Firefox marketshare revisited

I'm actually kinda glad that Windows 10 forces the user to be very explicit when changing the default browser. Yeah, they use it to push Edge, of course. Better than programs changing it without the user knowing.

As scummy as those installs are, it highlights Google's killer advantage: money. It generates so much cash from advertising that it can pay any company for more distribution (even Firefox!), which in turn generates more cash... Unstoppable until anti-trust kicks in.

In addition to Chrome's bundling deals which override your default browser settings, major Windows updates now appear to reset your default browser to Edge every time.

If I remember, wasn't the version installed by Avast a custom chromium fork until relatively recently? Then there was some security issue, and google basically stop the AV's to knock it off? I think Comodo also did something like this too, though theirs was more of a mess, because Comodo.

EDIT: Found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11057532

I recall even the standalone flash installer coming with Chrome bundled (or at least pushing for it) at one point.

AVG also started doing this recently. I get a lot calls from family members and friends who aren't tech-savvy and can't differentiate between browsers. They think their "bookmarks" disappeared but the true reason is Chrome was bundled with something (e.g. AVG) and replaced Firefox as default browser. I called AVG on twitter but their answer was just typical PR BS: "We're sorry for your inconvenience. Please remember that you can opt-out from this". Yeah, they have clean hands because they put very small checkbox in very small font in installer.

While I don't agree with the technique, I would certainly not call it "tricking". Especially in your example, where it very clearly (more than most) describes what will happen if the boxes remain checked. People who blindly click "next", "ok", or "continue" buttons are tricking themselves, not being tricked. Especially when dealing with "free" software.

Does anyone know why they do this? Do they earn some extra money per each Chrome install or something like that?

As a web developer, I'm actually quite fine with this. Considering your family members probably fall under the "potential IE users" category.

From my experience, the reasons why people switched to Chrome have been because it renders pages much smoother and everything generally looks better. These were the original reasons that they moved over to Firefox from IE as well. I personally helped a number of relatives and friends make these switches.

Late last year, after many years on Chrome, I gave Firefox another serious look and I have switched back. Firefox has improved tremendously and I would prefer to give my support to Mozilla from a philosophical standpoint (the Chrome team does a lot of good work with regards to pushing forward the features of the web and its security but at the end of the day, Chrome is still a strategic piece of Google's business machine and not a philanthropic effort)

While I have my reasons for using Firefox, I don't see a compelling reason for most users already happy with Chrome to switch back. The average web user that I know doesn't really understand where web browsers come from and isn't very interested in learning about it. They just care whether the browser runs better or worse for the tasks that they do. (Except many still hate IE and will not even try Edge because the logo looks similar enough - that's a branding issue that Microsoft has)

What irritates me now are more and more sites that only work with Chrome (where they literally throw up a page that blocks access and says go download Chrome). These are sites that are not Google properties so I'm not blaming Google for this bad behavior, but again, I would like to support the diverse browser landscape that has existed to this point. I guess my main complaint to Google is to please stop popping up dialogs about Chrome across all of your properties. The browser I'm using works perfectly fine thank you, and you should be supporting the open web with your products anyway.

I'd be surprised if any of those, up to the last three, was a big deal for more than 1% or so of users. And I am inclined to think the original article probably has it right about simple saturation marketing as the cause of most user switching.

But performance. Firefox very often outperforms Chrome in microbenchmarks and computationally-intensive code in my tests, but in the real world an awful lot of sites really are much more responsive in Chrome.

For me as a user, most recently an update to the FastMail web UI a couple of weeks ago made it lamentably slow in Firefox -- just mousing over the folder tree caused CPU spikes and lag in updating -- and in the end I switched to opening FastMail in a separate Chrome instance while continuing to use Firefox for everything else. I've just switched it back to Firefox as I type this, to see whether anything has improved.

The web app I'm working on as a developer just now also has problems updating as smoothly in Firefox as in Chrome, and I'm not at all sure whether we'll be able to do anything about it.

I can't think of an example at the moment of a site that feels faster in Firefox.

I believe I have come to think of Firefox as a web browser, and Chrome as a platform for web apps. Things written to be web apps are almost always more responsive in Chrome, even though many of their components (number-crunching work) really do run measurably quicker in Firefox.

I switched to Chrome in ~2011 or 2012 after being a Firefox user and evangelist since... was the first one Phoenix or Firebird? Anyway, that one.

Reasons:

- Firefox got bogged down with just a few tabs open, and caused beachballs (OSX/macOS) systemwide. Chrome was snappier and didn't harm my system's overall responsiveness with several times as many tabs open. This was the main reason.

- Dev tools. Liked Chrome's better.

- Profile handling was, at the time anyway, better.

- IIRC Firefox didn't do per-tab crashing at the time, while Chrome did, which aided overall stability.

Advertising had nothing to do with it. Chrome was just way, way better, especially its (apparent, which is mostly what matters) resource footprint.

Now I'm mostly on Safari, even though it's the worst mainstream browser, just because I gain 1-2hrs of battery life using it over Chrome or Firefox.

Yahoo as the default search engine didn't help, either.

Firefox is about to shoot itself in the foot again. Soon, all old add-ons will stop working, as Firefox tries to get add-on developers to change to their new WebExtensions API. (Which is almost, but not quite, compatible with Google's add-on format.) Many developers are not bothering, and will drop Firefox.

Honestly, as a firefox die-hard who finally gave up, all of those issues were dwarfed by the performance one. The only one I even bothered to config away was the search-engine change.

I stopped using firefox because of performance. Nothing more, nothing less.

You have forgotten a few, such as dropping alsa and making pulseaudio a hard dependency blaming alsa when actually it was their own implementation that was falling behind and they did not want to fix it.

But the issue here is that mozilla do not listen to user feedback and just push whatever they feel like pushing with an attitude and some hostility towards unhappy users. or as pointed out in the mozillazine forums: they're " making far-reaching and very short-sighted decisions in a vacuum. "

It seems inside mozilla they're convinced that firefox is great and answers users' needs, while users feels that firefox is not that good and getting worse. There's quite a gap between mozilla marketing and the reality, which shows that firefox fails to deliver on its promises.

I'm a Firefox user and quit Chrome for the same reason I stopped using Windows after Windows 7: to keep a bare minimum of privacy when using the internet. Here are a few additions to that list: * Firefox Extensions now must be signed, and there is no workaround, not even one for users willing to delve deeply into settings x,y,z. The rationale for making it difficult to add unsigned extensions is sound, but there is none for making it impossible. * Firefox claims to be privacy-friendly, but they use an identifier when calling home that, along with other data, uniquely identifies the user. Firefox claims that this communication is encrypted, but this is not enough for state actors, and likely not for others. * There are about 20 default settings in Firefox that call home to Google behind the scenes. * All of these settings are incredibly confusing and there is no standard documentation on how any of it works, so even for a technically inclined person it is near-impossible to simply use the browser without spewing your data all over the place- and that's _before_ actually calling up e.g. the NY Times and its 50 trackers, data-miners, beacons, ad networks, social networks, etc. * The shameful treatment of Brendan Eich (creator of JavaScript and co-founder(!)) still rankles.

All that said, it's the least-worst in the browser world, for now. It seems pretty clear that they have some technically brilliant people as well.

Edit: seems that I need to learn how to write lists...

Yup, FF has just missed the mark on so many points that Chrome just blows past them. Any JS-heavy web applications (YouTube, HBO Go, Netflix) run like garbage in FF. Switch over to Chrome and they are buttery-smooth. Sucks to say this too as someone who's used FF since its beta.

Performance is a big one for me. The Firefox UI feels slower, and every so often it hangs, which is frustrating to no end. When I used Chrome I took speed for granted - something I no longer can with Firefox.

Thank you! As soon as Pocket was "included" and the response to everyone complaining was a politely worded "fuck you" then I removed FF and haven't looked back.

It's understandable they have to find ways to make money, but those experiments alienated users. Once you've started down that path, there's no returning in a lot of users eyes, mine included.

So true. The Mozilla corp lost touch with their users. All early Netscape employees left, now it's official a non-profit but acts like big corp.

Firefox become unusable - shut down Firebug replaced by half-assed new DevTools, removed XUL based API, multi-process support that's still not working like Chrome1+/IE8+, still dog slow, can't handle more than a few tabs, Addons-website got useless as most addons aren't working anymore.

Sad, but Chrome is so much better, and Firefox is digging in a bigger rabbit hole with every new release. Would be great if we keep another open source competing browser around. Servo based browser could be a fresh start, but they need to focus now, in a year it can be too late.

People switch because Chrome is a superior product, just like Internet Explorer was a superior product to Netscape at one time. That's not a concern. The concern is using market position to engage in anti-competitive behavior, like bundling.

Those are tech-y reasons that might have repelled tech-y users like us on Hacker News, but the bulk of the market are laymen who don't know the difference between a browser and a search engine on whom marketing is very efficient.

Yea, I've always been a huge fan of (and donor to) Mozilla, but in the last few years, I've been losing some respect for them. Getting embroiled in absurd political snafus, head-in-the-sand analysis of their situation which ignores product quality, etc.

I switched to Chrome a lot later than most of my friends, and actively try to switch to Firefox every once in a while, for literally the last 7 or 8 years. There has yet to be a single time where a couple days of usage didn't reveal the browser as far inferior, in ways that affect my day-to-day life materailly (multiprocess support being the biggest, most basic issue for a long time). I spend a LOT of my time in the browser, and I'm a very heavy user (usually about 100 Chrome tabs open total at any given time, with fairly high turnover). The performance and quality penalty I pay when using Firefox just isn't worth it.

I don't disagree with the article's claim that Google's advertising is having a big effect on a drop in FF usage; it's just bizarre for them to act like this is the only possible reason why people are switching.

> * Frequent breakage of extensions when first switching to the more rapid release schedule.

That's why I switched. It broke most of my extensions every time it upgraded. After the 3rd or 4th time it wasn't worth dealing with anymore. I switched to Chromium and I don't remember it breaking an extension.

This is my list, all of which Chrome does better than Firefox (roughly related bug reports included):

* Restore the old settings. They copied Chrome's settings-as-a-tab with the UI just being HTML. But in Chrome I can at least search the settings. Why did Mozilla waste their time on copying the HTML-settings without also implemented the most useful feature? It was just a huge regression, because the UI is now non-native, many things aren't resizeable anymore and some other minor bugs where introduced, without any apparent benefit. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1325286

* When you start Firefox two times in a row, the dialog "Firefox is already running, please close the running instance" or something like this pops up. Chrome doesn't have this problem, maybe just because its startup time is SO much better. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=489981

* On Linux: Integrate the tabs into the titlebar like Chrome does. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=513159

* Way too easy to quit the whole browser with Ctrl+Q (Chrome uses Ctrl+Shift+Q) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52821

* Encrypt passwords with the keyring (like Chrome does) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=309807 (btw: that's the second most voted bug of the "Toolkit" product according to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=productdashboard.ht... )

* No hardware acceleration on Linux (playing HD YouTube videos lags for me in Firefox out-of-the-box, perfectly fine in Chrome) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1280523

* Speed and responsiveness of the UI in general are much better in Chrome. (no bug report link, sorry)

Notice how that there's no complain about the look of the main UI, still Mozilla decides to redo it yet again with project Photon ... Did I miss the bug report with lots of votes for that?

And regarding the bug reports (most of them reported years ago): There was a comment on Reddit a while ago where a GNOME (!) developer said something along the lines "We're not Mozilla, we're actually reading and answering our bug reports". That says something.

You seriously think that removing the ability to disable javascript (well, not really, you still can - just not as easily) is in any way a factor? Which other browser makes this easier?

Pocket? Hello? Really?

Firefox memory usage has for years used less memory; basically since its inception. Apparently it's no different now: https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/03/whos-winning-the-browser-...

e10s? Come on, give me a break. I bet the vast majority of users have never heard of it, and of the others, most don't know what it's about to any useful degree, and of those that understand this feature, most probably wouldn't know the details of how the various multiprocess implementations actually compare. A vanishingly small proportion of the user base know of this feature, understand it enough, can compare this to other browsers, and then have a strong enough opinion to affect browser choice (and frankly, it's not obvious multiprocess is actually that great of an idea in the first place if you really do know what you're talking about - not one of the browsers actually separates every tab into a separate browser - for a reason!)

As to OS support - firefox still is the last browser to support XP, so I'm not sure what you're referring to. Version 52 was the last one; but that's on an extended support cycle until june 2018, which AFAICT is more than two years later than chrome's last v50. Microsoft hasn't "supported" XP with any reasonable browser... well, not ever (the highest IE version was 9!), and it hasn't supported the OS at all even with security patches for years (with certain notable exceptions).

As to disruptions caused by signed extensions - so that's why the appstore has failed and nobody is using windows anymore? I get it's annoying, but this is a pattern that's recurring all over the industry, and has for many years before FF made this step. If anything, I think it's more plausible FF is being punished because it was too slow to ban unsigned extensions! Because poor experiences based on bad or even malicious extensions do reflect on FF. And for that matter, signing isn't the real issue, it's add-on sandboxing/threading. Chrome got this "more" right, in that it's less likely for an novice extension author to accidentally bring chrome to a grinding halt. But precisely this feature is still causing lots of addon breakage because FF has not yet completely dumped the old, problematic add-on API, presumably because users really hate losing their cherished extensions (and for a reason). I've witnessed several addons that have chrome+FF equivalents where perf issues occured only in FF - which may have been the addon author's "fault" - but that's a really poor excuse.

Poor perf, and the expectation of poor perf sound like more reasonable guesses, but even there I'm not convinced this actually matters as much as you'd hope. Still, that's at least something. But then, the number of people you see working with unworkably slow setups for all kinds of reasons that apparently don't care enough to switch products suggests that even abominable perf isn't necessarily very impactful. Maybe this matters indirectly; in that power users that care influence others in their choices.

The visual drops in data shows only one of the things you mentioned had a sizeable impact, and that was discussed in the article.

Almost everything you list are things that happen around a certain time and we don't see those events manifest in the graph.

The reason of course being that the vast majority of Firefox users are not expert and don't care or know about those advance features.

Maybe if you can link to a user satisfaction report...

I try firefox usually once a year to find out nothing changed about freezing, crashing, slow reactions and bad rendering on machine with 2GB RAM.

Meanwhile Chrome just works. It's even worse on Android, they don't have in FF even pull down to refresh and it's the slowest browser I tried.

Pretty much this drives my Firefox usage... I use it on mobile because I can still use various adblock/privacy extensions without trouble. Use it on the desktop, too, because Google being deeply linked into my browser creeps me out.

Excellent point about privacy. This is why Firefox is (still?) the top browser in Germany (think history, GDR and before). There is actually a huge majority of people who want to have control over their own data. Firefox should make this a real priority, in actions, not just in words. This really matters, especially to a lot of tech people who understand the issues, and who will translate this to regular users if Firefox makes a real effort (which they have not done to date).

Note that Mozilla is working more closely with the Tor project with an eye towards making it easier for more people to get the privacy enhancing benefits of browsing over the Tor network.

> Privacy is the one problem that Mozilla/Firefox can address

could address, unfortunately Firefox default settings are no better than Chrome nowadays - what a shame. Every time the Firefox settings dialog gets changed, privacy related settings get less, and default options changed for the worse. One has to dig through the about:config mess, and even there the settings get renamed. It feels like their new devs learned their work at Microsoft, with Win10 as shameful disrespectful highlight of user hostile behavior.

Mozilla have recently released Firefox Focus, which is a stripped down, privacy enhanced version of the browser. So it seems they are somewhat aware that they need to be targeting privacy conscious users.

No reason to do so when world clearly shows all one need to do is to stick "private", "secure", "end-to-end encrypted", "anonymous" etc labels (and keep buzzwords up-to-date with current year's trends) and just don't do something too obviously contradicting that.

That's really sad but seem to be true. Too many examples out there.

I have heard designer friends say that Firefox is the new IE for them: so many rendering problems that they always need to do special Firefox-specific workarounds.

Now the next remark tends to be that Chrome is pretty awful as well with very weird rendering errors happening all too often - for example HTML comments can shift paragraphs up or down (lots of fun with React inserting those everywhere), or toggling a class from JS making things disappear completely.

Safari seems to be a designer-favourite with a very strong focus on things designers need. I don't think I've heard any complaints about Edge either.

But you seem to point, that it already is an IE-like situation.

Google Inbox initially did not support Firefox because "Firefox was too slow" [1]. Inbox hit a performance problem with Firefox's Array slice() implementation, but Google didn't report the problem to Mozilla. Chrome's slice() was fast, in part because it was not handling some corner cases correctly. Once Mozilla engineers were made aware of the performance problem, they fixed it in one day [2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8495498

[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1087963

Yes, cross-browser support seems to be a low prio for Google nowadays. And the bad thing is that it does not hurt them but helps them to succeed.

I wished that instead of switching to Chrome, people would instead move away from Google Services like Hangout (Skype, WhatsApp, https://meet.jit.si/) or Gmail (posteo, mailbox.org) whenever they see a "This works even better in Chrome" notice…

Yes! It's really frustrating that Hangout / Meet don't work on Firefox. This isn't just Google's fault I think. Firefox changed how plugins work and I think that broke Google's Hangout implementation.

Also I can only use my U2F security key for Google when on Chrome. Firefox doesn't support it.

I don't know anyone who use Hangout anymore so that doesn't bother me. Basic gMail, Docs, Sheets work pretty well in Firefox. They feel faster in Chrome (actually I use Chromium) but are not perfect. Right now I'm having a problem where deleting a document in Drive causes an "Aww, Snap" crash.

Overall I think it's a tossup. Google makes sure their stuff works decently in Chrome, Edge, Safari, and Firefox (probably in that order).

> For example, Hangout. I can no longer use Hangout using Firefox.

Is that different from Hangouts[0]? That's worked and continues to work in Firefox AFAICT.

[0] https://hangouts.google.com/

There was a time when web developers went to great length to make their site compatible with every browser. Now they just make it work on Chrome.

YouTube's new preview on thumbnail hover doesn't work on Firefox as well.

Interestingly there is a pretty salty comment bellow his post addressing this and complaining that he is publishing/commenting publicly available data. The "how dare you publish facts! The Mozilla Politburo does not approve of this!" tone is so stereotypical of zealots I initially thought it was a sarcastic comment.

https://www.arewestableyet.com/ is for internal tracking and rather hard to make sense of externally. It's cluttered with jargon and abbreviations and raw numbers. (I can tell because I just logged in. I work for Mozilla.) For example, this is how the rows are labeled in one table: usage_khours, Main (M), M + Content (M+C), C - Content Shutdown (C-S), M + C - S, NPAPI + GMP Plugin Crashes (P), GPU.

It's easy to see how exposing this site to the world might not be a good idea, especially when it's referenced from a blog post appearing on the hacker news front page and people start drawing all kinds of uninformed conclusions.

GitHub isn't social media, dude.

The change over to yahoo as the default search, as well as the ui changes a few years ago which made it a hassle to change search engines has, I would wager, done more harm to mozilla than whatever monetary benefit they gained from the switch. The fact that they made it difficult to change search engines is probably the worse offense. It's just blatantly anti user. i like firefox, but they needlessly erode people's goodwill toward them.

What has been going on with Mozilla as of late, as well as Gnome and various other FOSS projects, is a overton distraction on "social". This in the form of "helping" the third world etc. Mostly all this ends up doing is adding to some execs ladder climbing scorecard, and draining the project of focus and manhours.

> They eventually fixed it

And then broke it down, step by step. It used to be perfect but over the years gradually got changed/removed features that I loved, with no about:config option to get them back. Things like no menu button[1] (my device has a physical menu button), text reflow when zooming was removed, double tap to zoom to a paragraph now (sometimes?!) selects text instead of zooming, the tab you have open is no longer on the bottom side of the tab menu (it would slide open fast, as soon as your finger touched it and would feel super snappy; now there's some fancy animation)... etc.

It got to the point where I started looking for other browsers, but there just are no good options. Chromium sometimes bugs and uses 100% CPU for hours until I notice, and most other things are closed source. So I'm stuck with a mix of Firefox and Habit browser.

Habit seems to be what Firefox used to be: configure it any way you like (and it does a fantastic job at that). The trouble is that it's closed source and it has an inferior rendering engine, so I don't dare using it for things with a login that are valuable and it doesn't work for some websites.

Edit: by the way, the desktop story is completely different. I could never go without Firefox on non-mobile for various features (besides the privacy matter).

[1] What does that matter: Well, space (now there's two buttons next to the already-small address bar) and usability. I used to be able to hit the tab button without really looking. It was on the side of the screen, I'd just finger along that edge and I'd open my tab menu. Now I need to tap somewhere specific, and if I accidentally hit the menu button, I need to either reach over to the other side of the screen (on a 5.5" phone, that's a stretch for my thumb) or hit the back button (which would require shifting my phone, then touching it, then shifting back, all balancing it in one hand, oftentimes at least). How friggin' difficult is it to make an about:config setting to hide a button?

The redesigned Firefox for Android was roundly praised as the best Android browser for a while. (It's still very good!) It gained very little market share. Unfortunately it's very hard to compete with defaults these days without paying for distribution deals like Google is doing with Chrome.

What are your thoughts on Vivaldi?

I try it occasionally and I'm enjoying it. Most tools come out of the box, like Adblock, screenshot, window tiling, and mouse gestures. Not sure if the Adblock is as good as uBlock origin, though. Some new features like an improved history (haven't used thoroughly yet) and tab stacking.

It still is a bit buggy for me on Ubuntu 16.04. Sometimes when playing videos the window flickers.

I've been slogging along with FF Bookmarks, but breaking the XUL-dependent "Show Parent Folder" extension may be the last straw:

    https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1299016

History of bookmark SNAFU goes back 9 years:

    https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=469426

A comment said the same and I added a note to the text. If you have concrete data happy to update charts. Pull request welcome :) All code and data for charts on github.

We're already at that point IMHO.

I can't pay my phone bill with Firefox, for example, and have to use Chromium for that. It's a redirection problem between the company's website and the external payment service they use, been going on for years. Similar annoyances all over the place from all sorts of major corporations that all seem to invest the bare minimum in cross-platform QA.

Just the fact you're on HN means that you're in a small percentage of users, and anyone doing pair programming or many related activities will also fit into a small subset of overall Firefox users. The vast majority of users will start with IE (now with Edge) or Safari, and will be exposed to Chrome when they go to Google for a search or because they have an Android phone and got directed there.

I'd say that the best thing that could happen for Firefox would be Google banning ad blockers, but in my experience with end users in office environments most users don't realize they even exist. Similarly they could partner with Facebook or some major destination sites, but that would have its own issues and complications.

Firefox is being squeezed out of the browser market for the same reason Opera was. They have no monster platform/s to leverage.

IE/Edge has Windows.

Chrome has Android and Google services broadly.

Safari has iOS & Mac.

Firefox has... nothing.

Unless Chrome suddenly gets a lot worse, it's pretty clear what's going to happen to Firefox. Even IE/Edge is finding it difficult to hold market share against Chrome on the PC (where Microsoft still has an effective monopoly), Firefox doesn't stand a chance by comparison.

I was one of those few who used Firefox on mobile because I could install ublock origin on it, so I preferred it over Chrome because of that.

However, at the time (about a year ago), I didn't think Firefox was as fast as Chrome. So I eventually switched to the Chromium-based Brave (run by Mozilla's former CEO) due to its speed and (Chromium) security architecture (and of course ad-blocking).

I would use Brave on the desktop, too, if not for the awful UI decisions there (on mobile it's more like a Chrome clone). They really need to replace their UI guy, because I feel like he (or she) has been getting it wrong since day one. Too much UI fluff getting in the way and controls being hidden from you.

I believe they were saying Ff on ios is non-existant. However on Android it is decent and growing. I exclusively use it on android. I even have Chrome disabled.

I don't buy it.

Chrome for years and years was sold as lightning fast and secure from malware - and it delivered.

That was why I switched back in the day.

Even today, it has a reputation for being lightning fast, and having a fast pace of development.

In my (admittedly mostly/predominantly) technical circle - I don't know many who switched to ads. In fact, those people are the least likely to click on ads.

Most of them switched because Chrome is fast, and lightweight - or for the non-technical people, because their technical friends told them to.

I am running Firefox 56 (Nightly) and it is very fast due to project Quantum. Even faster than Firefox 54 which also got a big boost due to e10s.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/desktop/#night...

If Firefox 54 is still slow for you, I would be interested if multiprocess is enabled (look at about:support). Also, what does about:performance say?

If still slow you might want to do a Refresh: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-a...

At least for me, since the e10s updates, firefox has been quite snappy even compared to chrome. Ive been enjoying the experience.

My experience exactly. Every time people told me it's getting better I downloaded and just felt differently...to the point I'm too tired to try it anymore.

Don't forget to mention privacy. Why would I use a browser which is spying on me if there is an alternative that doesn't? Same goes for other software.

Yeah, lets swing the "hater" label around just to be on the safe side.

Why is it that anyone that question the decisions regarding a project are instantly tarred as "haters"?

> no really big advantage

No _user perceived advantage_ but they are important: Privacy, freedom and avoiding the monoculture of a single web engine. The amount of websites that don't quite work well or outright has bugs on firefox is increasing.

If you read the thread, you'll see that many people are discussing points on which it fell behind, sometimes on specific platforms and sometimes in general.

(Then again, your comment is 6 hours old, maybe it wasn't discussed yet back then.)

I use Firefox on Android exclusively - because it has uBlock, and thanks to my country's carriers, I have very limited mobile data budget, that I can't afford to spend on ads.

The most annoying thing is that Firefox's tabs don't integrate with the normal Android mechanism of switching windows.

EU seems more on top there than USA. And frankly USA seems unwilling to engage any kind of antitrust against tech companies since the anemic slap on the wrist Microsoft got.

Yeah i have noticed this cold launch issue myself.

You can remove the search bar, as the address already acts as a search bar. (the "customize" menu)

edit: but sometimes the separate search bar is useful eg. when searching wikipedia instead of google? maybe it's just not your use case, I know it's not mine, I just append "wiki" to my searches, but we have to consider many different users.

I'm using firefox 50 until it's not safe to do so. When the time comes, it's going to be hard to choose from bad & worse.

Firefox is the only browser out there that supports text-only page zooming! And until recently, the only browser that supported these total-conversion extensions like Vimperator.

> Why can’t firefox combine the search and address bar like every other major browser?

Because they don't want to send all your keystrokes in the URL to your search provider just so you can get autosuggest. So there is one bar that does autosuggest and a different bar where you can put things that your search provider should not see.

Obviously Chrome doesn't have that problem, since they _want_ your search provider to see all the URLs you visit.

> Why can’t firefox combine the search and address bar like every other major browser?

They have. Try typing "test test" in the address bar and hit enter. If you mind the separate field, hit menu -> customize -> drag the field away -> hit done. Then have a beer.

> Why can’t Firefox ditch their slow animations

On mobile? No idea. On desktop? Which ones? Might it be a Windows thing that I don't notice on Debian?

> buttons

Wait what? You mean the, like, five buttons that are left in the interface by default (menu button, new tab button, and some in the toolbar)? I added extra ones myself for things like enabling/disabling flash, user agent switcher, etc. but besides that, I don't think Chromium does any better on that.

> menus

There is one menu... I don't know what you're talking about.

Check back in November. Literally all of those things are in progress and scheduled for Firefox 57.

I think the new UI looks quite good, here is a screenshot from an install of nightly with the dark theme http://i.imgur.com/LVZSyTS.png.

> Maybe Firefox is slow on Linux but on Windows I don't notice a difference between it and Chrome.

I really think this is a big part of the discrepancy in opinions of performance here. In my own experience, Firefox on Linux just has sluggish responsiveness. It doesn't happen everywhere, and sometimes the effect feels cumulative (depending on how long the process has been running). I've also found the occasional website (usually forums) where the text input box is painfully sluggish in Firefox (for no good reason), while its just fine and dandy in Chrome.

Now I've also run Firefox on Windows, where it seems quite snappy and I don't really have any performance complaints.

(Of course there's also the part where "hip web designers" are now treating Chrome like the modern MSIE6, which probably affects "internal" sites more than public-facing ones. But that's a topic for rants elsewhere in this thread.)

FF is great on Windows but slow on OS X. I really wanted to use it but it was maybe 10x slower for heavy JS pages. The whole browser would hang all the time from JS.

I still use it on Windows but had to switch back to Chrome on my MacBook.

> If you buy into the Google Suite then you get synched profiles. Firefox has the same but the account is only useful for keeping Firefox in sync whereas Google's also give you access to all their other products, plus oauth to third party services.

That's the exact reason some of us avoid Chrome :)

Came here to quote the same sentence and post a similar reply. I've been using Firefox forever, esp. b/c of some of the extensions, but it just isn't stable, reliable, or performance-oriented anymore. Chrome is more stable, snappier, and smoother.

I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for Firefox, but the reality is that Firefox's engineering is inferior when compared to Chrome or Safari IMO. To deny this is perhaps illustrative of why Mozilla's browser is suffering. It crashes, it leaks, it sputters, it freezes. It's shameful and embarrassing.

Do you mind looking in about:crashes and pointing to some of the crash reports involved? I normally have multi-week uptimes in Firefox before I remember to restart just so I can get an update... I would really like to try to figure out why you're seeing so many crashes.

It's way more aggressive now. I have also dismissed the convert to 'youtube red' popup like 20 times now and the damn thing keeps coming up on the phone. I never expected my phone to be infested with marketing and ad popups like this :/

Some Google services don't work properly on Firefox or show annoying banners. It is just a pain. I just moved to chromium.

I've been a loyal Firefox user since the earliest couple versions. Something like 12-13 years or whatever. I like the interface more than Chrome, among a few other things about how it operates.

I can't leave Firefox open on even simple pages, without it consuming ~5% or more of the processor with one tab doing nothing. If I open numerous tabs, forget about it, Firefox will eat the processor (brand new machine, i5-7400, new Firefox install). I can leave Chrome running almost perpetually without problems with tons of tabs open. Right now I've got seven tabs open in Firefox, and it's consuming 706mb of ram, for a few stackoverflow pages and HN. I've had that resource abuse problem with Firefox essentially since the beginning, across a lot of varied PC systems.

Over the last year I've gradually stopped using Firefox because I can't stand its horrible performance any longer.

[Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla, but I'm not involved in Firefox decision making]

> Mozilla wants to make Firefox look like Chrome, probably to replicate features which seem to draw users in

This is false IMO

> by changing the extensions API to make it less powerful

This is not about copying Chrome. This is about moving off of an API which was effectively "our entire codebase is your public API, here, have fun", which is horrible for making it easy to evolve the codebase. We had this problem with electrolysis (multiprocess firefox) already, lots of addons broke because of it. Additionally, the base of this API is XUL, which is a technology many want to phase out.

Firefox is using the same base extension API as Chrome. It's a sensible choice -- if you're going to design an extensions API from scratch, why not standardize the base so that many extensions become interoperable. The base manifest format and most of the normal APIs from Chrome are the same, however the new system has many other APIs which chrome doesn't have, and the intent is to continue adding these so that most of the former very powerful extensions are still possible. But I'm already using extensions that won't work in Chrome because Chrome doesn't expose that functionality.

> by supporting standardised DRM in the browser

If Netflix didn't work in the browser Firefox would not have any users left.

Mozilla fought this battle, and lost.

> changing the extensions API to make it less powerful

Changing the extensions API to decouple it from the browser's internals, allowing long-needed refactoring, a move to multiple processes, sandboxing, etc.

And because the old extensions API must be completely scrapped (and ought to have been scrapped years ago), it makes more sense to replace it with a new thing that's compatible with other browsers rather than a new thing that only works with Firefox.

Firefox isn't simply aping Chrome, even visually. The next UI refresh is going to look more different, not more similar. https://www.primeinspiration.com/mozilla-firefox-getting-new... The extensions API is being changed to disengage addons from the guts of the browser, which will let the team make bigger changes to CPU- and RAM-hungry areas of the codebase. The new extensions API has had a huge amount of work put into it to expand it before the old-API cutoff around November. The point is to make the browser perform better, not to make it less capable.

> by supporting standardised DRM in the browser

Firefox is trying to avoid losing marketshare and you're complaining about a big usability win. In what way could causing every video service on the planet to start steering users towards Chrome/Edge/Safari help that?

(Yes, I realize we don't like DRM but normal people are far more concerned about not having to do anything other than click play on Netflix/Amazon/Hulu/etc.)

There's also a far bigger difference: Chrome looks native (with elements of Material Design mixed in) on every platform. Meanwhile, Firefox aims to have the same Firefoxy look on every platform. Users definitely notice this and choose accordingly.

Using your dominant position in one sector to push your products in others is the exact kind of behavior that gets you tagged as a monopoly in the legal sense of the term.

> Mozilla wants to make Firefox look like Chrome, probably to replicate features which seem to draw users in, by changing the extensions API to make it less powerful

The current Firefox marketshare is a predictable outcome of that strategy; by eliminating everything that made Firefox distinct from Chrome, they've made made going with the biggest, most well-funded version of Chrome the most reasonable choice. It has resulted in a Chrome monopoly, but there's really no way to prevent it: even when given a explicit choice between Chrome and mostly-Chrome, people will usually choose Chrome.

edit: After the elimination of the old-style extensions, I've run out of distinct features that justify sticking with Firefox, and am left with pure ideology. An ideology that I don't even think that Mozilla places any importance in anymore, so I might as well be using Chromium.

Indeed. The one thing that got a relative of mine to go Chrome was that the flash games on Facebook performed "better".

Are Chromium installs counted in the Chrome count as well?

I'm not sure that it's reasonable to blame Firefox for this issue. I use Firefox on Windows 7, 8 and 10 without issue; the installation went without a hitch.

For an opposing anecdote, I do not have this problem at all. Firefox is always snappy and uses less memory than Chrome on my Macbook.

about:performance can now help you figure out what's going on.

Not sure why you're downvoted. This is a question I feel stupid for not thinking of myself.

Name one video site that has anywhere near the usage level of YouTube.