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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

#51

Post by makeitdouble »

FinanceAnon wrote: post #5

After a year of using Firefox on Macbook, I've switched back to Chrome. The laptop was running really hot just from having a few tabs opened and Youtube playing in the background. It's been much better after I've made the switch to Chrome. For privacy reasons, I would rather stick to Firefox, but I feel like the performance is worse.

In general I think there is no way to heavily use Google properties (in particular drive, docs and meet) without Chrome.

I tried through the years, and always ended up with a main browser (Safari or now Firefox) and Chrome as a Google dedicated browser, because the experience would be miserable otherwise. At this point I stopped blaming the other browsers.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#52

Post by kiryin »

I use Firefox exclusively on all of my devices, but my opinions on both the browser and Mozilla are pretty grim. Apart from the advancements in first-party isolation and containerization I can name very few "features" intorduced in the past 5~ years that I view in a positive light. Firefox has become less configurable, in other words more hostile to the user, chasing after chrome with every new pants-on-head UI decision, while abandoning important technical research like Servo that could've brought them to the bleeding edge of browser development. I've come to terms with my position as being held hostage, simply because the only other option is Google and thus infinitely worse, but I am not happy. Change is needed.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#53

Post by corty »

laurent92 wrote: post #19

My Firefox has become adware. Adware for Mozilla, but still: Every new tab I open, there is a “WE CARE FOR YOUR PRIVACY” message awaiting for me. Every restart, “LOOK AT HOW WE HAVE FEWER ADS, MORE PRIVACY”. And from time to time, if I don’t open a tab by myself, it will install Pocket and/or open two tabs at startup, one for the release notes and one for browsing, but still with the little mention “Firefox has been…

Also, in my mind, exchanging Chrome's insistence on Google logins is just the same as Firefox's insistence on their proprietary sync and pocket. I'll say no to every one of those things, because I do value my privacy and none of them provide proper self-hosted options.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#55

Post by _fat_santa »

trm42 wrote: post #10

My personal pet peeve is that the Chrome's different User Profiles is so easy to use. I'm aware of the different plugins that can offer similar functionality but the setup Chrome is offering is so simple and intuitive that switching feels annoyingly too complicated. Otherwise I've been really surprised how much better Firefox has gotten in the last two years. Good to see old giant still alive.

Have you tried firefox containers? They basically do the same thing as chrome but you can run tabs from different contains right next to each other.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#56

Post by guerrilla »

greatgib wrote: post #38

Really great piece this article. Very good idea to have mapped the rants that have accumulated over time to the historical evolution of Firefox. It is often that you hear that a minority of complainers are just adverse to change and that the majority agree with the stupid changes. But, in fact, the majority of person will disagree in silence and just switch to alternative solutions without a vocal complaint. So, it i…

> But, in fact, the majority of person will disagree in silence and just switch to alternative solutions without a vocal complaint.

That's an interesting point. The #1 Linux distribution on distrowatch for the last 12 month is now MX Linux, a non-systemd distro. Of course, the next 15 distros use systemd, so maybe that says nothing after all.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#57

Post by 0xCMP »

Yoric wrote: post #31
lousken wrote: post #12

Idk about 12 years but I know about last two years - many companies and workers had to switch to WFH. So that means using some sort of chat&video&audio software/website. What did Firefox do to fix the compatibility e.g. with Teams? That should've been the highest priority. Instead, it took them years to get at least the GPOs right, autoupdate is the same story... so many things in corprote env were or still are PITA…

That's the vicious circle: 1. Google basically controls the web. 2. Whenever a new Web API shows up, browser vendors have to decide between implementing the standard and copying the bugs, exotic behaviors and extensions that are implemented in Chromium. 3. Websites are tested on Chromium, so they start to rely on Chromium's bugs, exotic behaviors and extensions. 4. When a website breaks in Firefox (or Safari), people…

On the other hand, how many of these browsers are actually building or inventing any of these new apis to support things like screensharing, video, audio, and etc so they're not hacks except for chrome?

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#58

Post by Xevi »

greypowerOz wrote: post #16
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 use ffox on android because (for some reason) it's the only one I'm aware of that has ublock origin addon...( happy to be proven wrong :) I also used to use reader mode once in a while...

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.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#59

Post by [deleted] »

dunefox wrote: post #9
knob wrote: post #3

One year ago they launched their new Android version, which is godawful. Just read the reviews on the android store. Why Firefox, why?!

> Just read the reviews on the android store. 4 1/2 stars with over 4 million reviews. I use it regularly and have no real problems with it.

[deleted]

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#60

Post by Yoric »

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 equivalent ad budget for promoting Chrome during year 1 was about 6x the entire budget of Mozilla for that period (writing "equivalent" because webside, Google is its own ad agency).

3. Mozilla is competing against Google. Google owns countless properties besides Chrome, from Google Docs to Google Translate to Android, and leverages all of these (great products) to lead users towards Chrome. Case in point: 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.

4. Mozilla is competing against Google. While Mozilla was front and center on many things open-source, relying on volunteers, Google employs countless (talented) Tech Evangelists and managed to attract considerable goodwill, much of it at the expense of the army of volunteers who used to help Mozilla.

5. Replace "Google" with "Apple" in the above points, adapt product names and repeat.

6. In 2011, predicting that the only way out of this was to outmaneuver Google and Apple on mobile devices/silos, Mozilla bet the farm on Firefox OS and lost. Mozilla never recovered.

7. During the Brendan Eichgate, Mozilla became a hapless victim of the US culture wars, mostly acccidentally. Mozilla never recovered.

Now, I'm not claiming that Mozilla never made any other mistake wrt technology or UX or PR. We've all seen a number of them. What I'm claiming is that these mistakes have next to no influence in comparison to the points above.

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