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Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

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Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#51

Post by camjohnson26 »

soperj wrote: post #32
toper-centage wrote: post #15

It's honestly a pity. Firefox is it perfect but the Internet is becoming worse because of chrome. Google is able to fast track any non standard Web tech and the hordes follow. Soon after, that become the standard. I don't want to cheer for a broken browser, but only Safari is able to stop this madness now. Also, Firefox on the Desktop is really good and still let's you do so much more than chrome clones. But it suffe…

>only Safari is able to stop this madness now Safari is usable on less than 20% of machines, it absolutely will not be stopping anything. It's also the bane of my existence as a web developer.

I’m guessing a huge percentage of the lost users switched to Brave since it had 25 million as of February and is affiliated with Brendan Eich.

https://brave.com/25m-mau/

Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#52

Post by tgv »

soperj wrote: post #32
toper-centage wrote: post #15

It's honestly a pity. Firefox is it perfect but the Internet is becoming worse because of chrome. Google is able to fast track any non standard Web tech and the hordes follow. Soon after, that become the standard. I don't want to cheer for a broken browser, but only Safari is able to stop this madness now. Also, Firefox on the Desktop is really good and still let's you do so much more than chrome clones. But it suffe…

>only Safari is able to stop this madness now Safari is usable on less than 20% of machines, it absolutely will not be stopping anything. It's also the bane of my existence as a web developer.

I'm curious. I'm not "frontend", but I do write code that runs in the browser, and write parts of the visualization UI for our products. I do get to determine how we build our products. I've gone with vue/typescript, and that hasn't caused any problem so far. A part of our software has to be able to run everywhere, and that unfortunately still includes IE11, so there I do take care of using a minimal feature set, but I can't remember the last time Safari caused me a problem. What problems does Safari cause?

Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#53

Post by yann2 »

toper-centage wrote: post #15

It's honestly a pity. Firefox is it perfect but the Internet is becoming worse because of chrome. Google is able to fast track any non standard Web tech and the hordes follow. Soon after, that become the standard. I don't want to cheer for a broken browser, but only Safari is able to stop this madness now. Also, Firefox on the Desktop is really good and still let's you do so much more than chrome clones. But it suffe…

I dont worry. I have seen these cycles with IBM and Microsoft. And they all blow up eventually because the unintended consequences keep increasing.

So Google has got itself locked into that same trajectory for a long time now. "Features" are total bullshit. Its all about making sure every small thing is in the cloud or eventually gets pushed into it.

That vision is as dumb as moving the DNA in every cell in your body into a nearby lake and visiting the lake everytime you want to read 1 bit. With a Google toll booth at the lake entrance. Its doomed to fail.

Just look at the consequences. If you have a webpage on your local hard drive and want to use the browsers javascript to access it to make it look better, the Google Chrome team will come running like well programmed alert robots to call it a security violation and disable api access to your own disk.

This is how empires fall.

Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#54

Post by tgv »

rwmj wrote: post #30

The recent changes to the address bar and the terrible new "Photon" UI are really annoying. Don't annoy your loyal users.

I'm sort of used to it by now, but I also don't see it as a real reason to stop using Firefox. Chrome also changes. So how big of a factor would UI changes be in this user loss? I'm suspecting there are more trivial and indirect causes too, such as people changing machines: Firefox isn't pre-installed, and then they just pick whatever that also works.

Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#55

Post by approxim8ion »

roenxi wrote: post #50
crmrc114 wrote: post #5

I may be the odd one but I dropped FF after the drama over brendin eich and his support of prop 8. I just did not feel the same after seeing how he was attacked for his personal contributions. There was just some hateful stuff that came from both sides that really uncovered some toxic personalities in the FF legion.

The Mozilla corporation has to contend with a substantial portion of their community that thinks a $1,000 donation (an unrelated donation, no less) weighs similarly on the scales as something like 20 years in service vigorously supporting the open internet and a long history of technical success. They're going to struggle to focus on their mission with friends like that.

That's their right as consumers. Just as it's Eich's right to be a bigot.

That said, I agree that Moz have failed to find a stable business model,which is a pity.

Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#56

Post by SquareWheel »

Ygg2 wrote: post #23
Rebelgecko wrote: post #18

I moved back to FF after Quantum but haven't been happy with the latest round of UI changes (which also seems to have turned the buttery performance of quantum into a stuttery mess on my machine)

Guess firing those people that brought you those improvement really paid up for Mozilla execs.

Would you recommend they simply stop paying their engineers instead?

Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#57

Post by rvz »

All thanks to the Chromium ecosystem that have made it 'desirable' for web devs to build on, companies like Microsoft, Brave, Opera and Vivaldi all have their browsers depending on Chromium and for users to be running almost everything in either a browser or an electron desktop app.

This is a two horse race. Chrome vs Safari and Chrome is still winning.

Not only that, Chrome is 'the standard' and we happily helped them become that after pushing out IE. The control of the web standards has just switched hands from one tech giant to another.

Firefox has no chance of catching up. They are already on life support by Google.

Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#58

Post by crmrc114 »

saurik wrote: post #29
crmrc114 wrote: post #5

I may be the odd one but I dropped FF after the drama over brendin eich and his support of prop 8. I just did not feel the same after seeing how he was attacked for his personal contributions. There was just some hateful stuff that came from both sides that really uncovered some toxic personalities in the FF legion.

Is there anything you could imagine he could be doing with personal contributions that you would consider worth "attacking" him over (at which point I guess we could reverse engineer that you consider that activity notably "worse" than what Brandon Eich actually did) or do you feel like there is nothing that someone could be doing in their "personal" lives that should cause them to not be a good public face of a proj…

The world is a big place - we don't all share a monolith of values. There can be some claims made to natural law or objective truths. However; Your truth is not mine, Plato's cave, etc.

Ask yourself why there is no outrage at every company that posts rainbow flags on US brand pages but refuses to do the same on their UAE brand pages.

In a nutshell: I am glad that the Christian monks kept the work of all those 'evil pagans' through the dark ages. The candle of Western Civilization could have gone dark if they had religiously burned the works of those they disagreed with... I worry this is a direction we are headed as a cyber culture.

I want discourse because that is how we learn and bring others to enlightenment. I (correctly) saw that move with firefox as a broad move in the general us political ecosystem to "unperson" those on the right/left who don't feel the same as you. I.e. "Trump is Hitler", "Obama is a Terrorist" the schoolyard branding in concerning because it does not help any of us get better or connect on a human level.

I guess I feel like what happened with Brandon is a good example of that fear manifest.

What if, for example, my support of Edward Snowden makes me the next Emmanuel Goldstein, target of two minutes hate for the altar of some agenda? That scares the shit out of me- I don't like it.

Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#59

Post by eightails »

nightski wrote: post #44
nsilvestri wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome is already the standard. Firefox usually works, but more and more often nowadays I encounter a glitchy or poorly performing page, which I switch to Chrome to use properly. I use Firefox to not be part of the Chrome monopoly, not because it's actually a fundamentally better browser.

I have used Firefox for about a decade now and I can't think of a single page that did not work. I'm not saying it's impossible, but incredibly rare. I'd be more inclined to just give up on the site than install Chrome.

Stuff doesn't always completely break -- e.g. Google forcing new Chrome-only web standards on certain sites and making other browsers like Firefox resort to alternatives which can end up being 5x slower [0], or serving a more dated design of google search on FF mobile vs Chrome. I suspect this sort of thing might be enough to make some people switch.

And I have had a few experiences with sites not loading properly in the last few months. Try windy.com for example: on FF 90 with no extensions enabled and tracking protection on 'balanced' I get blue and yellow banding on the map, and the wind gusts graphics fail to load properly. I have reported a few of these instances in the past, but a lot of the time I'd rather just switch to chromium temporarily and continue with what I'm doing.

[0] https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/mozilla-exec...

Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#60

Post by freediver »

rvz wrote: post #57

All thanks to the Chromium ecosystem that have made it 'desirable' for web devs to build on, companies like Microsoft, Brave, Opera and Vivaldi all have their browsers depending on Chromium and for users to be running almost everything in either a browser or an electron desktop app. This is a two horse race. Chrome vs Safari and Chrome is still winning. Not only that, Chrome is 'the standard' and we happily helped th…

Allow me to mention that we are adding another horse to the race, a WebKit based browser no less, Orion [1]. There are many things we believe Safari could do better and we are set to do them.

[1] https://browser.kagi.com

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