8 ms·

The fall of Firefox: Mozilla's once-popular web browser slides into irrelevance

63 points by CrankyBear 3y ago

RadixDLT 3y ago
they never implemented crypto, they are slipping away very slowly
- vkou 3y ago
  I'm not sure what version of Firefox you are using, but mine has full support for HTTPS, which is about the level of encryption support that I expect from a browser.
  - denton-scratch 3y ago
    I assumed GP was saying that Mozilla's mistake was not to bundle Foxcoin.
    - vkou 3y ago
      I fail to see how that's a mistake. My toaster, garage door opener, or my webmail app don't support it either.
      - wussboy 3y ago
        I'm assuming it was sarcasm.
- cobbal 3y ago
  Sure they have crypto, they've had TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_CHACHA20_POLY1305_SHA256 since at least 2017. Source: https://stackoverflow.com/a/43249703/73681 https://stackoverflow.com/a/43249703/73681
SomeoneFromCA 3y ago
Really? Have not been using anything other than FF last 5 years
penneyd 3y ago
I flipped back to FF about a year ago, performs flawlessly and all the extensions I used on Chrome are available too.
squidbeak 3y ago
It's hugely relevant to me and has been one of my all-time most appreciated pieces of software.
nytesky 3y ago
I think most users like having their sync setup automatically with their email, and most Chrome users have Gmail so it’s one simple step to sync. Firefox has a separate profile process that is cumbersome. And switching profiles is even worse, I think you have to use command line switches to get profile manager?
- drlemur 3y ago
  I think you're talking about the Mozilla Accounts feature (recently renamed from Firefox Accounts). It is not as smooth an experience as Google accounts, but it works reasonably well. Firefox has a separate profile feature, and it is one of the great things about Firefox. You can access profiles through "about:profiles". You can (at least on Linux, don't think it's possble on MacOS) start firefox with a profile chooser. Each profile is a completely isolated browser instance -- no shared bookmarks, cookies, history, anything.
- yetanother12345 3y ago
  Go to your "mozilla/firefox" folder, and locate the file "profile.ini". On linux the path is ~/.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini It is a regular text file. And here's a shortcut for you: $ nano ~/.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini Once you've opened it, find this line: StartWithLastProfile=1 - edit 1 to become 0 in stead, then save[0]. You only need to do this once. Added: After this edit you will be able to choose a profile on each launch (forgot that little detail). Also, Thunderbird works the same way if you want a set of alternative profiles for your email. [0] To save: [ctrl]+[s] or [ctrl]+[o]. To exit [ctrl]+[x] (can't assume everyone knows nano)
  - nytesky 3y ago
    I really appreciate the detailed tutorial and I will use this, but this is kind of illustrating the problem with Firefox. And yeah the Profiles are not automatically associated with Mozilla accounts, you have to setup each separately per profile I think. Or use containers — which are amazing but another complex use case for the average user compared to chrome sync experience.
- 3y ago
ilamont 3y ago
Apple's market share is only 8.6%. I can remember the click-bait headlines 20 or 30 years ago lamenting the Mac's demise and portraying it as an irrelevant platform doomed for the Information Age scrap heap. (See https://apple.slashdot.org/story/02/06/19/218246/dvorak-discontinue-the-mac https://apple.slashdot.org/story/02/06/19/218246/dvorak-disc... about a 2002 John C. Dvorak column calling for the Macintosh to be discontinued - Dvorak's column is no longer online but the Mac is still around) Firefox is still used by millions of people every day. It's not going anywhere.
- zamadatix 3y ago
  If Firefox were 8.6% and growing it'd be a completely different article. It's 3x less than that an shrinking though.
  - ilamont 3y ago
    "Apple PC Shipments Dropped 2X More Than Any Other Manufacturer In Q3" https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2023/10/10/apple-pc-shipments-dropped-2x-more-than-any-other-manufacturer-in-q3/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2023/10/10/apple-p... "Sky is falling" headlines around Firefox, Apple, Linux and a host of other technologies miss the point that these platforms may be small, but have dedicated followings, often with niche use cases that can't be replicated elsewhere.
    - pi-e-sigma 3y ago
      Because the Web is evolving, niche browsers are not able to keep up with the changes and become useless at some point.
    - zamadatix 3y ago
      The fault with that headlines has little to do with a small dedicated following. Apple isn't a "small" PC manufacturer when it's got more than half the shipments of the largest manufacturer. The real fault with that clickbait is it ignores Apple desktops had an enormous boon with people migrating to M* based desktops and they aren't ready to upgrade yet while simultaneously ignoring shipments are still higher than pre M* Apple desktops. Besides that, clickbait articles about other things other companies do don't even say anything about this topic. Again, focusing on how the usage share is abysmal compared to competitors while consistently shrinking down to where it is over the last decade lets you easily see why this particular headline isn't clickbait. Even with millions of users, Firefox having such low usage share, especially compared to alternative competitors, is a risk to its main funding source. This is a problem for an organization like Mozilla which makes very little from its users vs one like Apple which has become the most valuable in the world through the exact opposite.
whywhywhywhy 3y ago
A company (sorry “nonprofit”) going from 30% to nothing should be disbanded
NGRhodes 3y ago
I would not trust the statistics, Firefox blocks tracking cookies by default. The statistics in the article come from companies that use 3rd party tracking cookies. > By default, Firefox blocks the cookies that track your browsing activity across multiple websites. This includes cross-site tracking cookies set by ad, social media, and analytics companies https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/trackers-and-scripts-firefox-blocks-enhanced-track https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/trackers-and-scripts-fi...
- yorwba 3y ago
  You don't need tracking cookies to find out what browser someone is using. Looking at the user agent string is mostly enough. (On the bright side, "Mozilla/5.0" has near 100% market share.)
- zamadatix 3y ago
  I don't think this affects these statistics much. Statcounter numbers are based on pageviews for example, and Firefox hasn't given up on having its own UA yet. The numbers also align too well with the internal stats to be blanketly ignored https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity where MAU is 180,000,000/~5,000,000. That's a different approach to calculating usage share than page views from an internal source and external source that come to about the same number.
  - fsflover 3y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38531261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38531261
    - zamadatix 3y ago
      Whether the numbers from Google Analytics can be assumed accurate on its own is unrelated to the above, as are any of the other tracking protections Firefox currently employs.
  - zamadatix 3y ago
aendruk 3y ago
The article body is a decent (though myopic) history, but what a misleading headline. Irrelevance to whom?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- pjmlp 3y ago
  While I still make a question to use Firefox, since 2019 I never had to actually care if our projects work on it, as it no longer takes part on browser matrixes for project acceptance guidelines.
- rdlw 3y ago
  The US government: https://www.brycewray.com/posts/2023/11/firefox-brink/ https://www.brycewray.com/posts/2023/11/firefox-brink/
ActionHank 3y ago
I feel like this article is going to age poorly. I used Chrome because the devtools were better and they supported the same sorts of extensions. I've switched back to Firefox 2 years ago and haven't looked back. I've heard from friends that they've also switched back all largely due to the looming manifest v3 ad blocker limitations. There are no other mainstream browsers that I trust at this point.
- 8organicbits 3y ago
  Agreed, it seems inevitable that Google will enshitify Chrome by making ad-block tools unreliable. They've already started. That makes FF the "ad-block browser", and anyone who hates ads, scams, and malvertising will flee Chrome. Maybe we will see Chromium forks dominate, but I'm less sure about that.
  - jmathai 3y ago
    I hope you're right and that Firefox gets enough investment to be a viable alternative at the right moment.
    - JohnBooty 3y ago
      I've been using Firefox daily for over twenty years. It's viable.
- pi-e-sigma 3y ago
  Why would you think that people burned by Firefox would go back to it instead of switching to different Chromium-based browsers? Firefox market shared declined to a single digit for a reason...
- zamadatix 3y ago
  If people were really switching back more than leaving the trends in the article would be positive instead of negative. That's not to say nobody is switching back, obviously people are, but they are also continually either not staying or grossly outnumbered by those choosing to leave for the first time. It's a shame, I really like Firefox and having the browser decoupled from a big tech company, but it's also what the data is saying and has been for over a decade as people continue to deny it.
marssaxman 3y ago
I don't care. It's been working great for years; it's the only browser I am willing to use.
- JohnBooty 3y ago
  Same here. FF is fast, stable, and functional for me. I'm using the web 50+ hours per week and my usage is something like 80% Firefox 20% Chrome. So, that is a lot of hours per year comparing them on a level playing field. I don't notice a performance difference. The only thing that "feels faster" on Chrome is creating a new window by dragging a tab out of an existing window. Never had runaway RAM usage or anything with either browser in apporoximately 50,000 hours of browser usage. I've always had decent amounts of RAM (16GB since ~2009, 64GB currently) ...maybe people are running into issues with different kinds of machines.
kornhole 3y ago
I am suspect of how they measure usage. When many of us use Firefox forks or configurations that leave as little fingerprints as possible through a VPN, we are intentionally not identified as unique visitors. If this is the case, these results are a testament to the advantage of Firefox.
rtcoms 3y ago
Chrome with bucket loads of extensions is speedier for me compared to bare-bones Firefox.
stuff4ben 3y ago
People still read zdnet? Talk about irrelevance.
krunck 3y ago
I've used FF since it's inception. Not going to stop now.
- jeffreygoesto 3y ago
  Echo chamber ping. Had some sort stint with Opera but basically FF on all platforms since I stopped using NCSA Mosaic. I would feel unsafe without uBO and Firefox (and NoScript on Desktop Linux).
denton-scratch 3y ago
Shoot that messenger!
NERD_ALERT 3y ago
Everyone in this comment section seems to forget that we are an extremely small minority of the entire population of people who use web browsers. A vast majority of people don't think about their web browser and simply use whatever they're used to, which for most is Chrome or Safari. They have much better brand recognition and unless Chrome gives them an unusable experience, they won't have any reason to consider changing browsers.
- slig 3y ago
  Exactly. Thinking "I use, works for me, so whatever" is very shortsighted, if it falls even more on usage, we can expect more and more websites to not even bother to test. People will use whatever comes by default on Android (which is Chrome or Samsung Internet [which is Chrome]), Safari on iOS and Chrome/Edge on Windows. Plus Windows has been very pushy about Edge.
- endemic 3y ago
  Yeah, I suppose so. I still always try to convert friends and family members to Firefox with uBlock Origin. The experience is just so much better.
- earthling8118 3y ago
  It wasn't always this way though. When I was first using a computer my parents had Firefox. Not for any particular reason as they aren't savy at all.
  - zamadatix 3y ago
    Back in the day IE, and most other default browsers of the time, were damn near unusable. Firefox was pushed by sites, techies, and even Google (pre-Chrome). There is no such push currently. Chrome works either well enough or even better for the vast majority of people. The ones talking about going back to Firefox for ideological reasons are a niche crowd with reasoning different than the last shifts.
gigel82 3y ago
Adding to the anecdotes, I'm using Firefox as my main browser on Windows and macOS and have been for years. Very very rarely do I find websites that don't work and need to switch back to the built-in browser (Edge or Safari). I hope Firefox doesn't die because the open web will die with it (no, I don't trust Apple to be the hero of anything given the intentionally locked down features on Safari iOS).
barnabee 3y ago
100s of millions of users, highly concentrated around the types of user who build and influence software and create new technology startups [1] does not sound like irrelevance to me. [1] exhibit 1: this comment page
arpyzo 3y ago
No mention of arguably illegal browser bundling and anti-competitive tactics by Microsoft, Apple, and Google to push their own browsers over Firefox: https://www.computerworld.com/article/3674858/mozilla-apple-google-and-microsoft-lock-you-into-their-browsers.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/3674858/mozilla-apple-... No mention of Google's sabotage of its web properties' operation and performance on Firefox: https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has-sabotaged-firefox-for-years/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has... edit: grammar
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Mozzilla had an opportunity with Firefox OS and blew it, by caring too much about FOSS ideals instead of OEMs willing to make great experiences.
  - ksec 3y ago
    Oh it wasn't just FOSS, it was ideology over everything ( e.g Everything should be Javascript ) and complete lack of understanding on hardware. It is also an observation that to this day most people working on web related technology has similar problems.
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      True, at least WebOS also has first class for C and C++ apps, and LG takes advantage of it.
scrame 3y ago
I'm using Firefox right now. i use Firefox on windows, Linux and android. i only use chrome when i need to awkwardly cast something i can't do otherwise. the only stupid thing was when they screwed up their extension policy on mobile and required you to use nightly with a special "bundle" to install stuff like RES. edit: this is a cnet/zdnet article and probably written by chatgpt from a prompt by the editor.
andrewstuart 3y ago
FF is my primary browser on MacOS and it’s great never any probs.
butz 3y ago
It is more relevant more than ever, after Chrome disabled manifest V2 and made ad blocking way worse.
- leotravis10 3y ago
  I'm going to share what Bryce Wray said on that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38524790 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38524790
CrypticShift 3y ago
I think it is the slide that gives the wrong impression. 4% of a near-universal product? That's hardly irrelevant. Can anyone name a small non-profit tech company dominating a daily essential consumer-facing product ?
- calgarymicro 3y ago
  The Wikimedia Foundation is the example that comes to mind, though it may be a bit of a unicorn.
bigtex 3y ago
Was this the beginning of the end? https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/brendan-eich-steps-down-as-mozilla-ceo/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/brendan-eich-steps-down-...
- jemmyw 3y ago
  Yes absolutely. It didn't need to be, they could have found another CEO with an engineering background. Now it's too late, Mozilla has been "captured", the board is under the control of the person it is responsible for paying. I don't see any out once that's happened, even if the current CEO leaves the next will be the same.
  - slig 3y ago
    Besides being the person responsible for paying, she's the person responsible for the income. Google pays them half a billion a year for a reason.
    - pi-e-sigma 3y ago
      And that reason is to not get in the way of Chrome dominance but pretend that you are trying
redavni 3y ago
Mitchell Baker, earned $6,903,089 in 2022
rational_indian 3y ago
FWIW Firefox is only slow on Windows. It's much faster on Linux.
- yetanother12345 3y ago
  It was[0] excruciatingly slow on 32 bit Linux too. Had to use an alternative lightweight browser most of the time, but some sites worked only with FF (eg banking and such). There was no alternative for these sites, as no Chromium or MS browser supported 32 bit Linux. There was plenty of lightweight browsers that would work with anything else than these (very few) sites though. I've read somewhere that FF will soon no longer support 32 bit at all (if it has not happened already) [0] Probably still is. "Was" because the most used keys on the keyboard of my 32-bit 12 YO laptop went fubar around half a year ago, so I had to go 64 bit only for a while until I got a replacement KB. I've not used FF on the 32 bit machine since.
- JohnBooty 3y ago
  Is Chrome "slow" for you on Windows as well? Because Firefox beats it or is within ~50% on every benchmark I can find. Can you talk about what kinds of sites are slow in Windows or what kind of machine you're running? I've been doing full-stack development since the 90s using a range of browsers and I just don't feel the FF performance issues that others swear are a problem.
  - rational_indian 3y ago
    YouTube is particularly janky on Firefox on Windows. For example the full screen transition on Firefox uses a fade to / from black screen animation to hide the sluggishness. You have to disable this in about:config to see the behind the scenes jankiness. Edge and Chrome (on windows) are slower than Chromium / Firefox on Linux for me but still faster than Firefox on Windows. On Linux Chrome is faster than Firefox, but barely. IPython notebooks render seamlessly when scrolled in Chrome but the rendering is laggy in Firefox. Machine spec: AMD 5800X Ryzen, 64GB RAM, 1TB Samsung Evo NVME SSD, NVIDIA 1660 Ti GPU
    - 3y ago
wharvle 3y ago
iOS’ webkit-only requirement, whatever else one might think of that rule, is the only reason anyone still cares about or builds for any browser engines other than Blink. The rule has (by accident) been more beneficial to Firefox than harmful, overall—it’s the single thing keeping more than one browser engine on the test list, even for smaller development shops and teams. [edit] nb this would not be the case if Firefox’s usage share were still large enough to “defend itself”, as it were. It’s purely due to circumstance.
naet 3y ago
Firefox was my browser of choice for many years, then I switched to Chrome since it just plain seemed like the better browser at the time. Now that Chrome has a dominant market share, it seems to be getting worse and worse as Google uses that market share to push their agenda around telemetry and ads. It still feels like Chrome has the better dev team overall but has some major conflicts of interest with the greater Google agenda. Mozilla have also made some questionable decisions leading to less focus on core browser development and their upper management seems pretty suspect in their own ways. Safari and Edge feel like a tier below, they both work but I wouldn't want either as my daily driver. The rest of the web browsers are much more niche. Kinda feel like I don't have a great browser option given all that...
xnx 3y ago
I made this chart yesterday of CEO pay and Firefox market share to try and better understand the situation: https://ibb.co/rGd9QQf https://ibb.co/rGd9QQf
santah 3y ago
I don't believe these numbers. Here is a screenshot from my self hosted Matomo installation for my traffic today up until now: https://i.imgur.com/WcfQKdT.png https://i.imgur.com/WcfQKdT.png Firefox blocks most analytics scripts by default, so these articles rely on very skewed data. Any other devs with self hosted tracking solutions want to share how their browser stats look like?
- 8organicbits 3y ago
  The tech-crowd uses Firefox quite a bit. Four of my tech oriented sites show FF between 15% and 20% of traffic. But that uses goatcounter (not self hosted), which I know can get blocked by ad-ons. The other challenge is that most bots use Chrome as their UA string, so any bots you fail to filter out will inflate Chrome's numbers. I actually see more traffic from Pale Moon than from Edge. Edge looks dead.
sakjur 3y ago
There’s a mention of Safari’s popularity thanks to the iPhone but otherwise the article seem to miss that most of the smartphone and tablet boom happened during the period since. I think that’s a major point to Firefox’s demise, making the 2% of the whole market possibly represent quite a bit more of the desktop market. It also mentions the revenue to point out how dependent the foundation is on Google, but fails to mention that the market share of 34% in 2010 generated $123M and the market share of 2.2% in 2022 generated $593M. None of this will prevent an eventual demise of Mozilla and Firefox/Gecko (one possible future is what happened to Opera and Firefox adopting either Blink or WebKit – I’d personally consider that completing the slide into irrelevance), but I don’t think Firefox is as close to its last gasp as the article suggests.
Turing_Machine 3y ago
I remember the day I stopped giving a crap about Firefox. It was the day they broke my extensions for the second time within a week.
- JohnBooty 3y ago
  If you switched to Chrome, I guess it was also the day you stopped giving a crap about the web.
nateb2022 3y ago
This same author wrote an article titled "Is Firefox Toast?" back in 2011: https://www.zdnet.com/article/is-firefox-toast/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/is-firefox-toast/ > Firefox's market-share is fading; the browser itself isn't that good anymore; and its money supply may be drying up. Is Firefox coming to the end of the road?
throw7 3y ago
Firefox is irrelevant to most users because it just doesn't "work". It just takes a few sites that under perform for a firefox user to switch to chrome where it does indeed "just works". This happened to me personally with roll20.net. Recently with Air India, where I literally couldn't buy a ticket with them with firefox (it spins and shows a blank page)... with chrome, perfectly works fine. It's a combination of factors (anti-competition, default installed, devs/designers do not have firefox @ tier 1 testing, mozilla executive board fat & happy "Everything is fine"). My main browser is still firefox, but, let's be real, I keep chrome/chromium around to jump to when needed. The web has failed. There's a thin veneer over it, but we're basically back to client/server.
- JohnBooty 3y ago
  I keep hearing about these sites that don't work in Firefox but I never seem to run into any despite using the web for 2000+ hours per year. That includes a lot of Youtube usage. Works fine for me. I guess my machine was sprinkled with magic pixie dust or something.
  - beej71 3y ago
    I've run into a few. I still use FF near exclusively, but have other browsers installed just in case.
taylodl 3y ago
It's a browser, not a religion. If FF is working for you, then fine - use it. If you're not currently using FF and there's something bothering you with your current tool, try FF and see if it's still a problem. If you're happy with what you've been using then keep using what you've been using.
- JohnBooty 3y ago
  Religion? We're talking practical reality here. The reality is that when alternative browsers finally slip into irrelevance the web will belong to Google. We had a monoculture on the web once with IE. It went poorly. If you literally don't care about the health of the open web, fine -- but that is what I would call a near-religious dedication to ignorance
  - taylodl 3y ago
    You act as though Safari doesn't have a significant market presence. Also, Microsoft developed new web technologies and then patented them - preventing their competitors from using them. All of Microsoft's development tools of course used those new technologies and therefore required the web site visitor to use IE. The situation today with Google is markedly different.
    - JohnBooty 3y ago
      You act as though Safari doesn't have a significant market presence. Safari is not good enough as a bulwark of the free web. It's only available on Apple platforms and doesn't support ad-blockers as robust as FF. Microsoft developed new web technologies and then patented them What patented web technologies are you thinking of? ActiveX controls? The situation today with Google is markedly different. Sure. Microsoft wanted to lock you into IE and Windows. Google wants to lock you into Chrome and ensure that the web is utterly bent to serve their advertising platform. If you don't understand the massive commonality here -- which, again, is domination and ownership of the web -- because you're focused on implementation details, I don't know what to tell you.
irongeek 3y ago
I left Chrome 10 years ago and have been a happy Firefox user. I think this article is clickbait. I know more and more people using Firefox.
yetanother12345 3y ago
There's no reason to expect that FF will "fall" any day soon. If not for any other reason then Europe. We have EU-wide legislation that demands alternatives in the browser space. And while Eurocrats are not extremely tech-savvy they are not extremely stupid either, they will not likely be fooled by four flavours of Chromium. Just an opinion.
- zamadatix 3y ago
  It'd be interesting to see what they'd do. I don't think the legislation existed because the legislature agreed there needs to be a diversity in browser engines as much as they didn't want one company in control of web browsing. If Microsoft and Apple were to submit that they felt they did not feel a loss of control over Edge for being based on Chromium or unfair competition from Chrome in either case I'm not sure Firefox would be kept alive for the sake of source code diversity alone. That said, maybe Microsoft/Apple would not be aligned with supporting Google - though I think they would to protect themselves the same. Or they might not even care. iPhones have a significantly larger penetration than Firefox on the whole of the EU but they haven't (yet) been even forced to offer a browser selection at all during setup. It'd be interesting to imagine what the regulation would be though. "Google, you must pay more to keep Firefox alive better"? One thing I'd like to see is more crackdown on "first party browser advertisement" for the lack of a better word. I don't think that'd save Firefox as much as help other browsers though.
johnasmith 3y ago
For Firefox to succeed, it has to differentiate. There are two meaningful ways it does, or will do, in the near future: 1. Mobile extensions: that's a unique value prop 2. Fight for the user: manifest v3, web environment integrity, and whatever comes next are degradations in user experience, and following a different path puts FF apart
- JohnBooty 3y ago
  Why should they fight for users? The users who should care the most, such as the HN crowd, overwhelmingly have voted and the consensus is we read some synthetic benchmarks where Chrome is faster, and we are comfortable trading our freedoms away for that. Everybody has a price. It's just depressing that ours was so cheap. (Not me personally. I would use FF even if it was worse, but it performs identically to Chrome for me. I don't understand what people are even doing with their f'ing web browsers that gets them into these pathological poor performance states with FF.)
seba_dos1 3y ago
To slide into irrelevance it first needs any viable alternatives.
arun-mani-j 3y ago
Being the only "tech guy" in my family, I have installed Firefox with uBlock Origin and NewPipe in my parents', siblings' phone and some of my close friends'. The end result is their browsing experience has vastly improved. Once I saw that my mother had clicked a spam link in WhatsApp but UBlock Origin had blocked it. She called me and said that she is not able to open a link. Then I told her that is a spam and that's why her "browser" blocked it. Similarly I have told my close friends about advantages of Firefox with UBlock Origin over Chrome or Opera etc. 99% of them try and tell me that they wish they knew about this earlier. The remaining 1% will have Firefox as secondary because of their work or accounts that is available only on Chrome. For an average user, from my observation, Firefox is definitely awesome. The only issue is many of them don't know its existence. Sadly, many don't even know existence of adblockers. I really wish Firefox invested more into promotion and may be governments and phone manufacturers come forward to have Firefox as an option. :)
Gud 3y ago
Like a Phoenix, it will rise again.
Doomed2Repeat 3y ago
Author completely missed the boat, imho. Brave post by BigTex, only one who nailed it. Karma is a biotch. No rearranging of the FFox deck chairs will ever save that lost bunch from themselves.

63 points by CrankyBear 3y ago

RadixDLT 3y ago

they never implemented crypto, they are slipping away very slowly

vkou 3y ago
I'm not sure what version of Firefox you are using, but mine has full support for HTTPS, which is about the level of encryption support that I expect from a browser.
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  I assumed GP was saying that Mozilla's mistake was not to bundle Foxcoin.
  - vkou 3y ago
    I fail to see how that's a mistake. My toaster, garage door opener, or my webmail app don't support it either.
    - wussboy 3y ago
      I'm assuming it was sarcasm.
cobbal 3y ago
Sure they have crypto, they've had TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_CHACHA20_POLY1305_SHA256 since at least 2017. Source: https://stackoverflow.com/a/43249703/73681 https://stackoverflow.com/a/43249703/73681

SomeoneFromCA 3y ago

Really? Have not been using anything other than FF last 5 years

penneyd 3y ago

I flipped back to FF about a year ago, performs flawlessly and all the extensions I used on Chrome are available too.

squidbeak 3y ago

It's hugely relevant to me and has been one of my all-time most appreciated pieces of software.

nytesky 3y ago

I think most users like having their sync setup automatically with their email, and most Chrome users have Gmail so it’s one simple step to sync. Firefox has a separate profile process that is cumbersome. And switching profiles is even worse, I think you have to use command line switches to get profile manager?

drlemur 3y ago
I think you're talking about the Mozilla Accounts feature (recently renamed from Firefox Accounts). It is not as smooth an experience as Google accounts, but it works reasonably well. Firefox has a separate profile feature, and it is one of the great things about Firefox. You can access profiles through "about:profiles". You can (at least on Linux, don't think it's possble on MacOS) start firefox with a profile chooser. Each profile is a completely isolated browser instance -- no shared bookmarks, cookies, history, anything.
yetanother12345 3y ago
Go to your "mozilla/firefox" folder, and locate the file "profile.ini". On linux the path is ~/.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini It is a regular text file. And here's a shortcut for you: $ nano ~/.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini Once you've opened it, find this line: StartWithLastProfile=1 - edit 1 to become 0 in stead, then save[0]. You only need to do this once. Added: After this edit you will be able to choose a profile on each launch (forgot that little detail). Also, Thunderbird works the same way if you want a set of alternative profiles for your email. [0] To save: [ctrl]+[s] or [ctrl]+[o]. To exit [ctrl]+[x] (can't assume everyone knows nano)
- nytesky 3y ago
  I really appreciate the detailed tutorial and I will use this, but this is kind of illustrating the problem with Firefox. And yeah the Profiles are not automatically associated with Mozilla accounts, you have to setup each separately per profile I think. Or use containers — which are amazing but another complex use case for the average user compared to chrome sync experience.
3y ago

ilamont 3y ago

Apple's market share is only 8.6%. I can remember the click-bait headlines 20 or 30 years ago lamenting the Mac's demise and portraying it as an irrelevant platform doomed for the Information Age scrap heap. (See https://apple.slashdot.org/story/02/06/19/218246/dvorak-discontinue-the-mac https://apple.slashdot.org/story/02/06/19/218246/dvorak-disc... about a 2002 John C. Dvorak column calling for the Macintosh to be discontinued - Dvorak's column is no longer online but the Mac is still around) Firefox is still used by millions of people every day. It's not going anywhere.

zamadatix 3y ago
If Firefox were 8.6% and growing it'd be a completely different article. It's 3x less than that an shrinking though.
- ilamont 3y ago
  "Apple PC Shipments Dropped 2X More Than Any Other Manufacturer In Q3" https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2023/10/10/apple-pc-shipments-dropped-2x-more-than-any-other-manufacturer-in-q3/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2023/10/10/apple-p... "Sky is falling" headlines around Firefox, Apple, Linux and a host of other technologies miss the point that these platforms may be small, but have dedicated followings, often with niche use cases that can't be replicated elsewhere.
  - pi-e-sigma 3y ago
    Because the Web is evolving, niche browsers are not able to keep up with the changes and become useless at some point.
  - zamadatix 3y ago
    The fault with that headlines has little to do with a small dedicated following. Apple isn't a "small" PC manufacturer when it's got more than half the shipments of the largest manufacturer. The real fault with that clickbait is it ignores Apple desktops had an enormous boon with people migrating to M* based desktops and they aren't ready to upgrade yet while simultaneously ignoring shipments are still higher than pre M* Apple desktops. Besides that, clickbait articles about other things other companies do don't even say anything about this topic. Again, focusing on how the usage share is abysmal compared to competitors while consistently shrinking down to where it is over the last decade lets you easily see why this particular headline isn't clickbait. Even with millions of users, Firefox having such low usage share, especially compared to alternative competitors, is a risk to its main funding source. This is a problem for an organization like Mozilla which makes very little from its users vs one like Apple which has become the most valuable in the world through the exact opposite.

whywhywhywhy 3y ago

A company (sorry “nonprofit”) going from 30% to nothing should be disbanded

NGRhodes 3y ago

I would not trust the statistics, Firefox blocks tracking cookies by default. The statistics in the article come from companies that use 3rd party tracking cookies. > By default, Firefox blocks the cookies that track your browsing activity across multiple websites. This includes cross-site tracking cookies set by ad, social media, and analytics companies https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/trackers-and-scripts-firefox-blocks-enhanced-track https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/trackers-and-scripts-fi...

yorwba 3y ago
You don't need tracking cookies to find out what browser someone is using. Looking at the user agent string is mostly enough. (On the bright side, "Mozilla/5.0" has near 100% market share.)
zamadatix 3y ago
I don't think this affects these statistics much. Statcounter numbers are based on pageviews for example, and Firefox hasn't given up on having its own UA yet. The numbers also align too well with the internal stats to be blanketly ignored https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity where MAU is 180,000,000/~5,000,000. That's a different approach to calculating usage share than page views from an internal source and external source that come to about the same number.
- fsflover 3y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38531261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38531261
  - zamadatix 3y ago
    Whether the numbers from Google Analytics can be assumed accurate on its own is unrelated to the above, as are any of the other tracking protections Firefox currently employs.
- zamadatix 3y ago

aendruk 3y ago

The article body is a decent (though myopic) history, but what a misleading headline. Irrelevance to whom?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
pjmlp 3y ago
While I still make a question to use Firefox, since 2019 I never had to actually care if our projects work on it, as it no longer takes part on browser matrixes for project acceptance guidelines.
rdlw 3y ago
The US government: https://www.brycewray.com/posts/2023/11/firefox-brink/ https://www.brycewray.com/posts/2023/11/firefox-brink/

ActionHank 3y ago

I feel like this article is going to age poorly. I used Chrome because the devtools were better and they supported the same sorts of extensions. I've switched back to Firefox 2 years ago and haven't looked back. I've heard from friends that they've also switched back all largely due to the looming manifest v3 ad blocker limitations. There are no other mainstream browsers that I trust at this point.

8organicbits 3y ago
Agreed, it seems inevitable that Google will enshitify Chrome by making ad-block tools unreliable. They've already started. That makes FF the "ad-block browser", and anyone who hates ads, scams, and malvertising will flee Chrome. Maybe we will see Chromium forks dominate, but I'm less sure about that.
- jmathai 3y ago
  I hope you're right and that Firefox gets enough investment to be a viable alternative at the right moment.
  - JohnBooty 3y ago
    I've been using Firefox daily for over twenty years. It's viable.
pi-e-sigma 3y ago
Why would you think that people burned by Firefox would go back to it instead of switching to different Chromium-based browsers? Firefox market shared declined to a single digit for a reason...
zamadatix 3y ago
If people were really switching back more than leaving the trends in the article would be positive instead of negative. That's not to say nobody is switching back, obviously people are, but they are also continually either not staying or grossly outnumbered by those choosing to leave for the first time. It's a shame, I really like Firefox and having the browser decoupled from a big tech company, but it's also what the data is saying and has been for over a decade as people continue to deny it.

marssaxman 3y ago

I don't care. It's been working great for years; it's the only browser I am willing to use.

JohnBooty 3y ago
Same here. FF is fast, stable, and functional for me. I'm using the web 50+ hours per week and my usage is something like 80% Firefox 20% Chrome. So, that is a lot of hours per year comparing them on a level playing field. I don't notice a performance difference. The only thing that "feels faster" on Chrome is creating a new window by dragging a tab out of an existing window. Never had runaway RAM usage or anything with either browser in apporoximately 50,000 hours of browser usage. I've always had decent amounts of RAM (16GB since ~2009, 64GB currently) ...maybe people are running into issues with different kinds of machines.

kornhole 3y ago

I am suspect of how they measure usage. When many of us use Firefox forks or configurations that leave as little fingerprints as possible through a VPN, we are intentionally not identified as unique visitors. If this is the case, these results are a testament to the advantage of Firefox.

rtcoms 3y ago

Chrome with bucket loads of extensions is speedier for me compared to bare-bones Firefox.

stuff4ben 3y ago

People still read zdnet? Talk about irrelevance.

krunck 3y ago

I've used FF since it's inception. Not going to stop now.

jeffreygoesto 3y ago
Echo chamber ping. Had some sort stint with Opera but basically FF on all platforms since I stopped using NCSA Mosaic. I would feel unsafe without uBO and Firefox (and NoScript on Desktop Linux).

denton-scratch 3y ago

Shoot that messenger!

NERD_ALERT 3y ago

Everyone in this comment section seems to forget that we are an extremely small minority of the entire population of people who use web browsers. A vast majority of people don't think about their web browser and simply use whatever they're used to, which for most is Chrome or Safari. They have much better brand recognition and unless Chrome gives them an unusable experience, they won't have any reason to consider changing browsers.

slig 3y ago
Exactly. Thinking "I use, works for me, so whatever" is very shortsighted, if it falls even more on usage, we can expect more and more websites to not even bother to test. People will use whatever comes by default on Android (which is Chrome or Samsung Internet [which is Chrome]), Safari on iOS and Chrome/Edge on Windows. Plus Windows has been very pushy about Edge.
endemic 3y ago
Yeah, I suppose so. I still always try to convert friends and family members to Firefox with uBlock Origin. The experience is just so much better.
earthling8118 3y ago
It wasn't always this way though. When I was first using a computer my parents had Firefox. Not for any particular reason as they aren't savy at all.
- zamadatix 3y ago
  Back in the day IE, and most other default browsers of the time, were damn near unusable. Firefox was pushed by sites, techies, and even Google (pre-Chrome). There is no such push currently. Chrome works either well enough or even better for the vast majority of people. The ones talking about going back to Firefox for ideological reasons are a niche crowd with reasoning different than the last shifts.

gigel82 3y ago

Adding to the anecdotes, I'm using Firefox as my main browser on Windows and macOS and have been for years. Very very rarely do I find websites that don't work and need to switch back to the built-in browser (Edge or Safari). I hope Firefox doesn't die because the open web will die with it (no, I don't trust Apple to be the hero of anything given the intentionally locked down features on Safari iOS).

barnabee 3y ago

100s of millions of users, highly concentrated around the types of user who build and influence software and create new technology startups [1] does not sound like irrelevance to me. [1] exhibit 1: this comment page

arpyzo 3y ago

No mention of arguably illegal browser bundling and anti-competitive tactics by Microsoft, Apple, and Google to push their own browsers over Firefox: https://www.computerworld.com/article/3674858/mozilla-apple-google-and-microsoft-lock-you-into-their-browsers.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/3674858/mozilla-apple-... No mention of Google's sabotage of its web properties' operation and performance on Firefox: https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has-sabotaged-firefox-for-years/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has... edit: grammar

pjmlp 3y ago
Mozzilla had an opportunity with Firefox OS and blew it, by caring too much about FOSS ideals instead of OEMs willing to make great experiences.
- ksec 3y ago
  Oh it wasn't just FOSS, it was ideology over everything ( e.g Everything should be Javascript ) and complete lack of understanding on hardware. It is also an observation that to this day most people working on web related technology has similar problems.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    True, at least WebOS also has first class for C and C++ apps, and LG takes advantage of it.

scrame 3y ago

I'm using Firefox right now. i use Firefox on windows, Linux and android. i only use chrome when i need to awkwardly cast something i can't do otherwise. the only stupid thing was when they screwed up their extension policy on mobile and required you to use nightly with a special "bundle" to install stuff like RES. edit: this is a cnet/zdnet article and probably written by chatgpt from a prompt by the editor.

andrewstuart 3y ago

FF is my primary browser on MacOS and it’s great never any probs.

butz 3y ago

It is more relevant more than ever, after Chrome disabled manifest V2 and made ad blocking way worse.

leotravis10 3y ago
I'm going to share what Bryce Wray said on that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38524790 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38524790

CrypticShift 3y ago

I think it is the slide that gives the wrong impression. 4% of a near-universal product? That's hardly irrelevant. Can anyone name a small non-profit tech company dominating a daily essential consumer-facing product ?

calgarymicro 3y ago
The Wikimedia Foundation is the example that comes to mind, though it may be a bit of a unicorn.

bigtex 3y ago

Was this the beginning of the end? https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/brendan-eich-steps-down-as-mozilla-ceo/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/brendan-eich-steps-down-...

jemmyw 3y ago
Yes absolutely. It didn't need to be, they could have found another CEO with an engineering background. Now it's too late, Mozilla has been "captured", the board is under the control of the person it is responsible for paying. I don't see any out once that's happened, even if the current CEO leaves the next will be the same.
- slig 3y ago
  Besides being the person responsible for paying, she's the person responsible for the income. Google pays them half a billion a year for a reason.
  - pi-e-sigma 3y ago
    And that reason is to not get in the way of Chrome dominance but pretend that you are trying

redavni 3y ago

Mitchell Baker, earned $6,903,089 in 2022

rational_indian 3y ago

FWIW Firefox is only slow on Windows. It's much faster on Linux.

yetanother12345 3y ago
It was[0] excruciatingly slow on 32 bit Linux too. Had to use an alternative lightweight browser most of the time, but some sites worked only with FF (eg banking and such). There was no alternative for these sites, as no Chromium or MS browser supported 32 bit Linux. There was plenty of lightweight browsers that would work with anything else than these (very few) sites though. I've read somewhere that FF will soon no longer support 32 bit at all (if it has not happened already) [0] Probably still is. "Was" because the most used keys on the keyboard of my 32-bit 12 YO laptop went fubar around half a year ago, so I had to go 64 bit only for a while until I got a replacement KB. I've not used FF on the 32 bit machine since.
JohnBooty 3y ago
Is Chrome "slow" for you on Windows as well? Because Firefox beats it or is within ~50% on every benchmark I can find. Can you talk about what kinds of sites are slow in Windows or what kind of machine you're running? I've been doing full-stack development since the 90s using a range of browsers and I just don't feel the FF performance issues that others swear are a problem.
- rational_indian 3y ago
  YouTube is particularly janky on Firefox on Windows. For example the full screen transition on Firefox uses a fade to / from black screen animation to hide the sluggishness. You have to disable this in about:config to see the behind the scenes jankiness. Edge and Chrome (on windows) are slower than Chromium / Firefox on Linux for me but still faster than Firefox on Windows. On Linux Chrome is faster than Firefox, but barely. IPython notebooks render seamlessly when scrolled in Chrome but the rendering is laggy in Firefox. Machine spec: AMD 5800X Ryzen, 64GB RAM, 1TB Samsung Evo NVME SSD, NVIDIA 1660 Ti GPU
  - 3y ago

wharvle 3y ago

iOS’ webkit-only requirement, whatever else one might think of that rule, is the only reason anyone still cares about or builds for any browser engines other than Blink. The rule has (by accident) been more beneficial to Firefox than harmful, overall—it’s the single thing keeping more than one browser engine on the test list, even for smaller development shops and teams. [edit] nb this would not be the case if Firefox’s usage share were still large enough to “defend itself”, as it were. It’s purely due to circumstance.

naet 3y ago

Firefox was my browser of choice for many years, then I switched to Chrome since it just plain seemed like the better browser at the time. Now that Chrome has a dominant market share, it seems to be getting worse and worse as Google uses that market share to push their agenda around telemetry and ads. It still feels like Chrome has the better dev team overall but has some major conflicts of interest with the greater Google agenda. Mozilla have also made some questionable decisions leading to less focus on core browser development and their upper management seems pretty suspect in their own ways. Safari and Edge feel like a tier below, they both work but I wouldn't want either as my daily driver. The rest of the web browsers are much more niche. Kinda feel like I don't have a great browser option given all that...

xnx 3y ago

I made this chart yesterday of CEO pay and Firefox market share to try and better understand the situation: https://ibb.co/rGd9QQf https://ibb.co/rGd9QQf

santah 3y ago

I don't believe these numbers. Here is a screenshot from my self hosted Matomo installation for my traffic today up until now: https://i.imgur.com/WcfQKdT.png https://i.imgur.com/WcfQKdT.png Firefox blocks most analytics scripts by default, so these articles rely on very skewed data. Any other devs with self hosted tracking solutions want to share how their browser stats look like?

8organicbits 3y ago
The tech-crowd uses Firefox quite a bit. Four of my tech oriented sites show FF between 15% and 20% of traffic. But that uses goatcounter (not self hosted), which I know can get blocked by ad-ons. The other challenge is that most bots use Chrome as their UA string, so any bots you fail to filter out will inflate Chrome's numbers. I actually see more traffic from Pale Moon than from Edge. Edge looks dead.

sakjur 3y ago

There’s a mention of Safari’s popularity thanks to the iPhone but otherwise the article seem to miss that most of the smartphone and tablet boom happened during the period since. I think that’s a major point to Firefox’s demise, making the 2% of the whole market possibly represent quite a bit more of the desktop market. It also mentions the revenue to point out how dependent the foundation is on Google, but fails to mention that the market share of 34% in 2010 generated $123M and the market share of 2.2% in 2022 generated $593M. None of this will prevent an eventual demise of Mozilla and Firefox/Gecko (one possible future is what happened to Opera and Firefox adopting either Blink or WebKit – I’d personally consider that completing the slide into irrelevance), but I don’t think Firefox is as close to its last gasp as the article suggests.

Turing_Machine 3y ago

I remember the day I stopped giving a crap about Firefox. It was the day they broke my extensions for the second time within a week.

JohnBooty 3y ago
If you switched to Chrome, I guess it was also the day you stopped giving a crap about the web.

nateb2022 3y ago

This same author wrote an article titled "Is Firefox Toast?" back in 2011: https://www.zdnet.com/article/is-firefox-toast/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/is-firefox-toast/ > Firefox's market-share is fading; the browser itself isn't that good anymore; and its money supply may be drying up. Is Firefox coming to the end of the road?

throw7 3y ago

Firefox is irrelevant to most users because it just doesn't "work". It just takes a few sites that under perform for a firefox user to switch to chrome where it does indeed "just works". This happened to me personally with roll20.net. Recently with Air India, where I literally couldn't buy a ticket with them with firefox (it spins and shows a blank page)... with chrome, perfectly works fine. It's a combination of factors (anti-competition, default installed, devs/designers do not have firefox @ tier 1 testing, mozilla executive board fat & happy "Everything is fine"). My main browser is still firefox, but, let's be real, I keep chrome/chromium around to jump to when needed. The web has failed. There's a thin veneer over it, but we're basically back to client/server.

JohnBooty 3y ago
I keep hearing about these sites that don't work in Firefox but I never seem to run into any despite using the web for 2000+ hours per year. That includes a lot of Youtube usage. Works fine for me. I guess my machine was sprinkled with magic pixie dust or something.
- beej71 3y ago
  I've run into a few. I still use FF near exclusively, but have other browsers installed just in case.

taylodl 3y ago

It's a browser, not a religion. If FF is working for you, then fine - use it. If you're not currently using FF and there's something bothering you with your current tool, try FF and see if it's still a problem. If you're happy with what you've been using then keep using what you've been using.

JohnBooty 3y ago
Religion? We're talking practical reality here. The reality is that when alternative browsers finally slip into irrelevance the web will belong to Google. We had a monoculture on the web once with IE. It went poorly. If you literally don't care about the health of the open web, fine -- but that is what I would call a near-religious dedication to ignorance
- taylodl 3y ago
  You act as though Safari doesn't have a significant market presence. Also, Microsoft developed new web technologies and then patented them - preventing their competitors from using them. All of Microsoft's development tools of course used those new technologies and therefore required the web site visitor to use IE. The situation today with Google is markedly different.
  - JohnBooty 3y ago
    You act as though Safari doesn't have a significant market presence. Safari is not good enough as a bulwark of the free web. It's only available on Apple platforms and doesn't support ad-blockers as robust as FF. Microsoft developed new web technologies and then patented them What patented web technologies are you thinking of? ActiveX controls? The situation today with Google is markedly different. Sure. Microsoft wanted to lock you into IE and Windows. Google wants to lock you into Chrome and ensure that the web is utterly bent to serve their advertising platform. If you don't understand the massive commonality here -- which, again, is domination and ownership of the web -- because you're focused on implementation details, I don't know what to tell you.

irongeek 3y ago

I left Chrome 10 years ago and have been a happy Firefox user. I think this article is clickbait. I know more and more people using Firefox.

yetanother12345 3y ago

There's no reason to expect that FF will "fall" any day soon. If not for any other reason then Europe. We have EU-wide legislation that demands alternatives in the browser space. And while Eurocrats are not extremely tech-savvy they are not extremely stupid either, they will not likely be fooled by four flavours of Chromium. Just an opinion.

zamadatix 3y ago
It'd be interesting to see what they'd do. I don't think the legislation existed because the legislature agreed there needs to be a diversity in browser engines as much as they didn't want one company in control of web browsing. If Microsoft and Apple were to submit that they felt they did not feel a loss of control over Edge for being based on Chromium or unfair competition from Chrome in either case I'm not sure Firefox would be kept alive for the sake of source code diversity alone. That said, maybe Microsoft/Apple would not be aligned with supporting Google - though I think they would to protect themselves the same. Or they might not even care. iPhones have a significantly larger penetration than Firefox on the whole of the EU but they haven't (yet) been even forced to offer a browser selection at all during setup. It'd be interesting to imagine what the regulation would be though. "Google, you must pay more to keep Firefox alive better"? One thing I'd like to see is more crackdown on "first party browser advertisement" for the lack of a better word. I don't think that'd save Firefox as much as help other browsers though.

johnasmith 3y ago

For Firefox to succeed, it has to differentiate. There are two meaningful ways it does, or will do, in the near future: 1. Mobile extensions: that's a unique value prop 2. Fight for the user: manifest v3, web environment integrity, and whatever comes next are degradations in user experience, and following a different path puts FF apart

JohnBooty 3y ago
Why should they fight for users? The users who should care the most, such as the HN crowd, overwhelmingly have voted and the consensus is we read some synthetic benchmarks where Chrome is faster, and we are comfortable trading our freedoms away for that. Everybody has a price. It's just depressing that ours was so cheap. (Not me personally. I would use FF even if it was worse, but it performs identically to Chrome for me. I don't understand what people are even doing with their f'ing web browsers that gets them into these pathological poor performance states with FF.)

seba_dos1 3y ago

To slide into irrelevance it first needs any viable alternatives.

arun-mani-j 3y ago

Being the only "tech guy" in my family, I have installed Firefox with uBlock Origin and NewPipe in my parents', siblings' phone and some of my close friends'. The end result is their browsing experience has vastly improved. Once I saw that my mother had clicked a spam link in WhatsApp but UBlock Origin had blocked it. She called me and said that she is not able to open a link. Then I told her that is a spam and that's why her "browser" blocked it. Similarly I have told my close friends about advantages of Firefox with UBlock Origin over Chrome or Opera etc. 99% of them try and tell me that they wish they knew about this earlier. The remaining 1% will have Firefox as secondary because of their work or accounts that is available only on Chrome. For an average user, from my observation, Firefox is definitely awesome. The only issue is many of them don't know its existence. Sadly, many don't even know existence of adblockers. I really wish Firefox invested more into promotion and may be governments and phone manufacturers come forward to have Firefox as an option. :)

Gud 3y ago

Like a Phoenix, it will rise again.

Doomed2Repeat 3y ago

Author completely missed the boat, imho. Brave post by BigTex, only one who nailed it. Karma is a biotch. No rearranging of the FFox deck chairs will ever save that lost bunch from themselves.