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I am a regular Firefox user; it is literally the tool I use most often during my working hours. I like it more than Chrome. Firefox is steadily losing market s

by railka 11mo ago

I am a regular Firefox user; it is literally the tool I use most often during my working hours. I like it more than Chrome. Firefox is steadily losing market share, and any attempts to do something about it are met with negativity. The 2-4% of users who use it care about their privacy. But they are not being deprived of it; the AI tab is optional, and no one is removing the regular tab. (Of course, it would be better if they allowed the integration of local models or aggregators, such as Openrouter, Huggingface...) Meanwhile, developers continue to ignore Firefox, testing only Chromium browsers. Large companies are also choosing the Chromium engine for their browsers. Perhaps if they implement this functionality conveniently, more average users will use Firefox.

tcoff91 11mo ago
It’s losing market share because it doesn’t keep up with supporting the latest web standards.
- ryandrake 11mo ago
  And because they are wasting their time on these side quests that could have been spent improving the actual browser.
- dymk 11mo ago
  They’re losing market share because they’re not bundled with {OS of choice} / not heavily pushed on you when you visit a Google property
- wpm 11mo ago
  Which standards and are they actually standards or just some “draft” slop from Google?
  - charcircuit 11mo ago
    For example since firefox doesn't support WebNFC I can't do online shopping because during 3D secure my phone can't recognize my credit card being tapped. I have to use Chrome instead. Frankly, I don't care if WebNFC is "slop" or not. It's solving real world problems.
    - wpm 11mo ago
      WebNFC is a draft standard.
  - frm88 11mo ago
    For example Firefox could fix it's issues with VSS crashing on GPU's so that Linux distros like Nobara don't have to ditch Firefox as the standard browser in favour of Brave. Granted, that would only get them back a couple of hundred users but hey: marketshare?
thsbrown 11mo ago
I 100% agree. It's funny to me that for a website that's focused on people and companies creating new things, people here can be extremely hostile and jaded to the idea. The pessimism can get old.
DeusExMachina 11mo ago
I am not a Firefox user, but I am baffled by the fact that every time I see news about it is because its developers are trying to push something that users dislike. All the comments I read always highlight how they keep wasting time and money instead of working on more important things. My impression is that this is the reason why they keep losing market share. I never see any positive news about Firefox or Mozilla, and the browser has nothing that would make me switch. Firefox gained market share because people recommended it and installed it on the computers of friends and family. They seem to have stopped, and its developers don't seem, from the outside, to be interested in doing anything to bring that back.
- shawnz 11mo ago
  Here are some of the things that make Firefox the best browser for me: - An extension system more powerful than Chrome's, which supports for example rich adblockers that can block ads on Youtube. Also, it works on mobile, too - Many sophisticated productivity, privacy, and tab management features such as vertical tabs, tab groups, container tabs, split tabs, etc. And now it also has easy-to-use profiles and PWA support just like Chrome - A sync system which is ALWAYS end-to-end encrypted, and doesn't leak your browsing data or saved credentials if you configure it wrong, like Google's does, and it of course works on mobile too - And yes, LLM-assisted summarization, translation, tab grouping, etc, most of which works entirely offline with local LLMs and no cloud interation, although there are some cloud enabled features as well
  - stogot 11mo ago
    When/where was the PWA support added? I tried to test that this week and their docs say to use a third-party extension.
    - shawnz 11mo ago
      They're calling it taskbar tabs and it's behind a feature flag in nightly currently: https://windowsreport.com/firefox-is-bringing-web-apps-to-windows-11-with-taskbar-tabs-first-look/ https://windowsreport.com/firefox-is-bringing-web-apps-to-wi...
CjHuber 11mo ago
I don’t know. I‘m always a bit appalled that getting privacy in firefox requires you to disable so many flags in the user.js or use something like arkenfox. It feels kind of dishonest of them that they don‘t surface those settings when they‘re enabled by default. Of course there is librefox, but still I feel like there shouldn’t even have to be reason for an extra fork like that.
- godelski 11mo ago
  You mean the standards that Google adds to chrome and then turns into standards?
zgk7iqea 11mo ago
Firefox should commit more to correctly implement web standards - not even gradients render correctly. A lot of the users are oddballs with strange configurations that break everything. No wonder devs optimize for chrome.
- mccr8 11mo ago
  One longstanding issue with gradients was fixed recently. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=627771 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=627771
Kwantuum 11mo ago
I've had to stop using FF as my development browser because it chokes on large source maps. I used to find lots of issues in our web app that were only ever tested on chromium browsers. I don't anymore because the devtools are unusable past a certain point.
- mrandish 11mo ago
  Can you please file a bug on Mozilla's bug tracker? They are usually quite responsive on well-documented dev related bugs - especially ones around edge-cases related to fundamentals like resource allocation. You'd be doing a good thing that would help others.
kakuri 11mo ago
I am a frontend dev and use Firefox as much as I can. But I can't use it for development. Firefox's dev tools need to be better. I use Chrome for development because Chrome has great dev tools.
- y-c-o-m-b 11mo ago
  I've used Firefox as my daily driver for years on a high end gaming laptop and have the same gripe. The dev tools are truly bad. Even outside of dev work, there's sites where I want to hide paywall or login banners by simply setting a container to "display: none;", but opening up the inspector (slow) and doing so causes the browser to freeze.
  - easygenes 11mo ago
    I think Lizard is the best UI for elements hiding in FF: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lizardextension/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lizardextensi... The name is in keeping with a lineage of animal tools for ad hoc page manipulation in Firefox. First was Aardvark, then Platypus. https://github.com/dvogel/AardvarkDuex https://github.com/dvogel/AardvarkDuex More background: https://chatgpt.com/share/69177dc6-6378-8011-bdae-c8dcbb124fb1 https://chatgpt.com/share/69177dc6-6378-8011-bdae-c8dcbb124f... I was an original early user of Aardvark. These tools have remained obscure, but with a cult following because they’re such a quick and easy way to rip up a page to your liking. They were the direct inspiration for modern browser dom selector tools. For hairy edge cases, uBlock Origin’s element picker is the gold standard for manipulating pages.
palmotea 11mo ago
> Firefox is steadily losing market share, and any attempts to do something about it are met with negativity. Why don't they spend the time innovating to make the browser engine faster and more stable? IIRC, they canceled that project. Instead they focus on stuff like yet another VPN and now this AI assistant.
AlienRobot 11mo ago
>Perhaps if they implement this functionality conveniently, more average users will use Firefox. I've tried Firefox before. I prefer Vivaldi, because it provides more convenience. I can't actually tell you what Firefox does or where all that money is going to. It looks exactly like Chrome with negligible changes. The critical problem, it seems, is that Firefox thinks people care about "privacy" only to the extent of being shown personalized ads. Literally nothing else matters. This feels to me like a recurring issue in technology, where an issue that users may have doesn't exist in the way they interact with the world, but only as a specific definition that can be measured or that be analyzed from a compliance perspective. I have multiple profiles in Chrome and Vivaldi that let me switch between professional accounts and private accounts. That sounds like privacy to me, and I'd wager that for most people on the planet this is far more useful than the ability to avoid being shown ads for a thing you have already bought just because of tracking cookies. Why Firefox doesn't have this feature? Vivaldi lets me subscribe to websites via RSS so I don't need to create an account to subscribe to things. That sounds like privacy to me. And I even have notes built into the browser. I don't use these today, but I used to use them when Vivaldi was called Opera. Firefox seems to have neither of these features. Again, I feel the need to ask, what features does Firefox actually have? Maybe this is a "hot take" for Firefox developers, but if you want people to use your web browser maybe you should try offering functionality that other browsers don't offer? Yes, you can run some extensions that don't work on Chrome anymore, but that's not even a functionality of the browser. That is third-party. It quite literally depends on third-party developers bothering to develop extensions for a web browser that has a 2% market when they could instead use that time to develop extensions for Chrome or even Vivaldi. If the only reason you want me to use Firefox is so that I don't use Chrome, that just doesn't feel very compelling.
bloppe 11mo ago
> Perhaps if they implement this functionality conveniently, more average users will use Firefox. Why would an average user switch to Firefox because it's the 20th browser to release a half-baked AI integration?
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
t_mann 11mo ago
Maybe Firefox would have a higher market share if they worked on features their users actually want instead of things that get widely criticized. I personally would use it a lot more if it had an --app flag like Chromium, which would probably also be a lot less work than AI integration.
chii 11mo ago
> any attempts to do something about it are met with negativity because these attempts have all been poorly thought out, and in fact are following the corporate playbook that only works if the product is producing revenue. It's an attempt to make firefox like chrome, in the hopes of getting some of chrome's marketshare. Stop it - firefox should be it's own identity, and serve the user's needs. It should depend in large part on donations from users, and not from corporations except as no-string attached donations. It should not have such a large team of non-contributors drawing funds and working on initiatives unrelated to improving the browsing experience.

by railka 11mo ago

tcoff91 11mo ago

It’s losing market share because it doesn’t keep up with supporting the latest web standards.

ryandrake 11mo ago
And because they are wasting their time on these side quests that could have been spent improving the actual browser.
dymk 11mo ago
They’re losing market share because they’re not bundled with {OS of choice} / not heavily pushed on you when you visit a Google property
wpm 11mo ago
Which standards and are they actually standards or just some “draft” slop from Google?
- charcircuit 11mo ago
  For example since firefox doesn't support WebNFC I can't do online shopping because during 3D secure my phone can't recognize my credit card being tapped. I have to use Chrome instead. Frankly, I don't care if WebNFC is "slop" or not. It's solving real world problems.
  - wpm 11mo ago
    WebNFC is a draft standard.
- frm88 11mo ago
  For example Firefox could fix it's issues with VSS crashing on GPU's so that Linux distros like Nobara don't have to ditch Firefox as the standard browser in favour of Brave. Granted, that would only get them back a couple of hundred users but hey: marketshare?

thsbrown 11mo ago

I 100% agree. It's funny to me that for a website that's focused on people and companies creating new things, people here can be extremely hostile and jaded to the idea. The pessimism can get old.

DeusExMachina 11mo ago

I am not a Firefox user, but I am baffled by the fact that every time I see news about it is because its developers are trying to push something that users dislike. All the comments I read always highlight how they keep wasting time and money instead of working on more important things. My impression is that this is the reason why they keep losing market share. I never see any positive news about Firefox or Mozilla, and the browser has nothing that would make me switch. Firefox gained market share because people recommended it and installed it on the computers of friends and family. They seem to have stopped, and its developers don't seem, from the outside, to be interested in doing anything to bring that back.

shawnz 11mo ago
Here are some of the things that make Firefox the best browser for me: - An extension system more powerful than Chrome's, which supports for example rich adblockers that can block ads on Youtube. Also, it works on mobile, too - Many sophisticated productivity, privacy, and tab management features such as vertical tabs, tab groups, container tabs, split tabs, etc. And now it also has easy-to-use profiles and PWA support just like Chrome - A sync system which is ALWAYS end-to-end encrypted, and doesn't leak your browsing data or saved credentials if you configure it wrong, like Google's does, and it of course works on mobile too - And yes, LLM-assisted summarization, translation, tab grouping, etc, most of which works entirely offline with local LLMs and no cloud interation, although there are some cloud enabled features as well
- stogot 11mo ago
  When/where was the PWA support added? I tried to test that this week and their docs say to use a third-party extension.
  - shawnz 11mo ago
    They're calling it taskbar tabs and it's behind a feature flag in nightly currently: https://windowsreport.com/firefox-is-bringing-web-apps-to-windows-11-with-taskbar-tabs-first-look/ https://windowsreport.com/firefox-is-bringing-web-apps-to-wi...

CjHuber 11mo ago

I don’t know. I‘m always a bit appalled that getting privacy in firefox requires you to disable so many flags in the user.js or use something like arkenfox. It feels kind of dishonest of them that they don‘t surface those settings when they‘re enabled by default. Of course there is librefox, but still I feel like there shouldn’t even have to be reason for an extra fork like that.

godelski 11mo ago
You mean the standards that Google adds to chrome and then turns into standards?

zgk7iqea 11mo ago

Firefox should commit more to correctly implement web standards - not even gradients render correctly. A lot of the users are oddballs with strange configurations that break everything. No wonder devs optimize for chrome.

mccr8 11mo ago
One longstanding issue with gradients was fixed recently. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=627771 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=627771

Kwantuum 11mo ago

I've had to stop using FF as my development browser because it chokes on large source maps. I used to find lots of issues in our web app that were only ever tested on chromium browsers. I don't anymore because the devtools are unusable past a certain point.

mrandish 11mo ago
Can you please file a bug on Mozilla's bug tracker? They are usually quite responsive on well-documented dev related bugs - especially ones around edge-cases related to fundamentals like resource allocation. You'd be doing a good thing that would help others.

kakuri 11mo ago

I am a frontend dev and use Firefox as much as I can. But I can't use it for development. Firefox's dev tools need to be better. I use Chrome for development because Chrome has great dev tools.

y-c-o-m-b 11mo ago
I've used Firefox as my daily driver for years on a high end gaming laptop and have the same gripe. The dev tools are truly bad. Even outside of dev work, there's sites where I want to hide paywall or login banners by simply setting a container to "display: none;", but opening up the inspector (slow) and doing so causes the browser to freeze.
- easygenes 11mo ago
  I think Lizard is the best UI for elements hiding in FF: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lizardextension/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lizardextensi... The name is in keeping with a lineage of animal tools for ad hoc page manipulation in Firefox. First was Aardvark, then Platypus. https://github.com/dvogel/AardvarkDuex https://github.com/dvogel/AardvarkDuex More background: https://chatgpt.com/share/69177dc6-6378-8011-bdae-c8dcbb124fb1 https://chatgpt.com/share/69177dc6-6378-8011-bdae-c8dcbb124f... I was an original early user of Aardvark. These tools have remained obscure, but with a cult following because they’re such a quick and easy way to rip up a page to your liking. They were the direct inspiration for modern browser dom selector tools. For hairy edge cases, uBlock Origin’s element picker is the gold standard for manipulating pages.

palmotea 11mo ago

> Firefox is steadily losing market share, and any attempts to do something about it are met with negativity. Why don't they spend the time innovating to make the browser engine faster and more stable? IIRC, they canceled that project. Instead they focus on stuff like yet another VPN and now this AI assistant.

AlienRobot 11mo ago

>Perhaps if they implement this functionality conveniently, more average users will use Firefox. I've tried Firefox before. I prefer Vivaldi, because it provides more convenience. I can't actually tell you what Firefox does or where all that money is going to. It looks exactly like Chrome with negligible changes. The critical problem, it seems, is that Firefox thinks people care about "privacy" only to the extent of being shown personalized ads. Literally nothing else matters. This feels to me like a recurring issue in technology, where an issue that users may have doesn't exist in the way they interact with the world, but only as a specific definition that can be measured or that be analyzed from a compliance perspective. I have multiple profiles in Chrome and Vivaldi that let me switch between professional accounts and private accounts. That sounds like privacy to me, and I'd wager that for most people on the planet this is far more useful than the ability to avoid being shown ads for a thing you have already bought just because of tracking cookies. Why Firefox doesn't have this feature? Vivaldi lets me subscribe to websites via RSS so I don't need to create an account to subscribe to things. That sounds like privacy to me. And I even have notes built into the browser. I don't use these today, but I used to use them when Vivaldi was called Opera. Firefox seems to have neither of these features. Again, I feel the need to ask, what features does Firefox actually have? Maybe this is a "hot take" for Firefox developers, but if you want people to use your web browser maybe you should try offering functionality that other browsers don't offer? Yes, you can run some extensions that don't work on Chrome anymore, but that's not even a functionality of the browser. That is third-party. It quite literally depends on third-party developers bothering to develop extensions for a web browser that has a 2% market when they could instead use that time to develop extensions for Chrome or even Vivaldi. If the only reason you want me to use Firefox is so that I don't use Chrome, that just doesn't feel very compelling.

bloppe 11mo ago

> Perhaps if they implement this functionality conveniently, more average users will use Firefox. Why would an average user switch to Firefox because it's the 20th browser to release a half-baked AI integration?

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

t_mann 11mo ago

Maybe Firefox would have a higher market share if they worked on features their users actually want instead of things that get widely criticized. I personally would use it a lot more if it had an --app flag like Chromium, which would probably also be a lot less work than AI integration.

chii 11mo ago

> any attempts to do something about it are met with negativity because these attempts have all been poorly thought out, and in fact are following the corporate playbook that only works if the product is producing revenue. It's an attempt to make firefox like chrome, in the hopes of getting some of chrome's marketshare. Stop it - firefox should be it's own identity, and serve the user's needs. It should depend in large part on donations from users, and not from corporations except as no-string attached donations. It should not have such a large team of non-contributors drawing funds and working on initiatives unrelated to improving the browsing experience.