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Good points have already been raised, but don't neglect the rise of smartphones. When you get a Google phone that already has Google's browser installed, and it

Good points have already been raised, but don't neglect the rise of smartphones. When you get a Google phone that already has Google's browser installed, and it works relatively well, why would you change? Add Chromebooks into the mix, and those meet a lot of people's needs, why change? Then, if you get a laptop, you'll want to have all of your passwords and bookmarks synced, so instead of using Edge, you grab Chrome. never even thinking of Firefox. Finally, in the early 00's, Firefox users had a reputation for letting you know about it. Forums of the day were full of signatures with a Get Firefox link in them. You don't really see that level of fervor anymore, because the difference between Firefox and Chrome today is nowhere near the difference between Firefox and IE back then.

floren 3y ago
> When you get a Google phone that already has Google's browser installed, and it works relatively well, why would you change? I know you're speaking in the context of the general public, but I've found that uBlock on Firefox Mobile does so much to make the web usable again that I'd never go without it.
- frostiness 3y ago
  On the other hand, as someone on an old android device, the performance difference between the two is massive and it isn't getting better. Some sites (usually the ones that are actually important such as restaurant menu) are perfect on Chrome and nearly unusable on Firefox, even with an adblocker. Performance already matters a lot on desktop browsers, but when battery life is thrown into the mix, it matters even more.
  - fooker 3y ago
    It's a bit perplexing to me that Firefox proponents keep denying performance issues for years. You can just compare it yourself or look at the some of the zillion benchmarks.
    - genocidicbunny 3y ago
      Are they...issues? Like, I frankly couldn't care less if Chrome is capable of running some funky JS that is mainly used on sites that I don't visit a bit faster, or is capable of rendering some css animation that I would honestly prefer died in a fire a bit faster.
      - fooker 3y ago
        They aren't if the goal is having a Firefox useful to you. They are, if the goal is to figure out why Firefox market share has plummeted. People do care about `funky` websites being faster. The modern web has immensely useful software which a good fraction of web users depend on that are rendered unusable on Firefox once in a while.
        genocidicbunny 3y ago
        I don't disagree, I'm just trying to address the incredulity that perhaps for some people, Firefox might not have problems, or (gasp!) for some, Chrome might be the one with problems.
        fooker 3y ago
        I'd argue that the market share reflects the ratio of these two `some`s. Unfortunately the party with the deeper pocket tends to win in these cases as long as they care to.
        genocidicbunny 3y ago
        Which is why it's even more frustrating when Mozilla ends up wasting a bunch of money on some boondoggle or other. They don't have the warchest Google has, they need to be smarter with how they spend their limited resources, especially since their income is proportional to their market share.
  - happymellon 3y ago
    How old? My S10e isn't very new and FF works great.
    - frostiness 3y ago
      It's an S7. Though newer phones probably don't have as noticeable performance issues, it still indicates that the browser's going to use more power even if the performance is fine.
  - genocidicbunny 3y ago
    I know it's just anecdata, but on my 2 year old phone, Firefox+Adblock+NoScript uses about 33% less power than the stock Chrome. I grant that my browsing habits aren't such that I tend to use a lot of media-heavy sites in the first place, so perhaps on those I wouldn't see such savings.
    - frostiness 3y ago
      I do the same, and honestly it's why I still use Firefox on mobile at all. But stock Firefox (which is what most people use anyways) has clear issues.
      - genocidicbunny 3y ago
        Which I think further speaks to my point I made elsewhere in this thread, that a huge part of the problem is that the web itself is shittier. Chrome can just handle that shittiness a bit better by default. I would love to see a comparison of Firefox vs Chrome with the same set of uBlock and NoScript rules applied to both. I suspect Chrome would probably still win, but perhaps the gap won't be as big.
NoboruWataya 3y ago
> Finally, in the early 00's, Firefox users had a reputation for letting you know about it. Forums of the day were full of signatures with a Get Firefox link in them. You don't really see that level of fervor anymore, because the difference between Firefox and Chrome today is nowhere near the difference between Firefox and IE back then. I agree that is probably the main reason - but another is simply that we don't have signatures anymore. So many of those forums were replaced by Reddit and other platforms which don't have signatures. One could argue they were a waste of screen estate but they allowed users to share a bit of their personality (including, in some cases, their choice of browser/OS) with readers in a non-awkward way.
- jareklupinski 3y ago
  > a waste of screen estate but they allowed users to share a bit of their personality somewhere there is a powerpoint with a slide that boils down to 'think about all the banner ads we can show in the wasted space where sigs live today!'
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  This is something I somewhat miss about the old forums. Between signatures and avatars, it was much easier to keep track of who you're talking to. Reddit-esque forums, this one included, have de-emphasized user identity to the point of homogeneity.
the_snooze 3y ago
>When you get a Google phone that already has Google's browser installed, and it works relatively well, why would you change? I seem to recall Microsoft getting some unfavorable government attention when they did something similar in the 90s...
- supertrope 3y ago
  The key being they had a near monopoly in the operating system market. The smartphone OS market is a duopoly.
damnesian 3y ago
I am a developer on a team of developers for a large data and interaction-rich website and we've watched the stats morph over the past 8 years from 23% mobile to 23% desktop. It's been a very swift revolution. I do a lot of QA on my phone now. I have been a Firefox proponent for at least ten years and resolved to do most of my QA on FF since I was most familiar with its features. Something that is very irksome about iOS is I can't suppress ads on Firefox on ios but I can on Safari. So Safari has become my main mobile browser. I'd love to keep pushing FF into the future- and still use it as my main desktop browser- but I can't advocate its use at least on iOS because of the ads issue.
- harpiaharpyja 3y ago
  You can't use uBlock Origin on iOS?
  - wiseowise 3y ago
    No extensions.
    - darklion 3y ago
      Oh for fuck’s sake. Safari has had extensions since 2010, and uBlock Origin supported it until 2018. The problem vis-a-vis uBO that in 2018, Safari switched its extension framework. It no longer supports the WebExtensions framework, instead using a native (proprietary) implementation. The new framework requires extensions to be packaged as apps, and is less featureful in terms of what extensions can do and access than the older framework. Consequently, uBlock Origin decided not to support the new extension framework (https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari/issues/158 https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari/issues/158).
  - vasili111 3y ago
    Not the extensions but you can use Brave browser that has its own built-in ad blocker.
  - Vrondi 3y ago
    Every time I have even the slightest mild thought of trying iOS again, I learn something like this which ensures I will not do it.
winternett 3y ago
FireFox doesn't synch with saved passwords that Chrome has.. Remembering tons of passwords across many sites, and having to do TFA all over again is excruciatingly painful. This is how people get locked in to so many monopolies today, and probably why log-ins are so difficult overall, yet still not working very well to secure accounts. There is too much hassle in software these days, it used to be about making your life easier, but so many companies put out products contradictory to that, creating entirely new problems. A web browser is just like a TV pretty much. People don't really care about what the brand is, they care about reliability, picture quality, compatibility, features etc... FireFox is like buying into a whole other TV before your current one is broken. Firefox could jump ahead if it radically changed how we can view painful web sites, like turning a video blog page into a convenient scroller, by adding tools to categorize and search bookmarks, or possibly by letting us block the display of keywords we don't want to see. They should also perhaps create their own search engine to counter Google's strangle hold... By turning FF into more of an Internet assistant, it would become a far superior web TV than Chrome, and that would likely encourage wider adoption perhaps...
- happymellon 3y ago
  I dont use browser password saving, but I just looked and FF syncs passwords.
- BizarroLand 3y ago
  Firefox does sync if you sign in. Extensions, history, the works.
  - sigsergv 3y ago
    And if you don't trust mozilla sync service you can connect your own.
- rekabis 3y ago
  Stealing passwords from browser password vaults is trivial these days for most any malware, which is why password managers like BitWarden have become much more popular. And those can sync across browsers and systems much more reliably.

floren 3y ago

> When you get a Google phone that already has Google's browser installed, and it works relatively well, why would you change? I know you're speaking in the context of the general public, but I've found that uBlock on Firefox Mobile does so much to make the web usable again that I'd never go without it.

frostiness 3y ago
On the other hand, as someone on an old android device, the performance difference between the two is massive and it isn't getting better. Some sites (usually the ones that are actually important such as restaurant menu) are perfect on Chrome and nearly unusable on Firefox, even with an adblocker. Performance already matters a lot on desktop browsers, but when battery life is thrown into the mix, it matters even more.
- fooker 3y ago
  It's a bit perplexing to me that Firefox proponents keep denying performance issues for years. You can just compare it yourself or look at the some of the zillion benchmarks.
  - genocidicbunny 3y ago
    Are they...issues? Like, I frankly couldn't care less if Chrome is capable of running some funky JS that is mainly used on sites that I don't visit a bit faster, or is capable of rendering some css animation that I would honestly prefer died in a fire a bit faster.
    - fooker 3y ago
      They aren't if the goal is having a Firefox useful to you. They are, if the goal is to figure out why Firefox market share has plummeted. People do care about `funky` websites being faster. The modern web has immensely useful software which a good fraction of web users depend on that are rendered unusable on Firefox once in a while.
      - genocidicbunny 3y ago
        I don't disagree, I'm just trying to address the incredulity that perhaps for some people, Firefox might not have problems, or (gasp!) for some, Chrome might be the one with problems.
        fooker 3y ago
        I'd argue that the market share reflects the ratio of these two `some`s. Unfortunately the party with the deeper pocket tends to win in these cases as long as they care to.
        genocidicbunny 3y ago
        Which is why it's even more frustrating when Mozilla ends up wasting a bunch of money on some boondoggle or other. They don't have the warchest Google has, they need to be smarter with how they spend their limited resources, especially since their income is proportional to their market share.
- happymellon 3y ago
  How old? My S10e isn't very new and FF works great.
  - frostiness 3y ago
    It's an S7. Though newer phones probably don't have as noticeable performance issues, it still indicates that the browser's going to use more power even if the performance is fine.
- genocidicbunny 3y ago
  I know it's just anecdata, but on my 2 year old phone, Firefox+Adblock+NoScript uses about 33% less power than the stock Chrome. I grant that my browsing habits aren't such that I tend to use a lot of media-heavy sites in the first place, so perhaps on those I wouldn't see such savings.
  - frostiness 3y ago
    I do the same, and honestly it's why I still use Firefox on mobile at all. But stock Firefox (which is what most people use anyways) has clear issues.
    - genocidicbunny 3y ago
      Which I think further speaks to my point I made elsewhere in this thread, that a huge part of the problem is that the web itself is shittier. Chrome can just handle that shittiness a bit better by default. I would love to see a comparison of Firefox vs Chrome with the same set of uBlock and NoScript rules applied to both. I suspect Chrome would probably still win, but perhaps the gap won't be as big.

NoboruWataya 3y ago

> Finally, in the early 00's, Firefox users had a reputation for letting you know about it. Forums of the day were full of signatures with a Get Firefox link in them. You don't really see that level of fervor anymore, because the difference between Firefox and Chrome today is nowhere near the difference between Firefox and IE back then. I agree that is probably the main reason - but another is simply that we don't have signatures anymore. So many of those forums were replaced by Reddit and other platforms which don't have signatures. One could argue they were a waste of screen estate but they allowed users to share a bit of their personality (including, in some cases, their choice of browser/OS) with readers in a non-awkward way.

jareklupinski 3y ago
> a waste of screen estate but they allowed users to share a bit of their personality somewhere there is a powerpoint with a slide that boils down to 'think about all the banner ads we can show in the wasted space where sigs live today!'
OkayPhysicist 3y ago
This is something I somewhat miss about the old forums. Between signatures and avatars, it was much easier to keep track of who you're talking to. Reddit-esque forums, this one included, have de-emphasized user identity to the point of homogeneity.

the_snooze 3y ago

>When you get a Google phone that already has Google's browser installed, and it works relatively well, why would you change? I seem to recall Microsoft getting some unfavorable government attention when they did something similar in the 90s...

supertrope 3y ago
The key being they had a near monopoly in the operating system market. The smartphone OS market is a duopoly.

damnesian 3y ago

I am a developer on a team of developers for a large data and interaction-rich website and we've watched the stats morph over the past 8 years from 23% mobile to 23% desktop. It's been a very swift revolution. I do a lot of QA on my phone now. I have been a Firefox proponent for at least ten years and resolved to do most of my QA on FF since I was most familiar with its features. Something that is very irksome about iOS is I can't suppress ads on Firefox on ios but I can on Safari. So Safari has become my main mobile browser. I'd love to keep pushing FF into the future- and still use it as my main desktop browser- but I can't advocate its use at least on iOS because of the ads issue.

harpiaharpyja 3y ago
You can't use uBlock Origin on iOS?
- wiseowise 3y ago
  No extensions.
  - darklion 3y ago
    Oh for fuck’s sake. Safari has had extensions since 2010, and uBlock Origin supported it until 2018. The problem vis-a-vis uBO that in 2018, Safari switched its extension framework. It no longer supports the WebExtensions framework, instead using a native (proprietary) implementation. The new framework requires extensions to be packaged as apps, and is less featureful in terms of what extensions can do and access than the older framework. Consequently, uBlock Origin decided not to support the new extension framework (https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari/issues/158 https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari/issues/158).
- vasili111 3y ago
  Not the extensions but you can use Brave browser that has its own built-in ad blocker.
- Vrondi 3y ago
  Every time I have even the slightest mild thought of trying iOS again, I learn something like this which ensures I will not do it.

winternett 3y ago

FireFox doesn't synch with saved passwords that Chrome has.. Remembering tons of passwords across many sites, and having to do TFA all over again is excruciatingly painful. This is how people get locked in to so many monopolies today, and probably why log-ins are so difficult overall, yet still not working very well to secure accounts. There is too much hassle in software these days, it used to be about making your life easier, but so many companies put out products contradictory to that, creating entirely new problems. A web browser is just like a TV pretty much. People don't really care about what the brand is, they care about reliability, picture quality, compatibility, features etc... FireFox is like buying into a whole other TV before your current one is broken. Firefox could jump ahead if it radically changed how we can view painful web sites, like turning a video blog page into a convenient scroller, by adding tools to categorize and search bookmarks, or possibly by letting us block the display of keywords we don't want to see. They should also perhaps create their own search engine to counter Google's strangle hold... By turning FF into more of an Internet assistant, it would become a far superior web TV than Chrome, and that would likely encourage wider adoption perhaps...

happymellon 3y ago
I dont use browser password saving, but I just looked and FF syncs passwords.
BizarroLand 3y ago
Firefox does sync if you sign in. Extensions, history, the works.
- sigsergv 3y ago
  And if you don't trust mozilla sync service you can connect your own.
rekabis 3y ago
Stealing passwords from browser password vaults is trivial these days for most any malware, which is why password managers like BitWarden have become much more popular. And those can sync across browsers and systems much more reliably.