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Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

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Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#71

Post by dTal »

corty wrote: post #49
bjt2n3904 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, isn't this a bit like saying, "I left Windows for Ubuntu because of the invasive privacy concerns I had... But man Unity is terrible, I'm going back to Windows!" If privacy is the ultimate concern, I can suffer usability. I think the real issue is we've stopped advocating for privacy loudly and publicly. All the users know is convenience.

The thing is, if you do not like the UI of unity, maybe you'll like Gnome, KDE, LXDE, fluxbox, i3 or ratpoison or .... With most Linux distros, you can have both privacy and your favourite UI paradigm. You usually do not need to suffer in the usability department (or at least not too much). But with Firefox, all the UI choices are gone now, intentionally sacrificed on the altair of rewrites, UI changes, branding and…

Huh? Happy Tree Style Tabs user here, and another addon (Sidebery) seems to be growing in popularity as well. You can disable the built-in tabs with userChrome.css. What am I missing?

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#72

Post by Xevi »

mithusingh32 wrote: post #61
Xevi wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched from Firefox on Android to Brave. Not because I like Brave, but because I disliked the new UI in Firefox. Brave also had much better performance for JavaScript and CSS animations.

I tried brave. But I constantly had ads on it. It would block trackers and ads on websites but if I was to open a few tab it would have crypto ads or some other nonsense.

I don't see any ads when using Brave. What kind of crypto ads are you talking about?

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#73

Post by pteraspidomorph »

bjt2n3904 wrote: post #28
pteraspidomorph wrote: post #6

I agree with this opinion piece. Firefox is a product strangely hostile to its core userbase. It's almost like they've been deliberately trying to sabotage themselves for years. I don't use it because I approve of all their stupid pigheaded UI choices, I use it because it has been the least bad option despite those choices. That might not go on for much longer, though.

I mean, isn't this a bit like saying, "I left Windows for Ubuntu because of the invasive privacy concerns I had... But man Unity is terrible, I'm going back to Windows!" If privacy is the ultimate concern, I can suffer usability. I think the real issue is we've stopped advocating for privacy loudly and publicly. All the users know is convenience.

I care about privacy, that's why I didn't move away from Firefox years ago (or as of yet). But ideally I would prefer not to suffer from privacy or usability issues...

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#74

Post by phillipseamore »

Yoric wrote: post #60

I have an alternative set of explanations regarding why Firefox is seeing a continuous decline for the last 12 years. 1. Mozilla is competing against Google. Numbers are not public but I would be surprised if Google didn't have 10x more people working on Chrome vs. the number of people working on Firefox. 2. Mozilla is competing against Google. Numbers are again not public but I remember reading estimates that the eq…

To points 1-4, where would FF be without $400m a year from Google?

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#75

Post by nakovet »

Due to the shrinking user base another thing becoming more common these days is broken websites on Firefox. Sometimes something small like WebRTC processing, other times the site simply won't load. 1x/week I open a website in Chrome incognito to use it due to not working on Firefox, last week was a restaurant reservation website.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#76

Post by dTal »

Yoric wrote: post #60

I have an alternative set of explanations regarding why Firefox is seeing a continuous decline for the last 12 years. 1. Mozilla is competing against Google. Numbers are not public but I would be surprised if Google didn't have 10x more people working on Chrome vs. the number of people working on Firefox. 2. Mozilla is competing against Google. Numbers are again not public but I remember reading estimates that the eq…

>many properties that don't/didn't work or work correctly with Firefox could be made to magically work if you changed your user agent to Chrome.

Pretty damning that Google was never slammed with a huge fine for anti-competitive behavior for that.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#79

Post by lousken »

corty wrote: post #63
jeroenhd wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What did Firefox do to fix the compatibility e.g. with Teams? I think that's the wrong way around. Why would Firefox need to change their browser for a specific web application? Microsoft chose not to support Firefox, not the other way around. It's still choosing not to support smaller platforms (the Linux application is simply garbage, lacking basic features that have been available on other platforms for months).…

I would strongly disagree on the sysadmin stuff. Firefox has always had a very powerful settings system. All the stuff you could set in about:config can also be set via a set of configuration files provided by the sysadmin, the user and the distro, each of which can provide defaults, presets or locked non-changeable settings which are hierarchically enforced. Exactly what you need as a sysadmin, cross-platform, could…

I am not denying that firefox has options to customize itself, but if you don't wanna take my word for it - here's the comments on /r/sysadmin when they started supporting GPOs https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/82naw1/mozilla_fi... .

Same thing with MS login https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/p1ral4/firefox_91...

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#80

Post by jeroenhd »

0xCMP wrote: post #65
jeroenhd wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What did Firefox do to fix the compatibility e.g. with Teams? I think that's the wrong way around. Why would Firefox need to change their browser for a specific web application? Microsoft chose not to support Firefox, not the other way around. It's still choosing not to support smaller platforms (the Linux application is simply garbage, lacking basic features that have been available on other platforms for months).…

I'm not aware of the APIs in question and it sounds like this probably to prevent fingerprinting of a device... but why not simply return only the default device when enumerated? It inherently makes sense that all those apps would try to understand what devices were available and even allow switching between them. It's often required because that entire stack between the browser, os, and device is very unreliable eve…

I don't know why this broke in the first place, all I know is that I had no sound and that the device selection menu was borked where other video calling webapps worked just fine. The enumerateDevices API has been in Firefox for years [1].

To be fair(ish) to Microsoft, I did spoof Chrome's user agent because Microsoft forced a "this website doesn't work with your browser" screen in Firefox. Perhaps the failing API was an unstable Chrome-only API that they assumed works because of the UA. The browser compatibility screen communicates that they definitely tested it, that they definitely knew about the problem, and that they just didn't want to fix it.

I just dropped Teams as an option and sent everyone who wanted to video chat Jitsi links. That worked fine while I needed it. If a company chooses not to support me, then I will choose not to use that company if I can.

[1] https://caniuse.com/?search=enumerateDevices

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