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Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

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Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#241

Post by hu3 »

NullPrefix wrote: post #141
ladzoppelin wrote: post #115

Edge is the biggest threat to Chrome and Firefox is still great. uBlock Origin does not even work as well in Chrome as it does in FF which will always create demand for alt browsers. I can't deal with with Chrome but if everything else goes away, Edge is fine. Ms is doing exactly what Google did with webkit, what can you do?

>uBlock Origin does not even work as well in Chrome as it does in FF AFAIK Firefox is the only mobile browser that supports uBlock Origin.

Kiwi Browser on Android has support for desktop Chrome extensions, and it's open-source.

Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#242

Post by gibba999 »

rmsaksida wrote: post #144
bluedevil2k wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given how they make a minimum $450M a year in revenue, how on Earth is Mozilla not swimming in cash?! How high can their expenses be?

Mozilla pays millions of dollars per year to their CEO, despite the decrease in usage and user base. Could be a symptom of a larger problem in the organization.

In general, I don't donate to non-profits where anyone earns more than I do.

I've worked for nonprofits for most of my career, and have seen the insides of several. The most effective ones tend to have a small team on shoestring salaries and really need money. The least effective ones have a CEO making $5M and an executive team above $400k.

I've seen a lot of people argue that good people cost money, but they don't. I know $5M CEOs, $1M CEOs and $100k CEOs. The $100k CEO was by far the most effective.

That said, the Mozilla 990 doesn't look crazy. Many big nonprofits are bad. It's not an organization I'd donate to myself, but it's not one I'd discourage others from donating to either. CEO makes $3M, which isn't really reasonable, but the next-highest salary is $286k. That said, the whole for-profit Mozilla Corporation bit sketches me out. It feels like it might be a way to dodge IRS reporting regulations. I'd want to do due diligence before donating to a non-profit that has a structure like that (it may be innocuous), but I don't have time for due diligence when there are transparent nonprofits too.

Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#243

Post by bigyikes »

LinuxBender wrote: post #188
csmpltn wrote: post #126

I've been using Firefox daily for over 15 years now. My experience with Firefox over the last 2-3 years in particular leaves me very disappointed and frustrated. The constant nonsense UI redesigns that come about with every new update. The instability, and ridiculous resources consumption. The slowness and slugishness. I want a browser that works, respects my privacy, stays out of my way and lets me get shit done. A…

I have a theory why people have dissenting views on the performance of Firefox. I have a laptop dedicated to doing business online. Firefox has no addons on that machine. Some websites are painfully slow and my laptop fans kick on. I have debugged these issues and in every case it was javascript bogging down the CPU's, all 8 cores! gaming laptop I am not a web developer, so it is perhaps unfair for me to pick on the…

Chrome uses V8, which is the same JS engine that Node is built on top of. As the name implies, it’s sort of wicked fast.

IIRC Firefox uses their own engine called Spider Monkey. I don’t know of anything outside of Mozilla which uses it. I have a hard time imagining it being faster than V8, but I actually have no idea — will need to go look at some benchmarks.

Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#244

Post by foepys »

bombcar wrote: post #239
foepys wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend of mine has over 4,000 tabs open in Firefox at the moment - they just never close a tab, ever. Their Firefox' memory usage is only a little higher compared to mine with 3 open tabs.

I wonder how many of those are actually “open” - disconnect the internet and try looking at them. I suspect many just are the URL and nothing more and on view it reloads.

Yes, Firefox unloads old unused tabs.

Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#245

Post by josefx »

csmpltn wrote: post #126

I've been using Firefox daily for over 15 years now. My experience with Firefox over the last 2-3 years in particular leaves me very disappointed and frustrated. The constant nonsense UI redesigns that come about with every new update. The instability, and ridiculous resources consumption. The slowness and slugishness. I want a browser that works, respects my privacy, stays out of my way and lets me get shit done. A…

> The instability, and ridiculous resources consumption. The slowness and slugishness.

Is that firefox or Google pulling a Shadow Dom v0 where they use an API only Chrome implements and fall back to software emulation on everything else?

Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#246

Post by DoingIsLearning »

roenxi wrote: post #69
tgv wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Possibly quite big. It basically drives down the cost of switching. If someone has to learn a new interface anyway, why not switch to the best supported browser at the same time? And if you add up enough annoyances that don't matter, eventually it becomes something. Mozilla still hasn't reclaimed the lofty peak when something like ChatZilla was feasible. A minor annoyance. One among many. Firefox is basically in head…

The best example of failing to understand your users was releasing all these updates on Firefox for Android and actually thinking it was a good idea to regress and disable access to 'about:config'.

Being able to have that level of control and configurability is exactly why I and many users put up with all the other downsides of Firefox.

Who ever is in charge of Mozilla the corporation has lost their way. They should trim everything back to having Mozilla the foundation only.

Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#247

Post by missblit »

LinuxBender wrote: post #188
csmpltn wrote: post #126

I've been using Firefox daily for over 15 years now. My experience with Firefox over the last 2-3 years in particular leaves me very disappointed and frustrated. The constant nonsense UI redesigns that come about with every new update. The instability, and ridiculous resources consumption. The slowness and slugishness. I want a browser that works, respects my privacy, stays out of my way and lets me get shit done. A…

I have a theory why people have dissenting views on the performance of Firefox. I have a laptop dedicated to doing business online. Firefox has no addons on that machine. Some websites are painfully slow and my laptop fans kick on. I have debugged these issues and in every case it was javascript bogging down the CPU's, all 8 cores! gaming laptop I am not a web developer, so it is perhaps unfair for me to pick on the…

> Does chrome not ever get bogged down by javascript?

Yes. This is pretty subjective as a user, but I'd classify Chrome as slightly better here. They're close enough that it doesn't usually matter unless you're playing JS based games or have a potato for a computer.

> Do they have a different javascript library/engine?

Yes, Chrome uses V8, Firefox uses SpiderMonkey

> Can you change the javascript libraries used by Firefox and Chrome?

No, not easily. It's all open source so technically you could with enough effort. But for example Chrome relies on some shared GC code between Blink and V8 [1]; I expect various feature needs like this would make swapping for SpiderMonkey infeasible.

[1] https://v8.dev/blog/high-performance-cpp-gc

Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#248

Post by agumonkey »

gibba999 wrote: post #227
eitland wrote: post #143

I have contacted local authorities twice about anti competitive behavior from Chrome. If two - three other Norwegians do the same that should start to look like an earthquake ;-) Same if ten - twenty Germans or Brits or French do the same. I would mention: 1. that some of their web properties (calendar and YouTube) have been intentionally incompatible with Firefox as evidenced by how well they work in Firefox if one…

My child's school uses Google Classroom. The Google experience is unusable in Firefox. Meet doesn't work (e.g. he sees nothing when the teacher screenshares). This seems really quite anti-competitive. My child cares about privacy and switches browsers. Chrome for Meet, Firefox for most non-Google things.

Unless Meet and other Google apps are really tailored to subperform under firefox I don't think it's a solid case.

If google devs code doesn't run as fast in firefox why should google take the blame ?

or maybe google is using non html5 apis to tap into chrome for faster perf in which case things are muddy.. since whatwg kinda allows unofficial apis

Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#249

Post by ducktective »

f32jhnjk33jj wrote: post #234

Guys, what do you think about switching Firefox to WebKit or Blink engine? This will greatly cut the development costs and will make Firefox almost 100% compatible to Chrome. FF is the only major browser with an engine different from Webkit/Blink.

Having a different engine from Chrome itself is a selling point for Firefox. I don't like a world in which every web browser is a re-skin of Google's monopolized product.
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