edited the heading of the question. I think most of us here are reasoning why more people are not using firefox (because it was the initial question), but none of that explains why it’s actively losing marketshare.
I don’t agree ideologically with Firefox management and am somewhat of a semi-conservative (and my previous posts might testify to that), I think Firefox browser is absolutely amazing! It’s beautiful and it just feels good. It has awesome features like containers. It’s better for privacy than any mainstream browser out there (even counting Brave here) and it has great integration between PC and Phone. It’s open-source (unlike Chrome) and it supports a good chunk of extensions you would need.
This was about PC, but I believe even for Mobiles it looks great and it allows features like extensions (and I hear desktop extensions are coming to firefox android?), it’s just a great ecosystem and it’s available everywhere unlike most FOSS softwares.
So why is Firefox’s market share dying?
I mean, I have a few ideas why it might be, maybe correct me I guess?
- Most people don’t know how to use extensions well and how to use Firefox well. (Most of my friends in their 30’s still live without ad blockers, so I don’t think many are educated here)
- It’s just not as fast as Chrome or Brave. I can’t deny this, but despite of this, I find it’s worthy.
- It’s not the default.
- Many features which are Google specific aren’t supported.
- Many websites are just not supporting firefox anymore (looking at you snapchat), but you would be right in saying this is the effect of Firefox losing it’s market share not the cause (at least for now) and you would be right.
But what else?
I might take time (a lot of it) to get back at you, thanks for understanding.
occasionally I’ll find websites that don’t work 100% because they were coded primarily for chromium based browsers. FU Google
I work in IT and had to abandon Firefox because of compatibility issues that came up on a regular basis. it appears companies are simply not using it as part of their QA anymore. Also, in general the GUI theming has issues for me with the font and distinguishing highlights with my crappy vision. I tried every theme out there and for some reason apparently people writing themes just don’t care to make it so you can see what is highlighted and what is not. Even The default theme sucks in my opinion. There were a number of other nits that I just kept having issues with - getting prompted on eBay to verify my identity for no reason, repeatedly, which doesn’t happen on chromium and stuff like that.
I wish Apple would adopt the Firefox rendering engine and take Safari cross platform. It would give Firefox a fighting chance at the overall market.
Corporations hate freedom. Imagine that.
Or they just expend their effort on the browsers that 96% of people use and not the one that 4% use. I love Firefox, but I don’t think this is the conspiracy you’re claiming it is.
Yep. I try to use Firefox and Safari as much as possible to get away from Chrome, but they just aren’t as good. They’re slow and clunky and don’t get me the information I need. I really wish Apple would do something about Safari. They’re the only ones with other ways to make money than our information.
I have been using FF for at least 10 years. Tried many of the others. Always come back.
I have told others about it but people rarely make the change even if they see it is better…
I’ve never experienced any slowness with Firefox, so I don’t know what people are talking about. But Chrome is still the default browser on Android and I guess it’s the major reason why people are installing Chrome on their computer.
It’s improved a lot recently and even surpasses Chrome in some benchmarks, but it took them a really really long time to catch up with Chrome’s speed.
Chrome split up web pages into their own processes very early on, while Firefox still had to mostly run things single threaded. That made a huge difference especially on laptops with 4-8 slow threads.
Chrome also turned to the GPU for acceleration really early on too. That’s also something Firefox took a really long time to catch up with.
Like many, I’ve been on Chromium since the single digit days, and only switched back to Firefox in anticipation of the manifest v3 fiasco.
Chrome was just way too good to not use it. Chrome beat the shit out of Firefox the way Firefox beat the shit out of IE6 back then. It was so good I sucked up the lack of extensions or Flash Player support. It was faster to load ads than use Firefox to block them.
You’ve hit the major notes that made the biggest difference to switching in the early days. Worth mentioning too that in order to sow that field, chromium, then billed as an open source project, lifted much of those never IE power users out of Firefox specifically as well.
Similarly, if you want patrons to tell others what’s great about your new restaurant, give them at least three good things to evangelize for you.
Fast. Freebies. Friendly.
Back then, Chrome crushed it. Today, it’s equivalent to a joint being oversaturated with lazy managers taking advantage of gullible, unskilled teenagers and wondering why the whole place’s gone to shit.
Firefox outperforms in all the key areas IMO. It’s honestly a pretty cool space.
can anything be done legally about Chrome being the default browser on most android phones? I mean, there has to be some default browser but maybe Android manufacturers should be forced to pre-install a FOSS browser instead of chrome ig, idk (or maybe the user can be asked to install it when they are logging into their phones for the first time, this sounds better)
Iirc the some people in the EU wanted to take a look at googles almost-monopoly on the android market but I don’t think anything came out of it. It’s virtually no different from MS using Edge as default browser on Windows; as long as you can get an alternative, there isn’t anything wrong with it legally.
Why make the effort to switch to Firefox, if the browser that came installed with your device works?
Or, more realistically, people don’t even grok the concept of a web browser.
Bingo. We live in the smartphone era where the average user cannot differentiate between facebook (the app) and internet (the web).
Because not only do you (the end user) have to go out of your way to get it, but you get spammed by Microsoft/Edge and Google/Chrome to install a “faster” and “more secure” browser. Additionally, on the mobile side, Apple is preventing all iPhone/iPad users from picking a real alternative browser that isn’t just webkit re-skinned, putting half the population at a disadvantage and to their own corporate interests.
What do you mean about the apple part? I use FF on my iPhone.
All browsers on iOS are just reskinned Safari, because that’s the only thing iOS allows you to install.
This is a really great reason not to use iOS.
It’s uses safari’s engine, which is the only one allowed by Apple. Doesn’t matter what browser you download from the store.
Spent twenty years burning out every committed advocate with broken extensions, UI whack-a-mole, random half-baked corporate decisions, and finally just giving up and being “like Chrome but.”
Meanwhile Google engages in blatant anti-competitive behavior to claw ever more market-share away from everything and everyone, and American politics are too much of a dumpster fire to stop them.
Literally the only other browsers that are other browsers are Firefox and Safari, and people only use Safari because iOS is a prison. iPhone users will insist their reskinned Safari webview is-too Firefox or Chrome or whatever, and then wonder why anyone makes a big deal about browsers when everything they’ve tried works exactly the same.
Yup. If I used iOS, I’d probably use Brave because it seems to be the only one with an ad blocker.
But I don’t use iOS, so I use Firefox with an ad blocker installed, and I think it’s great. But I can’t really recommend mobile Firefox because many of my coworkers use iOS and that recommendation won’t work for them.
So if someone asks what to use, I need to ask what platform they’re on. And that sucks.
Safari on iOS supports extensions as of the last couple years, and AdGuard is available for it. Works great!
Good to hear!
I just wish they would allow other browser engines on iOS.
Yeah, that’d definitely be another big improvement. At least Safari doesn’t add to Chrome’s marketshare though
Shockingly, a lot of people have no clue how extension works, but Firefox will eventually sell out, they all do.
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Shockingly. Most of humanity are stupid, media consuming dumbasses.
Firefox is ancient and used to be a major browser before chrome. They had plenty of opportunity to sell out and didnt. That said, firefox is shittier to use
Firefox does not have a way to force them into it.
- ChromeOS - Chrome only. Default. Google.com beggs you to get an account and try Chrome. Android, comes with Android preinstalled.
- Windows - Annoying Try Edge popup force them during boot. Bing Chat is Edge Only.
Many Linux distributions include Firefox as a default browser, but GNU/Linux is not very popular on desktop either…
- It’s actually faster than Chromium in recent build benchmarks. Firefox runs JS faster.
I ran the speedometer 2.0 benchmark on firefox and cromite (fork of bromite), and Firefox beat chrome by like 20 points which surprised me because chrome still feels a bit faster. Maybe this is why
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I have never understand exactly what it is that people need/desire/require out of Firefox that they find missing but which a Chrome based browser is providing them.
The ability to log into any computer on chrome and load my profile, which gives access to my bookmarks and passwords.
As someone who has 4 chrome profiles due to work remote managing 3 of them that I use daily, Firefox will never be able to handle that.
if Firefox had some sort of cloud sync that wasn’t oh hey you need to have multiple devices to make it work and just gave you a way to do it through the browser properly with even a paid option that would help.
Firefox is not a worse browser, it’s just the lack of visibility. You have to want to install Firefox to try it, the only exception I know it’s in Linux where most of the time it’s the default browser. Google Chrome, on the other hand, is promoted each time you search anything in Google without Google Chrome.
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what do you mean you’re conservative?
He means “waah waah! They’re oppressing me by not agreeing with me!!!” Conservatives hate the consequences of their actions.
Hey there now. BoTh SiDeS tHo /s
Eh, even as someone who on a global political scale is left leaning, I’ve been hesitant to donate to Mozilla. I’d love to support the browser development, but the fact that they siphon off money from that to support political activities and organizations (especially when some of them are downright corrupt, like BLM) turns me off from that.
When I want to donate to a political organization, I’ll do that directly. What I want Mozilla to do, most of all, is keep firefox (and by extension gecko) alive, and thereby maintain internet freedom.
Maintaining a browser for the modern web is a massive undertaking that needs funding.
I have no doubt that the second that FF gains a sizeable market share they will just turn in to literally every other corporation that has ever existed. They’re not special, they’re not your friend. They are selling a product to make money. And while they’re struggling, they are working their asses off to make a good product that beats the alternatives.
So until FF announced their intention to DC, I’m not telling a fucking soul.
Hashtag late but Firefox’s main downsides is that it’s tab flushing sucks compared to Edge, and there’s no native vertical tabs.
In Edge, if a tab is put to sleep, clicking it again does not require a full refresh. Why does it need to completely reload in Firefox?
I’m aware there’s extensions for tab groups and vertical tabs (I’m using Simple Tab Groups), but it should be a natively supported feature.
Add that to the fact that Firefox is now the web developer equivalent of IE6 circa 2010 - minuscule user base and requires weird hacks to get websites to look good on it - and you got a recipe for people not wanting to use it.
Also lying about being the privacy focused browser when it has a bunch of telemetry and a bundled sponsored extension I had to look up how to get rid of, that part sucks too.
I used to use Firefox before Chrome came out, because it was better than IE. When Chrome came out it was a breath of fresh air. A real third option! (konqueror didn’t really count). And it was faster, cleaner, lighter than Firefox. Just better at everything. So I installed it on all of my family’s computers, which they allowed me to do because IE by then was so bad it was an obvious improvement even for the layman.
Then in the intervening years Firefox dwindled to basically no market share and IE died, so now Chrome isn’t a third option, it’s the only option. And so I switched back to Firefox basically as a political sacrifice, but there’s no way I’m going to be able to convince any of my family to switch because Firefox isn’t better for them in any perceivable way. It’s just different and they don’t care. If Firefox had 30% market share I’d almost definitely be using Chromium still myself.
So probably that, but a million times. There was a period where every nerd moved all their associated people to Chrome because it was new, great, and non-dominant. It was hip and indie. And now they’re still there and there’s no reason for them to move that they care about.
I’ve basically made my parents use firefox for 15 years now. With adblocking and cookie warning disabled and stuff like that. Since a few years they’re more and more on the iPhone, not on laptop with firefox… “why are there so many advertisements on the phone? Can’t you fix it like on the laptop?” Nope. I can’t, you chose iPhone. Had no idea all these years how much they were shielded from bs by firefox. For an average user it just boils down to ‘it’s too complicated’, use whatever shit software they force on them and don’t ask fundamental questions… Firefox became the browser for privacy nerds, lost its mainstream appeal in the period that chrome definitely was a lot faster and smoother and was still a bit less evil corp about addons
konqueror didn’t really count
But Konqueror is where we got Webkit from!
Opera was also an option… I used Opera from ~2003 until when they switched to Chrome’s engine (2012 I think?)
I’ll admit I used to use Konqueror for a while. Plus I much preferred it as a file browser to Dolphin (even now I begrudgingly accept Dolphin). Problem for me was always plugins. I’ve used most browsers under the sun, but I can’t ethically support Chrome or Edge. I remember early versions of NS and AMosaic, Phoenix, Firebird (the latter two were what Firefox used to be called).
I will openly admit Mozilla has made some huge “WTF?” calls though. They alienated a lot of people with some of their design/technical decisions that I think fucked them more than they realised.
Netscape had the best gif-icon though, that star fall was gorgeous
Netscape 🛞 Navigator
Yes, I do have a soft spot for Netscape Navigator. It will always be my first…
