Why Firefox Deserves Its Sad Decline

> This led to the present where the only place where Firefox is dominant is on Linux, where it seems like the community is trying hard to give another chance to them...

Yup, this is me. It helps it's installed by default on Linux.

Firefox got so slow and bloated from 2010-2015 I stopped using it at some point. In 2017, a work colleague told me when Firefox "Quantum" was released so I tried it out for nostalgia, and found Firefox was as good as it used to be. Just from inertia, I continued to use Chrome until last year when I realized how great container tabs and the JSON viewer are. However, it seems everyone I know has moved on to Chrome and I don't blame them.

If anyone from Mozilla is reading this, I hope you have found a way to codify the learnings from the bloat years into your product development. My hope is if you can keep Firefox lean and innovative some lucky external development will eventually push users away from Chrome and Firefox will be the best browser to switch to.

These days FF is just as fast and lighter than most Chromium browsers. With a better curated add-on store (my god google store sucks), a clean UI (which they'll hopefully stop messing around with), and more importantly, it just works for day to day use, and is customizable enough for most people's needs.

While Mozilla have themselves to blame for a lot of the decline. A big part of it is Google's dominance over the web and android, pushing Chrome on everyone's face for years. Bundling Chrome with software, annoying pop-ups on android telling you to use Chrome, pre-installed on android, pushing it on their main page... There's so much of it. Of course there's also Apple's walled garden preventing it from going there, as well as years of MS doing what Google does now.

Any article about Firefox and it's relevance that doesn't strongly highlight the "David v. Goliath" nature of what it's up against -- and implies that it gets developed in roughly the same way and for the same purposes as its competitors -- is dumb at best and dangerously misleading at worst.

I can't get copy and past working without hanging/ crashing on manjaro ... tried all hints i could find (x11, wayland, about:config flags, ...) only thing that makes it kind or work is `WAYLAND_DEBUG=1 MOZ_LOG="WidgetClipboard:5, Widget:5" firefox > /dev/null 2>&1` is it just me ... is it just me ?

At this point it is clear that Mozilla is not really an engineering driven organization. They are mainly a political organization with a browser attached.

In addition, as some have mentioned, they really don’t have the resources of the big players (Apple/Google)

Given that the web browser is basically ground zero for malware and exploits, I think it is safer to go with the browsers with more resources behind them.