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Comment by abdullahkhalids | Hacker News Reader

I don't think the quality factor is the _most_ significant factor in the decline of Firefox's market share - though it might be a significant factor. Firefox simply lost out to Google doing all they can to push Chrome onto people. Its advertised on their pages, its pushed onto organizations using google tools, etc etc. Even if Chrome was marginally worse than Firefox, it would have a similar market share.

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I disagree, though that was certainly a big factor, particularly in speeding up the pace of user loss.

In any case, it's probably not a healthy perspective for Mozilla or its community to just write this off as Firefox being the victim of a big ad campaign for another browser. Mozilla had real problems and missed opportunities, and that's where their focus rightfully should have been.

I'm ex-Netscape, and have been using the various Mozilla browsers primarily since around 2000. The browser has always worked fine in daily use.

I also use the developer tools, and they're also adequate for vanilla-js development.

So based on 2 decades of experience with Mozilla, I'd go with Chrome surpassing it in market share as more to do with promotion than Mozilla not being good enough.

I consider myself concerned enough about Google, and supportive enough of having Firefox as an alternative, that I feel somewhat guilty for giving up on switching to Firefox about once a year (at least). And yet I keep doing so, because for whatever inexplicable reason I prefer Chrome enough, or dislike Firefox enough, to keep switching back to the former.

While your comment prompts me to try again and figure out why this is the case exactly, Google's marketing is not the reason for me (and, unfortunately, others too).

If I had to guess, I'd say it usually boils down to a feeling of clunkiness and weird hogging of memory/processing, whether true or just perceived. I've read some threads that indicate this is a problem for Mac users in particular, but I don't know if this is actually true.

The Mac/Linux Firefox ports have never been good, their success was unearned and they were quickly replaced when a competitor came along.

Been using Linux Firefox for over a decade - five years on a toshiba Core 2 Duo laptop with 2 GB ram and a harddisk. Never had any performance complaints even though I sometimes opened >20 tabs.

Could you elaborate on the contents of those tabs? I often have more than 20 tabs open, but even in Chrome this can cause some issues. Nonetheless Firefox seemed worse at it, and perhaps this has to do with the nature of the tabs I have open?

As a university student back in the day I would perpetually have gmail, facebook, university email, youtube open - all js heavy websites. Others tabs were links from HN, wikipedia and/or pdf class notes. Even developed a website for my department at some point, all on firefox.

That's been my experience too, I've never actually noticed the performance problems people are talking in the years I've used it. I mean, I heard ones like 'It bogs down after 100 tabs', but that to me is an extreme edge case and more a personal problem than the browsers fault (bit tongue in cheek, I'm sure there are plenty of valid use cases).

Other developers on teams I've been on certainly pushed it hard (mostly for the dev tools, which I admit I went to Chrome for at times), so there was 'grassroots' support there if I've used that word correctly, whether that came from being hoodwinked by The Great Advertiser I don't know.

Lately, I've had a lot of performance issues with Firefox.

I can pop open Task Manager at random times and see Firefox in the 2GB range (this on an 8Gb machine running Slack, Chrome and PHPStorm at the same time, so it's a little cramped for RAM at the best) and I'm running 20-30 tabs. Even chopping down to a handful still keeps you well over 2Gb.

It won't seize completely the way it used to prior to multiprocess, but you get this weird situation where you get a spinner just switching tabs.

For many years, I defaulted to Firefox because of an extension I loved (FireFTP) which could never make the leap to WebExtensions. I can recall developing on Firefox then patching things to make IE6 happy. But on my home machine I switched to Vivaldi entirely.

Well closing tabs still keeps some tabs (I think 10) in memory for the reopen recent tabs feature. You can always go to about:memory and click clear memory and that should help - though I have never had to do that.

Browser user here. Chrome was way better. Everybody else copied its UI for a reason.

Exactly. People seem to forget the effect it has when Google promotes something on their search engine as well as Youtube (where they also forced you to get a Gmail-account eventually after taking over) etc.

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