Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

I knew Mozilla was going downhill when they started purging words from the project. When your inclusion efforts start alienating moderate users it might be time to rethink them.

* Removing "meritocracy" from the governance docs - https://blog.mozilla.org/careers/words-matter-moving-beyond-

* Changing "master password" to "primary password" - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/primary-password-replac

* Removing "crazy" from the codebase - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1675987

* Removing words deemed as reference to mental illness - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1675986

The difference in the project from 15 years ago is stark.

The Mozilla mission 2005:

"Established in July, 2003, with start-up support from America Online's Netscape division, the Mozilla Foundation exists to provide organizational, legal, and financial support for the Mozilla open-source software project."

The Mozilla mission 2021:

"Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent."

Where they once were just supporting a software project they're now a political movement. They spout "equity", "justice", and "advocacy" all over mozilla.org. No thanks, I just want a decent software.

But that's exactly what you're asking Mozilla to do when you ask them to keep that as a formalized setting, it's exactly the same work just it's done by a Mozilla employee and not you. So it really sounds like you're asking them to do something which you acknowledge yourself is not a smart or efficient thing to do.

This piece highlights the underlying problem, about which the specifics are just symptoms: the attitudes of Mozilla people.

They have been outright dismissive, almost hostile - they think they know what's right, they think they "know better", they may even really believe they're doing pro-"privacy" stuff - but in the end, they're wearing blinders.

For example, there's no reason in the world to change things in a way that's actively hostile to those who don't want those changes, yet version after version requires non-trivial amounts of work to figure out how to simply not change.

Then they do things like aggregating all DNS for people in the US to one monopolistic company WITHOUT ASKING, because, they say, people don't know what's good for them. They only relented after lots of negative publicity, not after sitting and considering that not everyone trusts Cloudflare just because they say they're not evil.

So it's the attitude that comes from design-by-fiat that has turned me off completely, and I see no evidence that anything is changing in any way that's good. To the contrary - I see more examples of making decisions without the slightest concern for technical discussion.

I fear that declining market share will only strengthen their resolve to force things on their user base.

This is my experience as well. I use both Chrome and Firefox across Mac and Windows, and I find the experiences to be pretty much interchangeable. I'm usually someone who gets annoyed at minor differences, but this really is one area where I'm not bothered at all.

I use Firefox most of the time, out of a desire to support Mozilla and promote a non-Google browser. Admittedly, this is a political motivation, but it comes at pretty much zero practical cost. If you are interested in trying out Firefox, I think the only significant inconvenience is disabling Pocket.

Like the parent, I'll occasionally switch to Chrome for separate profiles, or if I need something specific in DevTools. Chrome has much better multi-profile support, in the sense that it has it at all, but again, the differences between the two are so minor that I don't have any qualms switching back and forth.

Same here but with Edge. Microsoft lobbied us extremely to make it our standard browser.

But both are just fine. Never have issues with Firefox. But I do have issues with its UI. Too much wasted space, it's only useable in compact mode which they want to get rid of. And I hate that there's no clear visual separation between tabs anymore. Even Chrome and edge have this.