Why is firefox losing market share? Why don't more people use Firefox?

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?

  1. 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)
  2. It’s just not as fast as Chrome or Brave. I can’t deny this, but despite of this, I find it’s worthy.
  3. It’s not the default.
  4. Many features which are Google specific aren’t supported.
  5. 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

leanleft,
@leanleft@lemmy.ml avatar

UI is worse, performance is mostly a bit slower, the morals seem cloudy sometimes.
and… the biggest one: PEOPLE ARE APATHETIC

meullier,

For me it’s a silly issue, they don’t let me customize my homepage and let set extensions like tabliss on homepage on android such a basic feature yet not available also external download manager implementation on android is horrible

Kindness,

On losing market share.

I truly appreciate all of the efforts Mozilla has brought, but there are things I cannot tolerate, and @mindbleach is accurate and concise, which I’d like to expound upon.

[Mozilla] spent twenty years burning out every committed advocate with broken extensions, UI whack-a-mole, random half-baked corporate decisions, [before finally mimicking Chrome.]

Firefox’s user-base was mostly nerds, and nerds’ grass-roots referrals; well and truly, Firefox was a developers first browser. What happens when you have many enthusiastic nerds contributing to a project? Free-ish improvements. You still need someone to review pushes, correct merge conflicts, implement requests, prioritize feedback, and maintain the playground after all.

However, Mozilla made some questionable and unilateral decisions that alienated their user-base. For the sake of brevity, I’ll list some of the issues that caused me to switch to LibreWolf. Descending importance:

  • Deciding developers would no longer be the target audience. (History follows. 2020 a new CEO is appointed: Mitchell Baker. Mozilla announces funding cuts to various departments, such as MDN, developer tools, and security researchers. MDN slowly loses its status as the, 1, go-to web reference and, 2, place to find the latest advancements of the web. Dev tools in Chrome gain features FF can’t keep up with. Earlier in May, of this year, 2023: Mozilla begins new developer blogs in an effort to regain the gold mine they discarded, along with various other measures.)
  • Installing the Mr. Robot extension without warning, let alone consent. (This was 6 years ago. I should let it go.)
  • Whitelisting only 6 mobile add-ons. (Add-on manager now announced to be “(re-)opened” later this year.)
  • Making it very difficult to opt-out of said mobile add-on decision, and impossible without opting-in to telemetry.
  • about:config unavailability in mobile Firefox.
  • Massive issues in major versions, which should’ve been caught by beta testing if not alpha.

My biggest gripes boil down to throwing us away, and the decisions made in pursuing generic and more profitable consumers. Mostly in removing the freedom, tinkering ability, control, etc that Firefox previously provided.

Ultimately, they have contributed greatly. I don’t expect they quite understand how controlling and authoritarian decisions are driving away their hardest dying supporters, but I can hope they remember their roots. I hope they can learn and change. I’d like to get some faith back in the company I was such a large fan of. I wish them all the wisdom and success they can manage. If they go the way of Netscape, I hope some other idealist nerds pick up the torch.

I wish them well, but Firefox is no longer my browser.

Belazor,

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.

bitwolf,

I use Firefox, but it has been becoming a chore.

Specifically on Android, randomly it’ll just not load a page or change tabs. It’ll also randomly just lose the entire DOM and only render a black screen.

I still put up with it but I’m hoping they can focus on UX quirks a little more.

dangblingus,
  1. It’s actually faster than Chromium in recent build benchmarks. Firefox runs JS faster.
Newchair,

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

barrett9h,

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.

rar,

Bingo. We live in the smartphone era where the average user cannot differentiate between facebook (the app) and internet (the web).

N00b22,

Because I think people are used to Chrome.

That being said, I used Edge till November 2022, before the Manifest V3 change.

ineedaunion,

Corporations hate freedom. Imagine that.

Echo71Niner,

Shockingly, a lot of people have no clue how extension works, but Firefox will eventually sell out, they all do.

ineedaunion,

Shockingly. Most of humanity are stupid, media consuming dumbasses.

WhyIDie,

and when they do, another will step up to take its place. such is the cycle of enshittification

quackers,

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

ZMonster,
@ZMonster@lemmy.world avatar

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.

mirror_slap,

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.

ineedaunion,

Corporations hate freedom. Imagine that.

dot20,

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.

SrslyCris,

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.

UncleGrandPa,

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…

NGC2346,

Because Librewolf is better

WhyJiffie,

It’s not like as if firefox would lose significant market share to librewolf

9up999,

Firefox lost it’s shares to normies because it was bad. Then it lost shares of tinkers because it moved extension, user agent and so on to chromium. Small market shares means developers don’t give a damn about testing on firefox. Firefox doesn’t show correctly pages and has no good support for pwa, microsoft teams etc. Chromium invents new things wich only edge and chrome have/support. Normies use browser wich just work out of the box for work and pleasure. It’s a circle. You can tinker with your niche browser but massed decides what is what. Chrome/Edge are just better for every day use. Simple as that.*

SnowdenHeroOfOurTime,

God, all of this is just incorrect.

9up999,

You just live in your fantasy world. Go outside sometimes and see what people really use. They don’t use firefox for a reason.

SnowdenHeroOfOurTime,

No, I live in a fantasy world because I use a far superior browser that also doesn’t track me.

And so can everyone. Nothing to be mad or weird about.

9up999,

Yeah yeah. Mr robot experiment, broken extensions, pocket, telemetry build in but not opt in, user data collecting. I don’t even talk about pushing shitty propaganda on their browser and blog to lock internet freedom. Also incompetence of mozilla as organization. Big pay of to director then browser is in shittiest position ever. Mozilla director photo on instagram with middle finger up gor users who don’t like her. Even more things just google them yourself. You just don’t want to see them. You must be crazy standing for them for free. Maybe you’re one of them. At least here you can’t ban comment you don’t like… kinda yet. Because reddit subreddit does that because they don’t like truth.

SnowdenHeroOfOurTime,

Ok you’re a wack job, makes sense now.

To say you’re gargling the Google boot is an understatement

9up999,

So no arguments? I don’t even use chrome or edge…

SnowdenHeroOfOurTime,

And yet you still choke on the boot. No I don’t have reason to argue with a conspiracy weirdo

9up999,

Because you don’t have arguments. Where do you see conspiracy? It’s known facts on the internet found by others.

SnowdenHeroOfOurTime,

Can’t hear you over the choking sounds

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