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Firefox has lost about 20 million users since the announcement of Chrome moving to Manifest v3. It can't avoid the monopoly even with the press in their favor.

by tapoxi 3y ago

Firefox has lost about 20 million users since the announcement of Chrome moving to Manifest v3. It can't avoid the monopoly even with the press in their favor. https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity Call me a pessimist but I don't think Mozilla is managed well enough to actually compete against Chrome. We'd need the Linux Foundation or some other large neutral standards body to fork Chromium at this point and create a vendor-neutral platform that everyone can rally behind.

burkaman 3y ago
I wouldn't expect Manifest V3 to have any effect until Manifest V2 is actually disabled and ad blockers stop working. Approximately 0% of Chrome users are following technical browser announcements, they won't care until their stuff actually breaks.
- comte7092 3y ago
  Have to agree here. Most people have no idea what manifest v whatever is and have no reason to switch. Not to mention, google pulls its own underhanded tactics.
- yorwba 3y ago
  Even among Firefox users, only about 41% have add-ons installed in the first place: https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/usage-behavior https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/usage-behavior So 59% of current Firefox users could switch to Chrome without being affected by the Manifest V3 change at all. I don't know how many Chrome users use add-ons that would become less useful after the change, so it'll definitely be interesting to see whether Firefox's numbers will show a sudden uptick at some point.
  - arp242 3y ago
    I expect that number to be biased since more tech-savvy users tend to disable/block telemetry, and they're also the sort of people who install add-ons. I have no idea if it's biased by 1%, 10%, or 50% though.
    - toastal 3y ago
      Even still, add-ons have always been a Fx selling point so I’m still quite shocked.
  - ComputerGuru 3y ago
    Not really. Firefox blocks more things out of the box for a better browsing experience than Chrome does. But I admit that there’s a good chance that at least some not-insignificant percentage of those 41% wouldn’t notice and realize that they would need to install uBlock to use Chrome comparably.
  - caskstrength 3y ago
    > Even among Firefox users, only about 41% have add-ons installed in the first place This seems like surprisingly low percentage. I wonder whether these stats count people who disable telemetry or install add-ons from their distro's repository.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    Firefox should really (somehow or another) come with ublock origin installed and on by default.
  - infamia 3y ago
    This isn't accurate since Firefox comes with a built-in ad blocker, which Chrome lacks.
- tapoxi 3y ago
  The Manifest v3 version of uBlock Origin (uBlock Lite) has been out for a long time now, and it still works its just less effective. For people using Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, Arc, etc it won't impact them. Their adblockers are all native and not using the extension API.
- LordDragonfang 3y ago
  There was a huge wave of anti-chrome propaganda about how manifest v3 would prevent all ad-blocking* on Reddit and Tumblr (and probably tiktok) and such. Even if none of them read the actual announcements, the low-info folks still learn about it from the outrage machine. *Which isn't actually true; "cosmetic" blocking (altering the DOM), the original type and the one most users actually care about, will still work just fine. It's only privacy tracking which is going to be totally broken, and frankly, outside of the unreality bubble of HN, most users care much less about "privacy" than you'd think.
  - hooverd 3y ago
    If that's their takeaway about Chrome, good.
  - vxNsr 3y ago
    Not sure why you’re being downvoted. I agree, I myself was waiting for ublock to stop working before I migrated to Firefox but now that I’m hearing it will still mostly work… I just don’t care that much. So they collect all this info on me… as long as I don’t see ads I just don’t care
  - croes 3y ago
    Just because people don't care doesn't mean it's unimportant. So these limitations of manifest V3 don't exist?: >One of the main issues with Manifest V3 is its limitation to filter lists: an extension can only include up to 50 static lists, and only 10 of them can be active at the same time. >There are also limitations to the number of filter rules inside these lists: installed extensions cannot collectively exceed 300,000 static filters and it is no longer possible to update
    - LordDragonfang 3y ago
      I never said it wasn't important, but it is misinformation. Case and point: to answer your question, no, those aren't limitations on DOM-manipulation ad removal; those are limitations on the new declarativeNetRequest API, and they ONLY apply to blocked web requests. Also, even that part isn't as catastrophic as you'd think; ad blocking, like most things on the internet, roughly follows the 90-10 rule: 90% of the ads are blocked by 10% of the rules. So even with a tenfold reduction, you should still see the vast majority of the ads blocked by even the intentionally-gimped declarativeNetRequest API. Yes, it's going to make ad blockers slightly less effective and make your page loads slightly slower. But that doesn't get as many clicks as "Chrome is banning adblockers!!1". And it's important to note the difference because when v3 rolls around, all those users that were lied to are going to see that their ad blockers still mostly work, and lose even more trust in whistle blowing.
postalrat 3y ago
Why does the announcement of manifest v3 mean anything? They keep pushing the date v2 will no longer work back. Why?
- pessimizer 3y ago
  Because they've already taken the media heat for the switch a half dozen times, each time less intensely. Eventually, when they finally switch it off, there will be one article about it on the Register, and it will be mostly jokes. It's a tactic.
gowld 3y ago
Extensions including ad blockers don't work at all on Android Chrome. I use Chrome on desktop because websites work properly in Chrome, and Firefox on Android for the adblocker, except when a site is unusable. What is FF marketshare on Android?
- jeffreygoesto 3y ago
  Us two probably?
  - toastal 3y ago
    Make it trouble. I really wish the timing of FxOS was better as well as the marketing. I’d certainly choose it over Android, but we’re now sort of locked into the duopoly with terrible decisions from apps like Signal requiring you have a Android or iOS primary device or no service for you.
mrguyorama 3y ago
Ah yes, so Firefox is faster than chrome, allows you more latitude for adblockers, and isn't pushing garbage hostile web standards, but clearly, mozilla just isn't doing enough Can we stop pretending that this is mozilla's fault that the GIANT corp sitting in front of the internet, being the homepage of 90% of computers, that nags users to install chrome "for a better experience" on every single web site it can, is able to get onto more systems than firefox? How many average users even KNOW about firefox anymore?
- n0tinventedhere 3y ago
  > so Firefox is faster than chrome Faster on sunspider. In practice, on real web pages, as someone who occasionally browses the web using a low end tablet PC (Surface Go 2 with linux. The CPU is downright anemic but good enough for treating it like a reading device/video stream platform), I experienced many more stutters on Firefox that I did not on Chrome and it has become one of the reasons I stopped using it (the syncing is also way worse and often breaks. "Read latest tab from other device" is almost useless if you don't manually trigger a sync because it sure won't do it by itself in any reasonable time frame). The performance difference is much less visible on my main computer though. But yall really need to try firefox on low end devices before you make generic statements about its performance. Or the android version.. lord, firefox on android is just unpleasant.
  - seanw444 3y ago
    Funny, I use Mull on my Android, which is basically Firefox on Android but even more heavily restricted. Have for at least a year. Didn't know people considered it unpleasant.
    - onli 3y ago
      I don't think they really do. Firefox, at least after the rewrite, is what made browsing on low-powered android machines bearable, in my experience.
      - 3y ago
afavour 3y ago
Manifest v3 announcement feels like a pretty arbitrary line to draw in the sand. > I don't think Mozilla is managed well enough to actually compete against Chrome. We'd need the Linux Foundation or some other large neutral standards body to fork Chromium Ah, yes, Linux, the OS used on something like 3% of desktop machines! I'm sorry but I don't see the logic at work here at all. Chrome dominates because Google pushes it and they have the means to reach basically every internet user out there. Switching out Mozilla for the Linux Foundation would do absolutely zero to counter that. Case in point: by most measures ChromeOS has a higher desktop market share than vanilla Linux already.
- sam0x17 3y ago
  Linux accounts for: 82% of the smartphone market 90% of public cloud workloads 62% of the embedded market 99% of the super-computer market The first figure alone makes it more relevant to the general population than windows or any other OS. Let's see, 55% of all web traffic is mobile devices so that means roughly 45% of all web traffic comes from linux-based smartphones. And that isn't counting things like Chrome OS, or linux desktop browsing, which account for another 2-4% So roughly 49% of all web traffic is literal user-facing linux devices, and 90% of the websites they are browsing are served by linux servers... So yeah, if anything linux is probably the most important OS in existence right now. Definitely not obscure..
  - afavour 3y ago
    And how much of that 82% is attributable to the Linux Foundation as opposed to Google?
    - Krutonium 3y ago
      100%, because Google is using Linux?
      - sam0x17 3y ago
        Public clouds don't dictate what people use. You can freely run windows or any other OS on an AWS or Google VPS, it's just people very seldom choose to do so, because (this is the punchline), linux is just that much more popular and developer-friendly. The domination of linux in the hosting / server world predates the existence of public clouds. I was there, I remember. At the turn of the millennium for a very very brief time there were a lot of windows servers running ASP.NET. That was it. Nothing has come close to linux since then, and it has absolutely nothing to do with what AWS/GCP offers. What they offer is entirely beholding to what developers like.
josteink 3y ago
> Call me a pessimist but I don't think Mozilla is managed well enough No disagreement there. > We'd need the Linux Foundation Who spends a whooping’ 3% of their total spending on actual Linux? [1] Call me a pessimist, but I might look for a better candidate. [1] https://lunduke.substack.com/p/linux-foundation-spends-just-34-of https://lunduke.substack.com/p/linux-foundation-spends-just-...
rgrieselhuber 3y ago
I’m confused why people would move away from Firefox to Chrome because of Manifest v3. If anything, it should convince one to move even harder in the other direction.
- gattilorenz 3y ago
  Indeed, the point OP is trying to make is that despite Manifest v3, Firefox is nevertheless still losing users (to highlight how dire the situation for Firefox is).
  - rgrieselhuber 3y ago
    Got it, thanks for clarifying. Definitely points to a management problem IMO.
remram 3y ago
Where does this data come from? I use Firefox because I am privacy-conscious, as a result I have telemetry turned off. Do people like me show up in those stats?
lamontcg 3y ago
> We'd need the Linux Foundation or some other large neutral standards body to fork Chromium Why is the answer always more chromium? And for a userbase nominally so positively biased towards open source it is weird to see how google gets a pass on pretty much everything, while mozilla/firefox has this incredibly carefully curated list of offenses that is maintained and spread by the community, doing most of the work at ensuring that firefox never goes anywhere. There's a lot of Linux proponents here who are doing all the heavy work of carrying water for Google when it comes to chrome dominance. Yeah, so every time you actually restart firefox after it updates you probably get an ad for mozilla VPN. Okay compare that to Google literally being the central advertising and spyware hub of the entire internet. "I'll just have to use the worst option possible, because the alternative isn't 100% ideologically pure".
- hooverd 3y ago
  Nobody hates FOSS more than FOSS users.

by tapoxi 3y ago

burkaman 3y ago

I wouldn't expect Manifest V3 to have any effect until Manifest V2 is actually disabled and ad blockers stop working. Approximately 0% of Chrome users are following technical browser announcements, they won't care until their stuff actually breaks.

comte7092 3y ago
Have to agree here. Most people have no idea what manifest v whatever is and have no reason to switch. Not to mention, google pulls its own underhanded tactics.
yorwba 3y ago
Even among Firefox users, only about 41% have add-ons installed in the first place: https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/usage-behavior https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/usage-behavior So 59% of current Firefox users could switch to Chrome without being affected by the Manifest V3 change at all. I don't know how many Chrome users use add-ons that would become less useful after the change, so it'll definitely be interesting to see whether Firefox's numbers will show a sudden uptick at some point.
- arp242 3y ago
  I expect that number to be biased since more tech-savvy users tend to disable/block telemetry, and they're also the sort of people who install add-ons. I have no idea if it's biased by 1%, 10%, or 50% though.
  - toastal 3y ago
    Even still, add-ons have always been a Fx selling point so I’m still quite shocked.
- ComputerGuru 3y ago
  Not really. Firefox blocks more things out of the box for a better browsing experience than Chrome does. But I admit that there’s a good chance that at least some not-insignificant percentage of those 41% wouldn’t notice and realize that they would need to install uBlock to use Chrome comparably.
- caskstrength 3y ago
  > Even among Firefox users, only about 41% have add-ons installed in the first place This seems like surprisingly low percentage. I wonder whether these stats count people who disable telemetry or install add-ons from their distro's repository.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  Firefox should really (somehow or another) come with ublock origin installed and on by default.
- infamia 3y ago
  This isn't accurate since Firefox comes with a built-in ad blocker, which Chrome lacks.
tapoxi 3y ago
The Manifest v3 version of uBlock Origin (uBlock Lite) has been out for a long time now, and it still works its just less effective. For people using Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, Arc, etc it won't impact them. Their adblockers are all native and not using the extension API.
LordDragonfang 3y ago
There was a huge wave of anti-chrome propaganda about how manifest v3 would prevent all ad-blocking* on Reddit and Tumblr (and probably tiktok) and such. Even if none of them read the actual announcements, the low-info folks still learn about it from the outrage machine. *Which isn't actually true; "cosmetic" blocking (altering the DOM), the original type and the one most users actually care about, will still work just fine. It's only privacy tracking which is going to be totally broken, and frankly, outside of the unreality bubble of HN, most users care much less about "privacy" than you'd think.
- hooverd 3y ago
  If that's their takeaway about Chrome, good.
- vxNsr 3y ago
  Not sure why you’re being downvoted. I agree, I myself was waiting for ublock to stop working before I migrated to Firefox but now that I’m hearing it will still mostly work… I just don’t care that much. So they collect all this info on me… as long as I don’t see ads I just don’t care
- croes 3y ago
  Just because people don't care doesn't mean it's unimportant. So these limitations of manifest V3 don't exist?: >One of the main issues with Manifest V3 is its limitation to filter lists: an extension can only include up to 50 static lists, and only 10 of them can be active at the same time. >There are also limitations to the number of filter rules inside these lists: installed extensions cannot collectively exceed 300,000 static filters and it is no longer possible to update
  - LordDragonfang 3y ago
    I never said it wasn't important, but it is misinformation. Case and point: to answer your question, no, those aren't limitations on DOM-manipulation ad removal; those are limitations on the new declarativeNetRequest API, and they ONLY apply to blocked web requests. Also, even that part isn't as catastrophic as you'd think; ad blocking, like most things on the internet, roughly follows the 90-10 rule: 90% of the ads are blocked by 10% of the rules. So even with a tenfold reduction, you should still see the vast majority of the ads blocked by even the intentionally-gimped declarativeNetRequest API. Yes, it's going to make ad blockers slightly less effective and make your page loads slightly slower. But that doesn't get as many clicks as "Chrome is banning adblockers!!1". And it's important to note the difference because when v3 rolls around, all those users that were lied to are going to see that their ad blockers still mostly work, and lose even more trust in whistle blowing.

postalrat 3y ago

Why does the announcement of manifest v3 mean anything? They keep pushing the date v2 will no longer work back. Why?

pessimizer 3y ago
Because they've already taken the media heat for the switch a half dozen times, each time less intensely. Eventually, when they finally switch it off, there will be one article about it on the Register, and it will be mostly jokes. It's a tactic.

gowld 3y ago

Extensions including ad blockers don't work at all on Android Chrome. I use Chrome on desktop because websites work properly in Chrome, and Firefox on Android for the adblocker, except when a site is unusable. What is FF marketshare on Android?

jeffreygoesto 3y ago
Us two probably?
- toastal 3y ago
  Make it trouble. I really wish the timing of FxOS was better as well as the marketing. I’d certainly choose it over Android, but we’re now sort of locked into the duopoly with terrible decisions from apps like Signal requiring you have a Android or iOS primary device or no service for you.

mrguyorama 3y ago

Ah yes, so Firefox is faster than chrome, allows you more latitude for adblockers, and isn't pushing garbage hostile web standards, but clearly, mozilla just isn't doing enough Can we stop pretending that this is mozilla's fault that the GIANT corp sitting in front of the internet, being the homepage of 90% of computers, that nags users to install chrome "for a better experience" on every single web site it can, is able to get onto more systems than firefox? How many average users even KNOW about firefox anymore?

n0tinventedhere 3y ago
> so Firefox is faster than chrome Faster on sunspider. In practice, on real web pages, as someone who occasionally browses the web using a low end tablet PC (Surface Go 2 with linux. The CPU is downright anemic but good enough for treating it like a reading device/video stream platform), I experienced many more stutters on Firefox that I did not on Chrome and it has become one of the reasons I stopped using it (the syncing is also way worse and often breaks. "Read latest tab from other device" is almost useless if you don't manually trigger a sync because it sure won't do it by itself in any reasonable time frame). The performance difference is much less visible on my main computer though. But yall really need to try firefox on low end devices before you make generic statements about its performance. Or the android version.. lord, firefox on android is just unpleasant.
- seanw444 3y ago
  Funny, I use Mull on my Android, which is basically Firefox on Android but even more heavily restricted. Have for at least a year. Didn't know people considered it unpleasant.
  - onli 3y ago
    I don't think they really do. Firefox, at least after the rewrite, is what made browsing on low-powered android machines bearable, in my experience.
    - 3y ago

afavour 3y ago

Manifest v3 announcement feels like a pretty arbitrary line to draw in the sand. > I don't think Mozilla is managed well enough to actually compete against Chrome. We'd need the Linux Foundation or some other large neutral standards body to fork Chromium Ah, yes, Linux, the OS used on something like 3% of desktop machines! I'm sorry but I don't see the logic at work here at all. Chrome dominates because Google pushes it and they have the means to reach basically every internet user out there. Switching out Mozilla for the Linux Foundation would do absolutely zero to counter that. Case in point: by most measures ChromeOS has a higher desktop market share than vanilla Linux already.

sam0x17 3y ago
Linux accounts for: 82% of the smartphone market 90% of public cloud workloads 62% of the embedded market 99% of the super-computer market The first figure alone makes it more relevant to the general population than windows or any other OS. Let's see, 55% of all web traffic is mobile devices so that means roughly 45% of all web traffic comes from linux-based smartphones. And that isn't counting things like Chrome OS, or linux desktop browsing, which account for another 2-4% So roughly 49% of all web traffic is literal user-facing linux devices, and 90% of the websites they are browsing are served by linux servers... So yeah, if anything linux is probably the most important OS in existence right now. Definitely not obscure..
- afavour 3y ago
  And how much of that 82% is attributable to the Linux Foundation as opposed to Google?
  - Krutonium 3y ago
    100%, because Google is using Linux?
    - sam0x17 3y ago
      Public clouds don't dictate what people use. You can freely run windows or any other OS on an AWS or Google VPS, it's just people very seldom choose to do so, because (this is the punchline), linux is just that much more popular and developer-friendly. The domination of linux in the hosting / server world predates the existence of public clouds. I was there, I remember. At the turn of the millennium for a very very brief time there were a lot of windows servers running ASP.NET. That was it. Nothing has come close to linux since then, and it has absolutely nothing to do with what AWS/GCP offers. What they offer is entirely beholding to what developers like.

josteink 3y ago

> Call me a pessimist but I don't think Mozilla is managed well enough No disagreement there. > We'd need the Linux Foundation Who spends a whooping’ 3% of their total spending on actual Linux? [1] Call me a pessimist, but I might look for a better candidate. [1] https://lunduke.substack.com/p/linux-foundation-spends-just-34-of https://lunduke.substack.com/p/linux-foundation-spends-just-...

rgrieselhuber 3y ago

I’m confused why people would move away from Firefox to Chrome because of Manifest v3. If anything, it should convince one to move even harder in the other direction.

gattilorenz 3y ago
Indeed, the point OP is trying to make is that despite Manifest v3, Firefox is nevertheless still losing users (to highlight how dire the situation for Firefox is).
- rgrieselhuber 3y ago
  Got it, thanks for clarifying. Definitely points to a management problem IMO.

remram 3y ago

Where does this data come from? I use Firefox because I am privacy-conscious, as a result I have telemetry turned off. Do people like me show up in those stats?

lamontcg 3y ago

> We'd need the Linux Foundation or some other large neutral standards body to fork Chromium Why is the answer always more chromium? And for a userbase nominally so positively biased towards open source it is weird to see how google gets a pass on pretty much everything, while mozilla/firefox has this incredibly carefully curated list of offenses that is maintained and spread by the community, doing most of the work at ensuring that firefox never goes anywhere. There's a lot of Linux proponents here who are doing all the heavy work of carrying water for Google when it comes to chrome dominance. Yeah, so every time you actually restart firefox after it updates you probably get an ad for mozilla VPN. Okay compare that to Google literally being the central advertising and spyware hub of the entire internet. "I'll just have to use the worst option possible, because the alternative isn't 100% ideologically pure".

hooverd 3y ago
Nobody hates FOSS more than FOSS users.