I think most people just don't care, and just use what the system provides. As Google gets more invasive and evil, I hope that people will start to care, and Firefox and other browsers start to flourish again.
Like the article said: no one cares (more or less) about how good the browser is. If you have to go install a new browser, that's more work than just using the builtin one, and Google can force every Android phone to install Chrome out of the box.
Also, though I use Firefox mobile out of a desire to not be a part of the Chrome problem (even though I know it's useless and I'm not actually helping by doing so), it's not fast, and it's not nice to use. It's painfully slow, crashes much more frequently than the other browsers, has confusing settings and constantly promotes garbage like Pocket (which you can disable if you dig through the confusing settings, but you can't actually uninstall it), etc.
Until Mozilla gets the performance problems under control (and they're finally attempting to do this with Quantum et al.) they won't stop the bleeding. Unfortuantely, stopping the bleeding is the easy part: getting new users is the hard part and I tend to agree with the article that they don't have a way to do that on mobile (though I know nothing about marketing, so hopefully I'm wrong and just spouting nonsense here).
(edit: tweaked to clarify)
edit 2: using Firefox on mobile (Android) too, for ~2 years now (i.e., since I have a smartphone), cannot recall a single crash over that timeframe either.
I particularly love the possibility of opening multiple links at once in the background, and buffering them until I switch to the Firefox app.
Performance is 1/2 of the reason that I prefer Mozilla. As one of those people that typically has 50-100 tabs open, the Firefox model for memory management is vastly superior.
The other half of the reason is TreeStyleTab, again because I'm one of those zillion-tab users. Vertically-stacked tabs in a sidebar is the only way to manage that mountain of tabs - horizontal at the top just doesn't work. And Chrome doesn't have any extensions that support this.
So you're suggesting that Firefox actually performs better now? Maybe all my coworkers complaining about it are just repeating lore that no longer exists?
Many tabs aside though, I still have a lot of performance problems with Firefox (although it's getting better; Quantum was fantastic, I was getting really fed up with Firefox for a while before that).
In contrast, Firefox pools those processes. I currently have 56 tabs open, but only 6 Firefox processes running, consuming a total of 1.7GB. So for example, there is (AIUI) just one single process that's responsible for all rendering behavior. I don't have the same detailed information about how much resources that HelloWorld page is taking, but it feels more efficient to me.
If you have hundreds of tabs in Chrome, you'd have hundreds of processes. In this case, Firefox used to perform much better with lots of tabs because it didn't spin up a process for each one. The downside of this model is that a crash would take down all your tabs in Firefox rather than a single tab in Chrome. Of course, now Firefox is also multi-process.
I can never have hundreds of tabs open in Chrome because the UI just doesn't handle that nicely. In Firefox I use multi-row tabs and can comfortably have 40 tabs open without issue.
But for me, it's easy to test. Go to http://addic7ed.com/ and open the (very long, nearly 5k entries) [Select a TV Show] drop-down. On FF (and IE/Edge FWIW) there is a noticeable delay in opening. I'd say 200-400ms. On Chrome it opens instantly.
Next, have something playing that consumes decent amounts of CPU in a tab. I used twitch. Then go somewhere and rapidly open new links (I middle-clicked around on Wikipedia). After about 10 tabs, FF starts slowing down (opening tabs that look like blank tabs and only starting to load after a delay) and possibly interrupts playback in the background tab. IE/Edge are even worse and will start opening tabs slower than you click and keep opening for a while after you are done. In Chrome on the other hand, everything is instant.
I'm on Windows 10 and everything is up to date. I'd love for someone to tell me that it's different for them.
Also, it's a pretty weird test case to compare performance, probably not related to anything that actually matters. What's more, Firefox tries to style the drop-down to match with the system UI, while Chrome doesn't even bother.
I specifically said that I can see it being a problem in low ram cases.
> Also, it's a pretty weird test case to compare performance, probably not related to anything that actually matters.
This is not some random benchmarks. Both of these problems are things that I regularly encounter on actual websites. And it's great that FF styles it, but I'd rather have performance than system appropriate dropdowns.
(I do use The Great Discarder, but did so before switching to Firefox, too.)
I liked firefox on mobile for ability to use addons. But with some update it started being totally unresponsive and crashing my phone, so I switched back to chrome which happily displays ":)" with 100+ tabs open.
On mac firefox is eating battery faster than chrome.
I would like some alternative for phone - so I will maybe try vivaldi or brave or test firefox once again.
If you're on a Mac and want better battery life when web browsing, Safari will do better than both Firefox and Chrome in most cases.
Ever used chrome or some other browser on android? The droidfox is quite infamous for it's slowness and backward interface.
No difference that maybe you can perceive, but I for one find the scrolling a lot more sluggish on FF than on Chrome, and that's on a SD 845 device, which is the latest and supposedly greatest Qualcomm chip. I just can't use FF on Android, and that's a shame because the desktop version is very good.
My phone isn't even some flagship. It's an OP3T, and it copes very well with FF.
Compounding the pity, Firefox used to have a more secure auth system, which they threw away. I'm still appalled by that.
I would accept running my own server for Sync as a solution and I believe this was even possible with the old system? Then power users could have that extra layer of security if they desired but regular users don't have to worry so much.
As an aside, I don't see that user key management was really an issue. The UI of the old system was perfectly fine, and one could have added a QR code or similar if one really wanted to. The number of folks doing TOTP auth these days prove that it works.
There's only one reason to use dynamically-downloaded JavaScript to ensure user privacy: because one wishes to silently and undetectably undermine user privacy at some point in the future.
Firefox has never been bundled with a mainstream OS, mobile or desktop, as far as I know, it's always been something that people sought out. I think since you can install it on Android, if it's any good it has a chance of success.