrat 5y ago
AniseAbyss 5y ago
I just don't trust Google, they make almost all their money from tracking users for advertising purposes. So the cynic/realist in me believes that they are fundamentally opposed to privacy.
ipaddr 5y ago
After 15+ years of use it has become so slow I had to move away for day to day browsing. I'm on windows 7 on that machine. My copy on windows 10 works almost on par with chrome in terms of speed. After the rewrite things were super fast but it has gotten slower each release.
- dralley 5y ago
  Have you tried refreshing your profile?
raven108 5y ago
The problem is not the browser, but a lazy mgmt. Selling user privacy to Google for easy money instead of asking users to either pay for ensuring their privacy. But that will take real work instead of easy “royalty” payments from Google. Between telemetry, safe browsing, sqlite database with all sites you visited & gvfs they siphon off some serious data. So bad for privacy but snappy otherwise, particularly the new versions. MDN is pretty good too, but they chopped off their tech team to “save money” for a top heavy mgmt team.
- dralley 5y ago
  I can think of few worse business plans than a paid browser, in 2021. I would bet money that even the majority of HN readers wouldn't pay money for something so heavily commoditized.
  - tigroferoce 5y ago
    Maybe you are right, but if you present yourself like a privacy-first browser, the paladin of the free internet, and then you end up taking money from Google, your position and credibility don't look great.
    - kaba0 5y ago
      Why exactly? It is just as much a positive for Google paying some (to them) small money to avoid lawsuits as it is for firefox to be able to stay afloat. Do you have any reference to issues where firefox lost credibility?
lenkite 5y ago
Mozilla keeps firing developers and keeps increasing their CEO salary. No doubt, there will be another top-exec pay-hike soon to improve the numbers, along with another layoff.

by trts 5y ago

dont__panic 5y ago

I still ask myself: has FF browser share actually dropped that much, or has FF's privacy focus caused browser share estimates to mostly miss FF users in their counts? Most of these stats come from the exact kind of skeevy companies that I (and many other FireFox users) are using FireFox to avoid.

ksec 5y ago
> FF's privacy focus caused Even before the whole privacy focused thing FF was already in decline to sub 10% market on Desktop. If you think about it the other way around, it is still hanging on to 5-10% of Desktop market after all is actually quite good. At its peak, Firefox was closing to 40% in some European countries. If you consider IE in Business Cooperate usage and Firefox are not available in those settings, 40% is a really big deal.
doomrobo 5y ago
Unfortunately that's not a likely explanation. If you do even the simplest possible measurement, which is just recording user agent strings and IPs, you won't end up undercounting Firefox clients
- boomboomsubban 5y ago
  Either uBlock Origin or Matrix comes with user agent spoofing, it's not like the practice is that rare.
  - unityByFreedom 5y ago
    Does uBlock Origin turn that on by default? That's the only way I could imagine such stats being wrong by a wide margin.
  - unityByFreedom 5y ago
    Matrix used to do this but doesn't anymore [1] and uBlock never had that feature. Please don't make stuff up. [1] https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/issues/927 https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/issues/927
    - boomboomsubban 5y ago
      I don't think it's fair to call not knowing that a feature was removed from a discontinued app "making stuff up." I was clearly wrong, though it is easy to change your user agent it's unlikely that many Firefox users have done it.
      - unityByFreedom 5y ago
        You're right, I misunderstood your comment. I interpreted what you said as in, you can get this feature via either Matrix or uBlock. I see now you meant one of those has the feature and you weren't sure which one had it. Sorry about that. In my defense I think it can be read both ways. I'd add there is a large gap in usage between uBlock and Matrix. uBlock has over 10 million users whereas Matrix is somewhere over 100,000.
  - executesorder66 5y ago
    By mozilla's own metrics only 30% of their users use any addon at all.
boomboomsubban 5y ago
Firefox users avoiding those tracking sites would result in an always low user share, it would not really explain the user share dropping. Maybe an increase in privacy minded users could explain a percent or two, but not most of the drop.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
indymike 5y ago
Firefox has less users than desktop Safari. It shouldn't be that way, but it is. When you factor in mobile it gets worse because Chrome (the Android default) and Safari (the only real choice on iOS) are so dominant. Also, the market share numbers reported by client side trackers like StatsCounter are very close to log file collection and analysis by companies like Kinsta.
- darig 5y ago
  ALL my homies use Firefox. You didn't address the OP's point... how can anyone know how many Firefox users there are when Firefox users refuse to be counted? You think that the subset of people willing to install a client side tracker and the subset of people who choose to use firefox are representative of the whole? You want to believe it is that way, but it isn't.
- eric_cc 5y ago
  How are you so sure? You really didn’t address OP’s point about content blocking and privacy tools.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - indymike 5y ago
    Content blocking does not change requests to the originating server. Firefox would have much better market share in log file analysis method studies than it does in client side tracker based studies if the OP was correct.
- jamie_ca 5y ago
  iOS Firefox is actually quite nice, I've been using it as my default for a year now. Biggest win for me is tab sync, so it's pretty easy to open a tab I had loaded on my phone in my desktop browser. Sure, it's using Safari as a renderer, but these days that's hardly where the differentiating value is.
gilrain 5y ago
Do you trust Mozilla? They share the numbers. https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity I’ve watched the decline for years, straight from the source. These usage numbers are not affected by privacy settings.
jakub_g 5y ago
My take on FF "decline" is that FF user share (%) dropped because the pie started expanding (especially on mobile). New internet users are likely to be Safari or Chrome users for whom the browser they have is good enough. And Firefox on mobile is simply not as fast as alternatives (the bar set by Chromium Android is very high), kinda painful to use unless you have a highend device, esp. JS heavy sites like Twitter work much better on Chromium. This doesn't fully describe situation, but over last 3 years, mobile users went from 50% to 75% users in my prev company's data. And Firefox is nowhere in those mobile stats.
- PostThisTooFast 5y ago
  It doesn't help that Apple effectively bans competing browsers from iOS, by forcing them all to use abysmal WebKit. So they're little better than re-skinned Safari. "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks." HACKER NEWS, YOU'RE JAGOFFS. SHOVE YOUR DISRESPECT FOR USERS STRAIGHT UP YOUR ASS. THANKS.
- gilrain 5y ago
  Number of Firefox users is dropping, not just Firefox market share.

sverhagen 5y ago

I'm sad too. I wonder if it demonstrates how rare it is to get a second chance.

starik36 5y ago

> FF browser share has continued to decline steadily Is that really a fact though? I read somewhere that >80% FF users have Ad Blocker installed. Wouldn't that keep it hidden to Google Analytics and similar outfits that come up with browser usage stats?

sorry_outta_gas 5y ago
whatsmybrowser.org returns firefox for me with some privacy plugins and ublock origin installed
- kennywinker 5y ago
  it even knows the exact version of firefox I'm running (92.0)
nerdponx 5y ago
HTTP servers can still see the clients' user agent strings.
- darig 5y ago
  just go to about:config and set general.useragent.override to anything you want. everything still works fine. most people just set it to the latest chrome default "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/93.0.4577.63 Safari/537.36" to blend in with the crowd. It is meaningless.
gilrain 5y ago
Yes. Do you trust Mozilla? They share the numbers. https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
executesorder66 5y ago
It's actually about 30% that have any kind of addon : https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/usage-behavior https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/usage-behavior

46756e 5y ago

Just out of curiosity, what are some of Chrome's shady dealings? I'm not too informed on the subject.

skinkestek 5y ago
> Just out of curiosity, what are some of Chrome's shady dealings? A parent company that could and would literally put ads for it on the front page of Google? (i.e. before a sesrch term has been entered) This is a place where I'm not aware that anyone else has been allowed to put anything, so if this isn't abuse of market power then I don't know what. Same with other Google web properties that magically work better in Firefox if you change the request headers..!
- techrat 5y ago
  A company putting an ad for its own product on its own website is not an example of a shady tactic. "Allowed?" Next you'll tell me that Microsoft should be forced to exclusively advertise other browsers other than their own on Bing before search... > so if this isn't abuse of market power then I don't know what. Abuse of market power would be preventing the mention of any other browser when using search and Google has never done that. Or how about a better example: Apple actively preventing any third party web browsers on iOS, then later only allowing third party web browsers to use the Safari Engine. THAT is anticompetitive. Google simply has the better product in this case.
  - skinkestek 5y ago
    Thanks for explaining your position. I'll try to explain in some more detail why this is a problem and how governments has stepped in before: > Abuse of market power would be preventing the mention of any other browser when using search and Google has never done that. Another way to abuse market power is to use ones dominance in one maket to crush competition in another market. Microsoft was punished for this after they bundled IE with Windows back in the day. Google has gone extremely much further down the road of abusing market dominance in one market (search, ads) to crush competition in browsers. Also: did you forget my point about how Google web properties work better if you fake the headers and pretend to be Chrome? > Or how about a better example: Apple actively preventing any third party web browsers on iOS, then later only allowing third party web browsers to use the Safari Engine. THAT is anticompetitive. The value is not in the engine. The engine is something you make to get an advantage in customers mind. Many browsers, both historic and present are just skins on top of other browser engines. > Google simply has the better product in this case. So you say Tree Style Tabs work in Chrome now and it doesn't eat memory for breakfast, lunch and dinner? That's news to me ;-)

eric__cartman 5y ago

I would love to continue using FF, but on my machine with an Nvidia card (sigh) the scrolling in Firefox gets very choppy when using two different browser windows open on the dual monitors. And for some reason this bothers me more than it should. Maybe one of these days I should try using it again. It's been over a year since I last tried it. It's odd because the Firefox on the desktop machine with the Nvidia card and a six core AMD CPU is way choppier than on my 7 year old Thinkpad with a dual core i5 and integrated graphics.

kvark 5y ago
We see issues with NV multi-monitor configurations, and are still trying to figure them out. Also, the whole story of multi-windows should improve in the future: there is a good opportunity to share WebRender context between them, but we aren't doing this yet.
- moralestapia 5y ago
  >but we aren't doing this yet Or anything at all it seems ...
xnyanta 5y ago
Damn, I have this exact same problem and never suspected it was NVIDIA related :/

mdoms 5y ago

Every time I use Firefox I find some other stupid issue that just doesn't fly in 2021. Today it might be a top 50 website that doesn't work properly, yesterday maybe it's excessive cpu usage, day before maybe pinch to zoom doesn't work. Who knows what dumb crap is happening tomorrow. Life is too short to muck around with half baked software.

techrat 5y ago
Firefox is a dumpster fire half the time. I use Firefox still for exactly ONE website: Facebook. To keep it sandboxed. I still have to restart Firefox at least once every other day because it leaks and becomes a runaway process. No plugins/addons. As stock as it gets. One single website only... and it still pukes all over itself.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- kaba0 5y ago
  Are you even using an updated version? Because I have firefox instances running for months with tremendous amounts of tabs open on 8GB of RAM laptop and has absolutely zero problem with it.
  - techrat 5y ago
    64GB Desktop. Apt runs weekly. Firefox still blows.
    - dralley 5y ago
      Something is F'ed with your system. I have 10 extensions installed, nearly 900 tabs (most of which aren't actually cached) and my Firefox stays open for weeks and it still never uses more than a few GB of RAM.
      - techrat 5y ago

AniseAbyss 5y ago

I just don't trust Google, they make almost all their money from tracking users for advertising purposes. So the cynic/realist in me believes that they are fundamentally opposed to privacy.

ipaddr 5y ago

After 15+ years of use it has become so slow I had to move away for day to day browsing. I'm on windows 7 on that machine. My copy on windows 10 works almost on par with chrome in terms of speed. After the rewrite things were super fast but it has gotten slower each release.

dralley 5y ago
Have you tried refreshing your profile?

raven108 5y ago

The problem is not the browser, but a lazy mgmt. Selling user privacy to Google for easy money instead of asking users to either pay for ensuring their privacy. But that will take real work instead of easy “royalty” payments from Google. Between telemetry, safe browsing, sqlite database with all sites you visited & gvfs they siphon off some serious data. So bad for privacy but snappy otherwise, particularly the new versions. MDN is pretty good too, but they chopped off their tech team to “save money” for a top heavy mgmt team.

dralley 5y ago
I can think of few worse business plans than a paid browser, in 2021. I would bet money that even the majority of HN readers wouldn't pay money for something so heavily commoditized.
- tigroferoce 5y ago
  Maybe you are right, but if you present yourself like a privacy-first browser, the paladin of the free internet, and then you end up taking money from Google, your position and credibility don't look great.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    Why exactly? It is just as much a positive for Google paying some (to them) small money to avoid lawsuits as it is for firefox to be able to stay afloat. Do you have any reference to issues where firefox lost credibility?

lenkite 5y ago

Mozilla keeps firing developers and keeps increasing their CEO salary. No doubt, there will be another top-exec pay-hike soon to improve the numbers, along with another layoff.