Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

Thanks for sharing your data!

I just installed polar.

Immediately after install, it prompts you to install a chrome extension, it has a big google chrome icon that takes up 1/16th of my screen. It has no mention of how to do the same in firefox.

Naturally, I responded by searching both "polar firefox addon" and "Save to polar firefox addon" on both DuckDuckGo and Google. All return a long list of results that don't include a save to polar addon.

I go to addons.mozilla.org and search "Save to Polar", I don't find your extension.

At this point I would typically have given up and assumed you just don't have a firefox version of the extension... but since you've just told me that there exists a firefox extension and I'm curious I'll keep going.

Your website mentions it nowhere.

The chrome store doesn't let me install it in firefox.

The GitHub readme doesn't mention it.

No GitHub issues mention it.

The subreddit linked from the website has no sidebar. Searching on it finds no mention of firefox.

Checking the other github repos under the same account as the polar repo I see a "Polar Chrome Extension" and not a "Polar Firefox Extension", but maybe those are the same things these days since both support web extensions. Nope, that repo is a placeholder with nothing in it.

Going back to addons.mozilla.org and just searching "polar", filtering for extensions, and scrolling through the results (only 5 thankfully) reveals nothing.

I search "Save to Polar" github' on both duckduckgo and google, hoping to at least find the source of the addon. Neither return any relevant results.

At this point I'm astonished there are any firefox users of that addon... as far as I can tell it doesn't exist for firefox.

Edit:

It occurs to me that maybe you meant looking at other people's addons. So I looked at the most popular addon I know of, ublock origin. Chrome says "10,000,000+", Firefox says "4,794,583"... which is 40%!

I am an edge-case but my favourite extensions are AdNauseum [1], CookieAutoDelete and NoScript. The first isn't even available on the Chrome store (although you can install it via Dev Mode [2]), and that's before I weight concerns like Google's dragnet. Totally agree with the Network Effect point though, and I hear Chrome's dev tools are quicker than Firefox's in DOM rendering.

With regard to 2, I've not found it to be noticeably slow, nor experienced dropped frames or the other complaints (ran on a 2014 and a 2017), but that's more likely me being unobservant.

My recreational browsing is mostly on an iPad, and the user story there is pretty desperate. I'd prefer to mimic my Desktop setup, but the walled garden doesn't afford me that opportunity. I'm cautiously optimistic that situation will catch up before I move platforms though!

Anyway, thank you for helping me see the other side a little better.

[1] - https://adnauseam.io

[2] - I don't know if anyone else has noticed this, but there's a needless and incessant Chrome (and Chromium) prompt on each startup as follows:

""" Disable Developer Mode Extensions

Extensions running in developer mode [sic] can harm your computer. If you're not a developer, you should disable these extensions running in developer mode to stay safe """

I personally find it inherently hostile, but perhaps I'm just an old man disregarding the use-case of other people!

> I also tried out Firefox on iOS some time ago...

I was in the process of switching to Firefox from Chrome, and a few days after installing Firefox on iOS it interrupted me with a notification advertising Pocket. I immediately uninstalled it and haven't looked back.

> Firefox is still pretty ugly, too. On macOS, it feels chunkier and less natively integrated.

Mozilla have put a tremendous amount of effort into the "ugly on every platform" cross platform tools over the years, from XUL to whatever the current one is. Developing a native UI for each platform would have been less effort and given much better results than continuing with this tried and failed approach.

Their latest attempt at theme support is just laughable and was very obviously not QA'd. In text areas I get the dark background theme from my desktop and the dark text foreground from the website css and it's made firefox unusable for me.

This is on top of things like their recent breakages to extensions so things that used to work (vertical tabs) still don't. And this only broke so they could go multi-threaded and then quickly had to add throttles so random sites couldn't hog every core.

But it seems mozilla are more concerned with re-writing things in rust, tying users into various web services and god knows what other side projects while they continue to avoid improving their core product.

I'd love to see firefox regain market share, we need an open source browser that's not controlled by a spyware company, but on their current trajectory firefox will dissapear into history and mozilla themselves will be the primary cause.

chrome also decreased this month, perhaps there is something larger here?