Firefox has taken a massive nosedive in the last few years, in the UK at least. My two big clients have them on less than 2% share.
Just checked one, 5 years ago they had 9.55% share, today it's 1.8%. Even taking into account the growth of mobile, that's dire.
Firefox is looking like Apple circa 1997. They can still recover, but they have to focus on what people want.
Firefox has a chance at doing the same thing with privacy-aware users and/or power users.
To that end, they need to stop dumbing-down the browser and endlessly playing catch-up with Chrome.
It would be like using Tor all the time. You know it's better, but the difference in speed is so great, that you have to make a conscious choice. I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that I want the benefits _without_ compromising speed.
Also, Google's pushing it helped. Otherwise consider how Chrome has occupied an IE like market share despite the quality Delta between Chrome and IE/Edge, Firefox or Safari is significantly lesser than the Delta between Firefox and IE was a decade ago, yet Firefox peaked at a much lower marketshare than Chrome's today.
Which means it won't be an alternative anymore and it will die.
If devs are ready to repeat the IE 6 story, this time with Chrome.
Getting companies to do cross browser testing seems hard even if it it should be simpler than ever before.. :-/
It is really sad that Gecko is becoming so good, but is mainly used to power a product in what is becoming a niche market (yes, desktop is becoming a niche in terms of users relative to mobile).
If I use Chrome only it is for my sockpuppet accounts.
I far prefer FF even on mobile.
But their mobile marketshare is totally irrelevant compared to Chrome, UCBrowser or the Samsung browser (even this one alone has about as many users as Fx Desktop).
That said, more market share for Fennec would be nice.
(This comment written in Fennec.)
I don't mind that some people want to keep focusing on desktop products, they have their use. But I think it's not what Mozilla should focus on if they want to "promote internet for everyone".
I've noticed that a lot of folks don't realize there are a bunch more devtools tabs that you can enable hidden in the settings (including a shader editor, a canvas debugger, and a DOM inspector). They're less useful than the main four (inspector/console/debugger/network) but are pretty neat and help a lot.
The other thing I'm trialing is using duckduckgo as a search engine which is quite good, but google is still mostly better, but since you can google from ddg, I'm sticking with it for the moment.
In this case, I think Firefox made a good choice in modernising the codebase and the extension APIs. In 2 years we'll find out if the vim people were right or they were indulging in hyperbole.
Here's an issue opened June 9 that hasn't been addressed by the Mozilla team and hasn't had any updates in a month: https://github.com/cmcaine/keyboard-api/issues/1
Here's the request for a better keyboard API (referenced in the above) that's been open for over 2 years with no end in sight: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215061
I'm sure the new FF is going to make some users happy, but as you said, having your workflow broken is quite painful, and the Mozilla team has known about this for years but still not made the upgrade path bearable.
Except an already developed patch and proposal that needs some time from the main devs to be reviewed. For a long time they were very busy making FF bearable for 90% of the users. Now that it's released we'll see if this issue is as stuck as you imply.
We power users are like 1-2% of all FF users. I think it's acceptable to break some things for a while to bring back much more users than that.
Also, since you're a power user, why don't you use that proposed API already? It seems you don't even need to compile the browser or anything, just enabling a flag and installing the API as an addon.
I am dealing with it. I moved to a different browser.
> Also, since you're a power user, why don't you use that proposed API already? It seems you don't even need to compile the browser or anything, just enabling a flag and installing the API as an addon.
Simply not true.
This is a restriction for chrome-store extensions. You can install one manually without with "feature"
Some of these things can be done in other browsers using third party extensions, but I am extremely reluctant when it comes to third party extensions for security reasons.
[Edit] Very important to me as well is built-in reader view.
Several things immediately come to mind:
* Mozilla is a more trustworthy company than Google, so all things being equal, I'll take their product.
* Container tabs (or multi-account tabs now) are a killer feature for privacy and greatly improve the "multi profile" use case
* Firefox Mobile allows extensions, where Chrome doesn't support it.
The only negative for me with FF is that in the enterprise, FF Kerberos/SSO function seems inferior to Chrome, which "just works".
But for it being closed source, I think Vivaldi is a better experience than Chrome. Sure it's "just" a reskin, but point is, Chrome is in 3rd place in my opinion.
Remember, Firefox was never the dominant browser, and where it is now is where it has almost always been.
Maybe because Google actively pays people to install Chrome without the users knowledge, and force it as default. That’s pretty much the definition of malware already.
It’s hard to win against someone that does such hostile behaviour.
The desktop browser was stagnating because the browser owners had no idea where to drive it, and some people with the castle keys were change adverse (some finally "left"). They took as an excuse that they could not get support from the platform team, so the platform team killed FxOS support and ended up being absorbed by the Firefox organization to become just the fx backend team (great strategy!). I guess the platform VP was so frightened by the Tofino experiment and Fx Desktop moving away from Gecko that he didn't understand that was betting on the wrong horse long term.
If Mozilla's goal is to strengthen the interests of a wide range of users against the narrow interests of two or three oligopolists they have to consider entering the OS game in spite of the immense difficulties.