this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
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Firefox

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Why is firefox losing market share? Why don't more people use Firefox? (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by Maddison@sh.itjust.works to c/firefox@lemmy.ml
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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

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[–] meullier@lemm.ee 1 points 9 months ago

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

[–] leanleft@lemmy.ml 1 points 5 months ago

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

[–] zerofk@lemm.ee 0 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Ever since the first release, I've tried Firefox a few times. Each time I was left with a feeling of needing dozens of extensions to get it up to par with the browser I was using at the time (mainly Opera and now Vivaldi). The extensions I found were never customisable enough, and would often break and/or be abandoned after a while.

Don't get me wrong: Chrome, IE, Edge, and Safari are worse - each time I used them I got the urge to throw my computer out the window after just a few minutes. But Firefox is just not customisable enough to my liking, and extension are IMO not the answer.

[–] Waryle@jlai.lu 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I'm curious, what is missing from Firefox compared to Vivaldi according to you?

[–] zerofk@lemm.ee 0 points 10 months ago

Note that since I don't use Firefox some of these may actually be available, but I don't know about them.

  • Mouse gestures.
  • A status bar that stays on screen.
  • The ability to select part of a link's text.
  • Tab stacking.
  • Tab tiling.
  • Opening a link in either a foreground or background tab. This is available as a toggle in the settings only.
  • Ad block.
  • Spatial navigation.
  • Customisable keyboard shortcuts for pretty much everything.

These are the ones that matter to me, there are more that I don't personally use.

[–] glad_cat@lemmy.sdf.org 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me 1 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] Engywuck@lemm.ee -1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Thank Mozilla for this. They're too busy with other shit and between feature removals and crappy UI changes, they've managed to loose a huge amount of users. I used to be one of them. Now I wouldn't touch FF with a 10 feet pole. I simply refuse to give Mozilla more visibility.

[–] Getallen@feddit.nl 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Well, what browser did you switch to?

[–] Engywuck@lemm.ee -1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

First Vivaldi, then Brave.

Now, let's the insults begin.

[–] Getallen@feddit.nl 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Brave is niet zo braaf als die kuthond die jij bent

[–] Engywuck@lemm.ee -1 points 10 months ago

Non ho capito una beata minchia. Scrivi in inglese.