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Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

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Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#311

Post by andrepd »

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.

You can improve the situation somewhat by using bromite/ungoogled-chromium instead of chrome, for the purposes when Firefox doesn't work.

Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#312

Post by dragonwriter »

coldtea wrote: post #305
granzymes wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How they have pushed Chrome as a "better browser" on the front page of Google (were no one else have been allowed to advertise) to Firefox users since way before Chrome was anywere nearly as good as Firefox, making it both a lie and - more importantly - a massive abuse of dominance in one market to gain monopoly in another just like Microsoft did with IE. Microsoft’s primary offense was illegally tying Internet Exp…

> Microsoft’s primary offense was illegally tying Internet Explorer and Windows. They refused to sell the two products separately, and instead required OEMs to buy the bundle. Nope. That's what some people complained about, but it wasn't their legal issue (which is why today every OS vendor still does it). The actual complaint, which is pasted below, shows it in much greater nuance, as it wasn't that they "required O…

> > Microsoft’s primary offense was illegally tying Internet Explorer and Windows. They refused to sell the two products separately, and instead required OEMs to buy the bundle.

> Nope.

Yes, it was.

> That's what some people complained about, but it wasn't their legal issue (which is why today every OS vendor still does it).

No, every OS vendor doesn't do illegal tying of a browser to the OS, which involves both the fact of a preexisting monopoly OS to which the tying occurs (that's essential to the illegality, since its an illegal method of leveraging one monopoly to another market), and the kind of business methods used to enforce the tying.

Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#313

Post by ahofmann »

FractalParadigm wrote: post #282
gibba999 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was having crazy issues in GDrive and GDocs where I could download nothing using FF - no PDFs, no .docx files, none of my other backed-up files, you'd click download and nothing would happen. Do the same in Chrome, Edge, Safari, Opera, even changing my user-agent to Chrome, and it works flawlessly. My solution to this problem was move everything off GDrive and into self-hosted options. If Google is going to intenti…

I experience the same. Can't really use YouTube, can't download files from gdrive. Google was the best thing that could happen to search engines. Chrome was a godsend. Now they are what Microsoft was two decades ago (Microsoft is still full of shit, but now they are not alone).

Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#314

Post by jjice »

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.

Huh, just an anecdote, but Meet runs perfectly fine on FF for me at work. Only issue is I can't blur my background unless I'm on Chrome.

Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#315

Post by prepend »

eli wrote: post #204
prepend wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used Firefox from launch until about two years ago. I stopped for reasons similar to what you listed. I’ve really enjoyed Brave as it is just a simple browser that works (and has lots of privacy features).

Firefox has its own funding issues but I don’t trust a browser that exists to support a cryptocurrency.

I trust it because it’s an open source project and I can see what goes in and comes out.

Of course, maybe it won’t work forever, but it works for now.

I’m not a crypto person and don’t use Brave’s crypto features, but I think it’s a more sustainable future than relying on Google’s largess.

Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#316

Post by chiefofgxbxl »

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've been a Firefox user for at least 15 years as well, and the recent UI updates in v89 is the first instance of me refusing to update Firefox.

I updated my user prefs file to permanently disable updates, so I'm remaining on pre-ProtonUI v88. Of course, I don't know how much longer I could sustain that because I'd also not receive security patches, but in the short term it's what I'm doing.

The new Firefox UI is incredibly frustrating, and feels like it walks back sensible UI principles. Removing icons in the main menu was celebrated as "de-cluttering" [0], when in reality icons improve ease of use. The "floating" tabs feel more distracting [1], when they claim the opposite. Heck, even user prompts no longer colorize the "primary action" button [2].

Also, what's with modern UIs becoming increasingly childish and watered down? The word I'd use to describe the new proton UI is "blurry".

[0] https://www.mozilla.org/media/img/firefox/releasenotes/note-... [1] https://www.mozilla.org/media/img/firefox/releasenotes/note-... [2] https://www.mozilla.org/media/img/firefox/releasenotes/note-...

Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#317

Post by aftergibson »

bsd44 wrote: post #300

I switched to Opera because Firefox forces invasive updates that require a forced restart. For someone who likes to keep a web browser running for a long time and put their laptop to sleep rather than shutdown, that is not acceptable. I use Linux so I could get around that by excluding the package from updates but I don't want to run an outdated web browser that might have security vulnerabilities. I raised this a fe…

Good old closed-source, Chinese-controlled, chromium-based Opera.

Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#318

Post by dathinab »

agumonkey wrote: post #248
gibba999 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Some of the problems come from codec licensing issues (which have a major competition hindering effect since over a decade? by now).

But things come also from Google (and Microsoft, they seem to use the same logic) implementing some logic but based on "how the web standard" works but by "how it happens to work on chrome", this leads to frequent issues with selected input devices and screen sharing.

And fixing it is easy, probably way less then 10h of work one single time. (As far as I know.)

Similar the codec issues only matter if certain slow devices are involved, e.g. non high end phones, high end phones in energy saving mode, old tablets. If no such device is involved it's not rare that the conference will anyway use different codecs. So they could support FF for many conference calls, but instead they decide to reflect to even try to work on FF (which is a web no-go btw.).

So there are "reasons", but it's clear that's they intend to not support FF at all.

Btw. Microsoft is the worst here as they reject to work with FF even for things which do not have any reason to have problems on FF.

Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#319

Post by codesections »

svl wrote: post #271

I'd say ~30M, rather than 50M. They explicitly call out the summer holidays effect above the first graph: "Generally, MAU fluctuates over the course of a year, dropping in the summer months and during holidays." So comparing the peak of Jan 2019 to the low of Jul 2021 isn't giving a good idea of the total loss. Jan 28 2019: 253.9M Jan 27 2020: 229.5M Feb 01 2021: 219.7M Jul 22 2019: 224.2M Jul 20 2020: 214.1M Jul 19…

> They explicitly call out the summer [and winter] holidays effect above the first graph

Given that this is a measure of "Desktop clients active in the past 28 days", that means that there are people tech-savy enough to be regular users of Firefox on a desktop – but who go an entire month without using Firefox because it's Christmas. And enough of those people to show up on this graph.

That blows my mind a bit. I don't doubt it, but wow.

Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#320

Post by zamadatix »

bsd44 wrote: post #300

I switched to Opera because Firefox forces invasive updates that require a forced restart. For someone who likes to keep a web browser running for a long time and put their laptop to sleep rather than shutdown, that is not acceptable. I use Linux so I could get around that by excluding the package from updates but I don't want to run an outdated web browser that might have security vulnerabilities. I raised this a fe…

Just use the official version instead of your distro's version if you don't want your distro to control the update timing - seems like a self created problem. Official Firefox has a setting for "Check for updates but let you choose to install them" which will alert you but let you choose when instead of forcing it.
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