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> Just to add, back then Firefox had an army of advocates installing Firefox on their family’s and friends computers, basically making them use it. Google co-op

> Just to add, back then Firefox had an army of advocates installing Firefox on their family’s and friends computers, basically making them use it. Google co-opted the same arm just four years later with similar marketing to get everyone installing Chrome on their family’s and friends computers. > They need to find a way to get that to happen again. I don’t have the answers but suspect privacy and security may be the angle to take. This worked because, at the time, Firefox was genuinely, and more importantly, visibly better. You can't honestly say that about Firefox nowadays, and after Mozilla's management laid off tons of their engineering talent, there's been no plausible path for them to get there.

alex_duf 5y ago
Although I agree it's not better, it's also not worse. So there's a case to use the web browser that will improve your safety and privacy.
- feanaro 5y ago
  It's better in terms of configurability. It's going to become even better when Manifest V3 comes around because ad blockers on Chrome will no longer be as effective.
- murderfs 5y ago
  It performs significantly worse than Chrome for me on both desktop Linux and Android (although Chrome mobile not supporting extensions means I use Firefox anyway). On privacy, I tentatively agree (but Mozilla's actions with Pocket etc. casts doubt), but Firefox is significantly behind Chrome when it comes to safety. Firefox's sandbox is substantially weaker (e.g. it's basically worthless on linux, because you can reach the X server from inside the "sandbox").
  - Semaphor 5y ago
    > It performs significantly worse than Chrome for me on both desktop Linux and Android Not sure about Android, as I can’t remember how Chrome performs, but I regularly test things in Chrome on Desktop (or when sites are so third-party heavy, I can’t figure out a sensible way to enable sites), and on Windows the performance for both is indistinguishable, and that’s despite tons of extensions for FF and none for Chrome.
  - boudin 5y ago
    I find Firefox less resource hungry and don't see much performance difference on Linux. Any resources on the sandbox weaknesses? I know it was the case a while back but I thought those issues had been addressed since. Firefox works really well on Wayland though, which addresses X's problems (and a few other regarding input and clipboard). Edit: found out the issue you mentioned: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1129492 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1129492 That's not great indeed. I guess that the only workaround for now is Wayland
- mbreese 5y ago
  Maybe a little over a year ago, I switched from Chrome to Firefox (phone, desktop, etc...). I didn't really see much difference, and I liked using Pocket. Plus, I wanted to support Firefox. Fast forward to last week and I'm considering switching back. It's not because of any sites that Firefox hasn't supported. It's because I recently needed to start using a webapp to access to email from $WORK. They locked up email and now my local Mail.app client won't connect to $WORK. My preferred way of handling this is to wrap the webapp as a desktop shortcut, so the entire site is wrapped in it's own window, etc. I also have a couple of other work webapps that I like to treat as applications. Chrome makes this easy/possible. Firefox does not. This used to be something I did with Firefox, but now, it's not possible (or at least easily, on a Mac). Firefox was something you could embed. And now, I have no idea. Small little features like this are where Firefox starts to lose users. Right now I have both running, but I can't see that lasting long.
  - toastal 5y ago
    Firefox 86 removed SSB (site-specific browser) because people weren't using it; also it was behind a flag in about:config no one knew about.
    - aidog 5y ago
      I'm still bitter about that.
    - mbreese 5y ago
      I'm glad to know that I wasn't just imagining things. I could have sworn that I could do this a few years ago. But I wasn't sure that I wasn't just mis-remembering.
      - toastal 5y ago
        I learned about it because I happened across a post from Peppermint OS leveraging it heavily to get lightweight 'apps'. Unless you were following specific posts about the feature, you would never have known about it. SSB had bugs for sure (and sot much dev attention was given), but it could have been a great alternative to Electron in a PWA landscape.
endgame 5y ago
I still install firefox on family machines, specifically because it lets me install a working adblocker. The WWW is too hostile without it.
ghusto 5y ago
> You can't honestly say that about Firefox nowadays That's the big problem. Looking at this only from an average user perspective, it's absolutely right, and "oh yeah well that doesn't work as well as in Chrome because Google pushed an overly complicated unnecessary feature into the standards that requires a company the size of Google to actually maintain and develop it", will only get you blank stares. I hope I'm wrong, but can't help feeling this war is lost. I can't see how you compete when the rules are being written out by your adversary. For what it's worth though, Firefox for _me_ is better than the other options in every way; container tabs, easy privacy options, clean interface, etc. I love it.
- dskloet 5y ago
  > doesn't work as well as in Chrome Did you mean Firefox there?
  - saurik 5y ago
    No: it would be "Chrome", as the feature doesn't work in Firefox as well "as in Chrome" due to requiring the aforementioned army to develop and maintain.
    - dskloet 5y ago
      I guess I missed the second "as".
- iqanq 5y ago
  Google is a convenient scapegoat, but the current state of Firefox is 100% Mozilla's fault, and until you realise that you will be far away from a solution.
  - libertine 5y ago
    Man, as soon as you visit google without chrome you get asked if you want to install Chrome. It's not even close to a fair game. Not saying Mozilla doesn't have some faults, but Google is just playing a different game.
tannhaeuser 5y ago
> after Mozilla's management laid off tons of their engineering talent, there's been no plausible path for them to get there Not saying Moz's management isn't crap, but IMO we shouldn't jump to conclusions into either direction here. From what juicy details we have, it might very well be the case that Moz's Rust advocacy (Servo project) turned out to be a cesspool of dictatorship, lack of accountability, and nepotism, and overall just not delivering much value to the endeavor of developing a web browser relative to an increasingly untenable situation and/or risk of PR catastrophe waiting to happen.
e2le 5y ago
> This worked because, at the time, Firefox was genuinely, and more importantly, visibly better. With Manifest V3 in Chrome stopping the use of uBlock and friends, Firefox could be a real alternative that provides users with a visibly better experience. Firefox will soon become one of only a few browsers capable of blocking the CPU unfriendly visual pollution that pervades every webpage nowadays. Users are going to leave Chrome and I would prefer they don't flee to Brave. If Mozilla fails to position themselves to capture these users (uBlock and AdBlock each have more than 10 million users), they wont be getting another opportunity like this for a very long time.
- dspillett 5y ago
  > With Manifest V3 in Chrome stopping the use of uBlock and friends, Firefox could be a real alternative that provides users with a visibly better experience. Coincidentally a similar issue is why a number of people I know shifted away from FF to Chrome: breaking changes in the add-ons system which meant a lot of old ones stopped working completely and some major ones were slower to update then you'd expect. Moving onto better maintained extensions is a good thing in the end in terms of security and stability, but the hassle of needing to find/choose new options meant one of the sources of friction stopping people move to Chrome then existing even if they stayed with FF. > If Mozilla fails to position themselves to capture these users Hopefully they'll remember the other side of the coin and organise to make sure those users are aware their option is viable. I don't currently use FF much (though I've experienced some irritations in Chrome in recent months so maybe it is time for my bi-/tri-annual switch of primary browser) but the existence of a significant browser that isn't essentially a reskin of Chromium and isn't locked to one platform is important to avoid the monoculture issues we experienced in IE6's 90+% market share days.
- blooalien 5y ago
  > "Firefox will soon become one of only a few browsers capable of blocking the CPU unfriendly visual pollution that pervades every webpage nowadays." Not only CPU-unfriendly, but network bandwidth stealing adverts like auto-play full-motion video ads (in a world where every one of the major "mini-monopoly" ISPs impose bandwidth usage caps with insane overage penalty billing), not to mention the security and privacy risks of some advertising "services"…
roenxi 5y ago
Mozilla systematically shut down all the reasons to advocate for them back around 2015-2016 when they assassinated their extensions. After they switched away from that, almost everything Firefox can do Chrome can do better. Firefox advocates are reduced to trying to defend using Firefox based on either trivialities or philosophical concerns. And the philosophical concerns seem weak to me since, like Chrome, Mozilla seems to ultimately draw funding from Google. I'm not against the idea of people keeping up the effort to maintain an independent engine, but it really is hard to justify why given Google's permissive licencing. I am overcome with the irony that the most interesting challenger browser I'm aware of - Brave, run by ex-Mozilla people - is itself using the Blink engine. A pretty sad statement of the strength of the Gecko engine as a renderer. They needed that groundswell support of lots of extension developers and they torpedoed it. I hope the price was worth it.
- barneygale 5y ago
  I'm a firefox user. What am I missing by not using Chrome?
  - roenxi 5y ago
    I'll tell you what you're missing. Chatzilla. I'm still sour even years later. :'[ The serious answer is hopefully nothing.
  - ikurei 5y ago
    Today? Nothing. I used to hop between browsers often, and for a few years Firefox felt significantly slower. Does that really matter that much? I don't think so. I often think that Firefox never really got bad, the difference between FF and Chrome was never massive. It's a bit unfair that FF lost so much market share for that small difference.
    - shadowgovt 5y ago
      Because, at the end of the day, the internet is one big social network, there are huge positive feedback loops that will drive minor differences into massive market share differences. If one browser is 2% faster than the other, and the cost to choose one or the other is near zero, then expect huge switching. ... And that's before we factor in the far more dominant network effects, like "What comes pre-installed" and "which integrates with my accounts and syncs my aggregated data and preferences history onto a new machine transparently."
pid-1 5y ago
I use Edge at $JOB (because we live in Windows land and Edge integrates better with Windows stuff) and Firefox at home. I also used Chrome in the past. Whereas I agree Firefox used to be way better than IE when I first used it, I can't really perceive any notable difference on performance for those 3 browsers. There are some minor diffs (edge has veritcal tabs and allows login in with your AD account), but that's it.
- pwdisswordfish0 5y ago
  >edge has veritcal tabs and allows login in with your AD account Firefox will let you do this, too, if you tell it to trust the host in about:config: network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris network.negotiate-auth.trusted-uris Just put all the hosts there in a comma-separated list.
  - winthrowe 5y ago
    That's ancient and perhaps best forgotten. More important in this day and age is since Firefox 91 there is a checkbox in privacy and security to automagically SSO using the account on the Windows 10/11 Account Settings page that Edge uses.
danShumway 5y ago
> You can't honestly say that about Firefox nowadays I guess I need to start advocating for this more, because people genuinely don't seem to know: Firefox is, today, straight-up better than Chrome on privacy in user-visible ways; albeit maybe not immediately obvious ways. Just off the top of my head, Ublock Origin on Chrome doesn't reliably start up when the browser starts up. If you have a page set as your homepage on Chrome, it might get loaded with ads on it even if you have Ublock Origin installed, because Chrome doesn't supply a mechanism for them to defer requests until after extensions load. I've seen people argue that they'll switch back to Firefox after Manifest V3 is required, but Ublock Origin already works better in Firefox than Chrome (https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-best-on-Firefox https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...). I don't know if that counts as visible though, because I see people who argue that even Safari's adblocking is "good enough". Maybe stuff like blocking ads just isn't obvious enough? Certainly all of the privacy improvements in Firefox (and I'll make the same claim, Firefox is just straight-up better than Chrome on a technical level where privacy is concerned) -- but those privacy features are not visible to even technical users, even people on HN don't notice those features. I would think that being one of the only big browsers on mobile that has good adblocking would be enough of a selling point that almost everyone on HN with an Android phone would be running Firefox on that at least, to me that's a user-visible feature. But I know a lot of technical people who still use Chrome on Android, and I've run into people who straight-up don't know that Firefox supports adblocking on Android. Informal poll, how many people here with an Android device are currently running Chrome on it, even though Chrome doesn't block ads on Android? If that number is high among technical users, then either adblocking doesn't count as user-visible, or people just don't know? I'm not sure what to make of that. But I want to push back against this narrative a little bit that Firefox just doesn't have anything going for it anymore. Firefox is indisputably the best mainstream browser available available today outside of Tor for privacy, adblocking, and (even with the decline of functionality) extension support. I'm just not sure that stuff matters for market share; or maybe the gap isn't wide enough that people care.
- sundarurfriend 5y ago
  > Firefox is indisputably the best mainstream browser available available today outside of Tor for privacy, adblocking The thing is, while things like privacy and adblocking are important, they are passive defensive features made necessary by others; they aren't things that make you feel good, they just make you feel less bad about certain things. When an extension could customize your browser exactly the way you wanted, that was exciting; when TreeStyleTabs felt integrated into the browser, instead of taking several seconds to load and feeling bolted on, it felt like an amazing part of _Firefox_; when mouse gestures worked reliably on every page, including new tab pages and plaintext-mime pages (really, sort this out Mozilla! No reason other than bad coding for extensions to not work on text/plain pages), it felt like a part of the browser, like Firefox was super-charged. These are the things people can get excited about, and so gets people to show them off to others and recommend it. It's hard to talk about how this nuanced privacy feature is better for X complex reason, in casual conversation; much easier to demonstrate how you're able make the browser fit you like a glove with customizations A, B, and C (and it's more psychologically natural to want to show off positive additive features, too). > and (even with the decline of functionality) extension support Extension support, yes, but in terms of actual extensions, it's a yes-and-no situation. The thing about this and other customization that Mozilla doesn't seem to understand is, it's not enough to have "better" extension support, it needs to be "better enough" to overcome the difference in popularity between Firefox and Chrome, and hence the difference in availability/motivation of addon developers. I still use Firefox as my main browser, but the extension support is not "better enough" for me anymore (see issues mentioned in the first para above), and so for the first in time actual decades, after switching from IE6 to Firefox back in the day, I'm considering switching or partially switching to another browser for my daily use (and have been doing so little by little, with Brave and qutebrowser).

alex_duf 5y ago

Although I agree it's not better, it's also not worse. So there's a case to use the web browser that will improve your safety and privacy.

feanaro 5y ago
It's better in terms of configurability. It's going to become even better when Manifest V3 comes around because ad blockers on Chrome will no longer be as effective.
murderfs 5y ago
It performs significantly worse than Chrome for me on both desktop Linux and Android (although Chrome mobile not supporting extensions means I use Firefox anyway). On privacy, I tentatively agree (but Mozilla's actions with Pocket etc. casts doubt), but Firefox is significantly behind Chrome when it comes to safety. Firefox's sandbox is substantially weaker (e.g. it's basically worthless on linux, because you can reach the X server from inside the "sandbox").
- Semaphor 5y ago
  > It performs significantly worse than Chrome for me on both desktop Linux and Android Not sure about Android, as I can’t remember how Chrome performs, but I regularly test things in Chrome on Desktop (or when sites are so third-party heavy, I can’t figure out a sensible way to enable sites), and on Windows the performance for both is indistinguishable, and that’s despite tons of extensions for FF and none for Chrome.
- boudin 5y ago
  I find Firefox less resource hungry and don't see much performance difference on Linux. Any resources on the sandbox weaknesses? I know it was the case a while back but I thought those issues had been addressed since. Firefox works really well on Wayland though, which addresses X's problems (and a few other regarding input and clipboard). Edit: found out the issue you mentioned: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1129492 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1129492 That's not great indeed. I guess that the only workaround for now is Wayland
mbreese 5y ago
Maybe a little over a year ago, I switched from Chrome to Firefox (phone, desktop, etc...). I didn't really see much difference, and I liked using Pocket. Plus, I wanted to support Firefox. Fast forward to last week and I'm considering switching back. It's not because of any sites that Firefox hasn't supported. It's because I recently needed to start using a webapp to access to email from $WORK. They locked up email and now my local Mail.app client won't connect to $WORK. My preferred way of handling this is to wrap the webapp as a desktop shortcut, so the entire site is wrapped in it's own window, etc. I also have a couple of other work webapps that I like to treat as applications. Chrome makes this easy/possible. Firefox does not. This used to be something I did with Firefox, but now, it's not possible (or at least easily, on a Mac). Firefox was something you could embed. And now, I have no idea. Small little features like this are where Firefox starts to lose users. Right now I have both running, but I can't see that lasting long.
- toastal 5y ago
  Firefox 86 removed SSB (site-specific browser) because people weren't using it; also it was behind a flag in about:config no one knew about.
  - aidog 5y ago
    I'm still bitter about that.
  - mbreese 5y ago
    I'm glad to know that I wasn't just imagining things. I could have sworn that I could do this a few years ago. But I wasn't sure that I wasn't just mis-remembering.
    - toastal 5y ago
      I learned about it because I happened across a post from Peppermint OS leveraging it heavily to get lightweight 'apps'. Unless you were following specific posts about the feature, you would never have known about it. SSB had bugs for sure (and sot much dev attention was given), but it could have been a great alternative to Electron in a PWA landscape.

endgame 5y ago

I still install firefox on family machines, specifically because it lets me install a working adblocker. The WWW is too hostile without it.

ghusto 5y ago

> You can't honestly say that about Firefox nowadays That's the big problem. Looking at this only from an average user perspective, it's absolutely right, and "oh yeah well that doesn't work as well as in Chrome because Google pushed an overly complicated unnecessary feature into the standards that requires a company the size of Google to actually maintain and develop it", will only get you blank stares. I hope I'm wrong, but can't help feeling this war is lost. I can't see how you compete when the rules are being written out by your adversary. For what it's worth though, Firefox for _me_ is better than the other options in every way; container tabs, easy privacy options, clean interface, etc. I love it.

dskloet 5y ago
> doesn't work as well as in Chrome Did you mean Firefox there?
- saurik 5y ago
  No: it would be "Chrome", as the feature doesn't work in Firefox as well "as in Chrome" due to requiring the aforementioned army to develop and maintain.
  - dskloet 5y ago
    I guess I missed the second "as".
iqanq 5y ago
Google is a convenient scapegoat, but the current state of Firefox is 100% Mozilla's fault, and until you realise that you will be far away from a solution.
- libertine 5y ago
  Man, as soon as you visit google without chrome you get asked if you want to install Chrome. It's not even close to a fair game. Not saying Mozilla doesn't have some faults, but Google is just playing a different game.

tannhaeuser 5y ago

> after Mozilla's management laid off tons of their engineering talent, there's been no plausible path for them to get there Not saying Moz's management isn't crap, but IMO we shouldn't jump to conclusions into either direction here. From what juicy details we have, it might very well be the case that Moz's Rust advocacy (Servo project) turned out to be a cesspool of dictatorship, lack of accountability, and nepotism, and overall just not delivering much value to the endeavor of developing a web browser relative to an increasingly untenable situation and/or risk of PR catastrophe waiting to happen.

e2le 5y ago

> This worked because, at the time, Firefox was genuinely, and more importantly, visibly better. With Manifest V3 in Chrome stopping the use of uBlock and friends, Firefox could be a real alternative that provides users with a visibly better experience. Firefox will soon become one of only a few browsers capable of blocking the CPU unfriendly visual pollution that pervades every webpage nowadays. Users are going to leave Chrome and I would prefer they don't flee to Brave. If Mozilla fails to position themselves to capture these users (uBlock and AdBlock each have more than 10 million users), they wont be getting another opportunity like this for a very long time.

dspillett 5y ago
> With Manifest V3 in Chrome stopping the use of uBlock and friends, Firefox could be a real alternative that provides users with a visibly better experience. Coincidentally a similar issue is why a number of people I know shifted away from FF to Chrome: breaking changes in the add-ons system which meant a lot of old ones stopped working completely and some major ones were slower to update then you'd expect. Moving onto better maintained extensions is a good thing in the end in terms of security and stability, but the hassle of needing to find/choose new options meant one of the sources of friction stopping people move to Chrome then existing even if they stayed with FF. > If Mozilla fails to position themselves to capture these users Hopefully they'll remember the other side of the coin and organise to make sure those users are aware their option is viable. I don't currently use FF much (though I've experienced some irritations in Chrome in recent months so maybe it is time for my bi-/tri-annual switch of primary browser) but the existence of a significant browser that isn't essentially a reskin of Chromium and isn't locked to one platform is important to avoid the monoculture issues we experienced in IE6's 90+% market share days.
blooalien 5y ago
> "Firefox will soon become one of only a few browsers capable of blocking the CPU unfriendly visual pollution that pervades every webpage nowadays." Not only CPU-unfriendly, but network bandwidth stealing adverts like auto-play full-motion video ads (in a world where every one of the major "mini-monopoly" ISPs impose bandwidth usage caps with insane overage penalty billing), not to mention the security and privacy risks of some advertising "services"…

roenxi 5y ago

Mozilla systematically shut down all the reasons to advocate for them back around 2015-2016 when they assassinated their extensions. After they switched away from that, almost everything Firefox can do Chrome can do better. Firefox advocates are reduced to trying to defend using Firefox based on either trivialities or philosophical concerns. And the philosophical concerns seem weak to me since, like Chrome, Mozilla seems to ultimately draw funding from Google. I'm not against the idea of people keeping up the effort to maintain an independent engine, but it really is hard to justify why given Google's permissive licencing. I am overcome with the irony that the most interesting challenger browser I'm aware of - Brave, run by ex-Mozilla people - is itself using the Blink engine. A pretty sad statement of the strength of the Gecko engine as a renderer. They needed that groundswell support of lots of extension developers and they torpedoed it. I hope the price was worth it.

barneygale 5y ago
I'm a firefox user. What am I missing by not using Chrome?
- roenxi 5y ago
  I'll tell you what you're missing. Chatzilla. I'm still sour even years later. :'[ The serious answer is hopefully nothing.
- ikurei 5y ago
  Today? Nothing. I used to hop between browsers often, and for a few years Firefox felt significantly slower. Does that really matter that much? I don't think so. I often think that Firefox never really got bad, the difference between FF and Chrome was never massive. It's a bit unfair that FF lost so much market share for that small difference.
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    Because, at the end of the day, the internet is one big social network, there are huge positive feedback loops that will drive minor differences into massive market share differences. If one browser is 2% faster than the other, and the cost to choose one or the other is near zero, then expect huge switching. ... And that's before we factor in the far more dominant network effects, like "What comes pre-installed" and "which integrates with my accounts and syncs my aggregated data and preferences history onto a new machine transparently."

pid-1 5y ago

I use Edge at $JOB (because we live in Windows land and Edge integrates better with Windows stuff) and Firefox at home. I also used Chrome in the past. Whereas I agree Firefox used to be way better than IE when I first used it, I can't really perceive any notable difference on performance for those 3 browsers. There are some minor diffs (edge has veritcal tabs and allows login in with your AD account), but that's it.

pwdisswordfish0 5y ago
>edge has veritcal tabs and allows login in with your AD account Firefox will let you do this, too, if you tell it to trust the host in about:config: network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris network.negotiate-auth.trusted-uris Just put all the hosts there in a comma-separated list.
- winthrowe 5y ago
  That's ancient and perhaps best forgotten. More important in this day and age is since Firefox 91 there is a checkbox in privacy and security to automagically SSO using the account on the Windows 10/11 Account Settings page that Edge uses.

danShumway 5y ago

> You can't honestly say that about Firefox nowadays I guess I need to start advocating for this more, because people genuinely don't seem to know: Firefox is, today, straight-up better than Chrome on privacy in user-visible ways; albeit maybe not immediately obvious ways. Just off the top of my head, Ublock Origin on Chrome doesn't reliably start up when the browser starts up. If you have a page set as your homepage on Chrome, it might get loaded with ads on it even if you have Ublock Origin installed, because Chrome doesn't supply a mechanism for them to defer requests until after extensions load. I've seen people argue that they'll switch back to Firefox after Manifest V3 is required, but Ublock Origin already works better in Firefox than Chrome (https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-best-on-Firefox https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...). I don't know if that counts as visible though, because I see people who argue that even Safari's adblocking is "good enough". Maybe stuff like blocking ads just isn't obvious enough? Certainly all of the privacy improvements in Firefox (and I'll make the same claim, Firefox is just straight-up better than Chrome on a technical level where privacy is concerned) -- but those privacy features are not visible to even technical users, even people on HN don't notice those features. I would think that being one of the only big browsers on mobile that has good adblocking would be enough of a selling point that almost everyone on HN with an Android phone would be running Firefox on that at least, to me that's a user-visible feature. But I know a lot of technical people who still use Chrome on Android, and I've run into people who straight-up don't know that Firefox supports adblocking on Android. Informal poll, how many people here with an Android device are currently running Chrome on it, even though Chrome doesn't block ads on Android? If that number is high among technical users, then either adblocking doesn't count as user-visible, or people just don't know? I'm not sure what to make of that. But I want to push back against this narrative a little bit that Firefox just doesn't have anything going for it anymore. Firefox is indisputably the best mainstream browser available available today outside of Tor for privacy, adblocking, and (even with the decline of functionality) extension support. I'm just not sure that stuff matters for market share; or maybe the gap isn't wide enough that people care.

sundarurfriend 5y ago
> Firefox is indisputably the best mainstream browser available available today outside of Tor for privacy, adblocking The thing is, while things like privacy and adblocking are important, they are passive defensive features made necessary by others; they aren't things that make you feel good, they just make you feel less bad about certain things. When an extension could customize your browser exactly the way you wanted, that was exciting; when TreeStyleTabs felt integrated into the browser, instead of taking several seconds to load and feeling bolted on, it felt like an amazing part of _Firefox_; when mouse gestures worked reliably on every page, including new tab pages and plaintext-mime pages (really, sort this out Mozilla! No reason other than bad coding for extensions to not work on text/plain pages), it felt like a part of the browser, like Firefox was super-charged. These are the things people can get excited about, and so gets people to show them off to others and recommend it. It's hard to talk about how this nuanced privacy feature is better for X complex reason, in casual conversation; much easier to demonstrate how you're able make the browser fit you like a glove with customizations A, B, and C (and it's more psychologically natural to want to show off positive additive features, too). > and (even with the decline of functionality) extension support Extension support, yes, but in terms of actual extensions, it's a yes-and-no situation. The thing about this and other customization that Mozilla doesn't seem to understand is, it's not enough to have "better" extension support, it needs to be "better enough" to overcome the difference in popularity between Firefox and Chrome, and hence the difference in availability/motivation of addon developers. I still use Firefox as my main browser, but the extension support is not "better enough" for me anymore (see issues mentioned in the first para above), and so for the first in time actual decades, after switching from IE6 to Firefox back in the day, I'm considering switching or partially switching to another browser for my daily use (and have been doing so little by little, with Brave and qutebrowser).