Firefox Lost Almost 50M Users: Here’s Why It Is Concerning
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2. Every time functionality works differently in Firefox, more companies drop Firefox support. At a prior job, we used datalist and FF seemingly implemented it differently than Chrome. At that point, we told the user that FF was no longer supported. If FF wants to win, they need to at least keep pace and not be a burden on developers.
One of the main reason designers exist is to help design things that most people can use and historically and generally, engineers are NOT good at this. Divisional labour through expertise.
Remember - most people don't care about stuff that we do. UI changes are generally based on research that we're generally NOT experts on. Just because HN readers and even redditors don't like Firefox's design doesn't mean it's bad design. These two segments make up a tiny proportion of the ~100m users.
I'm also not saying it's good design, but be careful when approaching this topic since it's more nuanced than you think.
Well, I don't think that's the case. Yes, there are users out there who meet those criteria, but there are also "engineers" who do. By and large, just because they aren't "engineers" doesn't mean they don't largely have the same concerns as everyone else who uses a PC: They want to get their work done, they don't like interruptions to their workflow, they don't like change for the sake of it, and they don't appreciate slow and unresponsive UI. "Engineers" are a subset of user who just happens to think a bit too highly of themselves because they use VSCode and JavaScript instead of Excel or Photoshop.
We may not be experts on UI design, but you don't have to be a chef to know when the food you're served tastes lousy and you don't need to be a designer to know when bad UI is shoved down your throat.
[0] I submit that the very concept of "average user" is a fictitious entity which only exists to be a strawman. See: https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...
This is exactly why it's important to design for the common denominator (not intended to be derisory) when building a product that essentially needs to be the same (at its core) for all users, e.g. everyone downloads pretty much the same exact Firefox binary (excluding beta builds).
My argument is that I'm giving Firefox designers the benefit of the doubt that they're doing that and that the UI changes made aren't "lousy" and "bad UI", but rather, a carefully considered approach to have a net benefit for all users.
So, if you are suggesting that you consider Firefox to have "lousy" and "bad UI", that's fair but perhaps it's not what the average opinion is. I'm not claiming to know the average opinion on the Firefox UI changes but I'd guess that they're mostly indifferent if not positive.
It's not regular folk, they can't outspend Google acquiring them.
It's not technical folk, they've been so tone deaf, forceful and unengaging that those people have left for greener pastures.
So who?
The market that actually uses Firefox is people who rejected Chrome.
The direction Mozilla decided to take Firefox truly baffles me because of this. Turning FF into Chrome seems like a losing proposition: you'll lose the users who actively don't want something Chrome-like, and it'll be pretty hard to get users who enjoy Chrome-like browsers to switch from whatever their current browser is. Why bother, when you already have that experience? Even the privacy angle isn't good leverage, as there are established Chrome-like browsers that do well on that count.
It's never made sense to me.
For regular users, having software look great can be quite important. Especially when there is strong competition.
Firefox doesn't even make that many changes that breaks the workflow of regular users. From memory, the last time seems when the hamburger dropdown 'Applications Menu' was introduced. Normally UI-changes in Firefox are more non-breaking.
And the non breaking changes seem just as annoying, when elements move around or change their appearance, need more/less space etc. The thing is, the browser has been looking nice for years. There is just no need for constant redesigns that change things just for the sake of change.
The keyboard shortcut for Copy Link Location changed, something I use countless times each day (plus I can't forget the old shortcut while Firefox ESR still has the old menu).
How many of Firefox's UI changes really impacted this, though? There was the big move away from menu bars and to a more minimalist UI, OK, great. But all the other changes since just reshuffled things that have no net impact, other than forcing users to re-train their workflows.
Though the bigger problem is all the other crap that doesn't relate to either the UI or browsing experience. Pocket, Hello, VPN, intrusive and forced extension-based advertisements, "Studies", anti-LGBT marketing, a failed mobile OS (justified, it was just awful), some vague IoT experiments nobody knew what the point of was, …
Mozilla has half a billion dollars in annual revenue, yet somehow most of it doesn't go to either Firefox nor Thunderbird. XULRunner could've been Electron 10 years before Electron, but Mozilla didn't even care.
They might be useful if Mozilla wasn't cannibalizing itself and stretched so thin that neither these services nor Mozilla's actual products were competitive, but as it stands, Mozilla is just digging its hole deeper with every side project.
I dislike Mozilla a lot, but here I disagree. Electron is not necessarily a good thing.
There are probably good reasons for such changes but users it is "hey, the thing I did yesterday is no longer working". But then we also have more questionable decisions like removal of "view image", which was doing everything and more of its replacement "open image in new tab"
I don't think that many people care.
Firefox was my main browser 13 years ago. I switched out of curiosity to Opera which was fun for a while. Around 2011, I jumped on the Chrome bandwagon, which switched to Chromium as Linux became my daily driver. This year when Chromium stopped syncing across devices[0] I thought I'd give Firefox another go.
I'm personally avoiding Brave like the plague mainly because it's chromium based, but also because I don't trust them, and when I've tried it out, I didn't care for all the crypto/BAT pushing.
Since switching back to Firefox, I've been a very happy user - and I'm surprised by all the backlash they've gotten this year (mainly, seemingly from dev communities like HN) for UI changes, performance, "being funded by google". None of these are issues for me - a relative power user - at all.
One huge advantage for me is the mobile app just feels miles ahead of competition. Now that phones IMO are oversized, it's so refreshing to have the option to put the address bar at the bottom, AND I can have uBlock and Dark Reader on mobile! Personally I'm a fan of the v89/90 UI changes - I think people have been over-reacting.
Even if I started to feel UI or performance issues, I still wouldn't switch back on account of Firefox not being chromium based. I don't trust Google. I'm trying to de-google and would encourage others to do the same.
Support competition! Whether it be cloud providers, web rendering engines. Sometimes this comes at a minor personal cost but it can be for the greater good. Think long term!
[0]: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2021/01/chromium-sync-google-api...
Now, let's say there is 1 Mio. people who want an open, trustworthy browser. I bet, these would pay 50 USD/year to have that. For this, it should be possible to get ~500 FTE positions to fulfill all needs of the project (seems reasonable, as a) this would be a really idealistic venture then and b) seems a pretty good salary everywhere except SV...). Hardware and hosting should be pretty easy to come by, if sold to governments/big companies the right way.
BUT... for some reason, Mozilla has offices in Mountain View, CA and is lead by a highbrow lawyer earning a 7 figures a year. This is (together with wikimedia, where salaries don't seem that broken) actually the only job, where I am certain, I would be able to offer the same quality of work for a fraction of the cost (first act: ringing up all digital ministries in democratic countries and pushing FF to schools :))...
Bonkers.
One stroke of luck was basically the whole thing ending up being open source, which basically meant that the whole team just cut loose from AOL when AOL management got a bit too infatuated with themselves. They continued independently at some point and created the Mozilla Foundation shortly after basically a botched attempt by AOL to get rid of Mitchell Baker; who ended up creating and leading Mozilla after which AOL basically lost most of what remained of their acquisition.
From the ashes of that came Phoenix, which later renamed to Firebird and eventually Firefox. Around the time the Mozilla Foundation became a thing it was convenient for Google to back a browser that wasn't Internet Explorer and they were basically rolling in cash since then without too much obligation to deliver anything more and a vague ambition to do something anyway. That was two decades ago.
Since then, essentially everything they tried that wasn't a browser kind of failed, got neglected, or got killed before it ever saw the light of day. They blew through many millions in the process with no return on investment. The exception is perhaps Rust, which itself was kind of a happy accident in the sense that it was part of a decade plus long attempt to refactor the browser that is still ongoing that happens to have produced a nice language community as a side effect. They cut Rust loose since they couldn't figure out how to monetize that. But it's arguably the most successful thing they accomplished aside from the browser despite the lack of a return on investment. At this point it's independent from Mozilla who bootstrapped it with a lot of cash without ever reaping the benefits. Lots of money but a complete lack of focus has been their story. Too comfortable and no sense of urgency. Lots of little projects that consistently go nowhere.
They should just shut the door on the mozilla corporation part and move the browser development to where it belongs which would be the Mozilla Foundation. Even with a few million users less, there is plenty of money in the user community to keep that going on donations, revenue from deals with Google and others, sponsor ships, etc. Just look at the Wikimedia Foundation, the Apache Foundation, etc. It's a great model for ensuring important OSS software keeps on going.
That would mean letting go of a bunch of offices they don't need, a marketing and business development department that has failed consistently to create new revenue streams, and would allow them to focus on the one thing they are good at which is developing and maintaining Firefox. They have plenty of developer mouths to feed.
I love Firefox. I love using it. I love not having my browser history being sold out to advertisers. And I love their general attitude of them looking out for me. I rarely use Chrome and only strictly for development purposes (i.e. testing stuff in different browsers). Nothing I care about requires Chrome. I don't really care for the countless spinoffs either (Brave, Edge, Opera, etc.). They all have the same problem: corporations with dollar signs in their eyes chasing revenue, which in the end always takes precedence over user interests. I love the engineering mentality and lack of chasing profits in favor of just doing the right things technically that the Firefox team has. It's not always quick to deliver or efficient or even effective but they get there in the end and keep on producing a great browser.
Anyway, important to keep Google honest to have Firefox and Safari around. They are still big enough to matter.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=795552
Quite simply, I won't use a browser on mobile that doesn't have text-reflow as; with a huge number of websites, a combination of my middle-aged eyesight and developers not designing for mobile, means that text is literally too small for me to read without pinching to enlarge it and I sure as hell ain't going to suffer the inconvenience of having to horizontally scroll back and forward because Firefox's developers are too stubborn to admit they made a mistake and add text-reflow back in.
And, since I want to be able to use the same browser across all my devices, so I can share bookmarks / history / etc. that also rules out Firefox on all my desktop machines too.
I never worried about the performance of Firefox. It was good enough, and I miss some features like tags for bookmarks. But a betrayal of their original mission is unforgivable. Yes, other browsers belong to evil corporations, but at least they never claimed to be good to begin with.
They are essentially preaching 'privacy' to those wanting to a privacy-focused browser and product and having that as its main unique selling point but then is paid by an anti-privacy company 'Google' which contradicts everything in Mozilla's mission statement.
Plus, Mozilla sort of did this to themselves anyway and turned Google into a direct competitor with Chrome.
Once Firefox is out, Chrome(ium) will be able to ban ad-blocks.
Constantly breaking the user experience with major overhauls"
For current users any UI changes that break the current UI "ABI" is bad. I guess the pressure to do pet projects is big internally as usual.
Constantly breaking the user experience with major overhauls
That said, now that I'm used to it, I think that having the address bar at the bottom on mobile is better and I wish they'd had it all along.
While google does whatever they want and people just nod and move along.
It was 'entirely self inflicted' from the start [0]
From [0]
> Mozilla can live without Google's money, Baker says
> We've spent a lot of time and energy making sure that Google understands that it cannot turn us into an arm of Google
Perhaps that was the signal that provoked Google to create Chrome in 2008 since Mozilla was going to walk away from them. Today, Google's millions still makes around 80% of Mozilla's entire revenue. Chrome has become more stronger and Mozilla is still heavily dependent on Google's millions and still haven't figured out how to make money without them 14 years later.
Mozilla needs to find itself some significant revenue by themselves which is compatible with their mission statement before preaching about 'privacy' and taking payment from a 'anti-privacy' company which is their direct competitor.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.compu...
It isn't like people will ever lose access to old browsers that work as well as they ever did. This isn't a serious threat.
The web is a moving target, and after a couple of years an old release will be close to unusable.
Firefox is currently the only serious competitor to Chrome, Safari having its known defects and Edge -- well, Edge being Edge.
So it's crucial that Firefox remains in the game, even as a (usable) wavebreaker to Chrome.
But what do I know, it seems that "adding features and modernizing the UI" wins everytime in upper management.
$1mil in 2015 https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2015/11/30/mozilla...
$2.5mil in 2018, and over $3mil in 2020. Someone compensated this well surely knows what they are doing!!
Also, Google should probably be broken up, Android/Chrome should be moved to separate companies
Extension changes, Pocket integration, UI updates, even the bloody icon keeps getting updated. Just leave it alone for god sake.
On Chrome now which seems to change a lot less frequently (in a perceptible manner - I know they add a lot of stuff to Chrome every year, but for the most part its ignorable unlike FireFox changes)
I use Firefox as my main browser, but having to jump on a Teams call, or GoToMeeting, or really any Google service requires Chrome to get it to work fully, or even at all. And as I understand it, this is for no good reason at all. At the moment, I find myself opening Chrome just for those tasks alone, but the fact that I have to do that at all says a lot about Chrome's hand in the market.
I'm not sure what there's left to do as a Firefox user. One would be to donate [0], but it looks like donations to Mozilla don't make it to Firefox development according to this [1] post from a few years ago.
[0]: https://donate.mozilla.org/
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/a98gmi/donations_t...
Previously Brave was the one i was using but it doesn't do full sync on iOS & can't be built on FreeBSD.
As I have upgraded to modern Ryzen PCs I immdiately switched back to Firefox and am happy although some people still tell me y browser looks very slow once they see me using it.
Using Firefox is a privilege many people just can't easily afford. Many people still tell me YouTube is too slow in Firefox but my experience shows a powerful PC solves this.
I am a huge Firefox fan and don't even mind some tolerable amount struggle but have to admit this.
I once tried to migrate my girlfriend (who has the 2013 MacBook Air) to Firefox (Quantum). As she tried it she immediately told me she doesn't want it because it feels slow. Chrome apparently has some bug which makes eat up 100% of the CPU on the same machine often but works faster even when it does this.
This still has to be addressed if we want Firefox to become more popular. "Just disable all the extensions" (mostly meaning featured extensions recommended by Mozilla, e.g. uBlock Origin) is not a good answer, neither is "buy a powerful modern computer".
I'd love to use FireFox again, but it's just too much garbage and hassle to deal with. Every other version change felt like it broke some quality or function for worse.
I used Pale Moon, a fork of Firefox, but it was too much to tinker with to keep it working with modern websites. Now I just use chrome based browser Vivaldi, and for the past five years of using it, they haven't done anything horrendously stupid like overhauling the entire UI. It's not a perfect browser, but it's a huge improvement from dealing with FireFoxes bullshit.
Turns out that 14 years later, nothing has changed and the Chrome ecosystem is stronger than ever..
Oh well, glad for FOSS!
I used Firefox from version 1.5 to version 30~32 alongside Opera (with the Presto engine), after that I switched to Palemoon since it had a pretty stable UI. A few versions later, before Quantum release, Palemoon felt really slow and webpages broke way too much for my taste. So I switched back to Firefox.
I got used to addons like Classic Theme Restorer only to be broken a few months later with the Quantum release and the addon apocalypse. I tried to stick with it for quite a while but it was quite tiresome to update CSS files every new release of the browser to keep the looks consistent.
Also, things like Google Docs/Spreadsheets, Office 365, JIRA really felt slow in Firefox... So I discovered Vivaldi, which has a lot of customization settings available and after giving it a few months trial I switched to it. And I've been quite happy with it, personally it's the best browser I ever used since good old Opera Presto, it's fast enough, clean and easy to customize. Heck, it even has CSS support and they manage to not break it with every new release.
And honestly, I don't see why I should go back as long as the first issue isn't addressed by significant leadership changes. Mozilla has repeatedly demonstrated their willingness to trample my privacy, why should I ever trust them again?
I mean really, browser that cannot load homepage is not functioning in my opinion, and nobody cares?
If they can't fix even such a basic thing what else can we expect from those people? What goes in their heads is beyond me.
In a post-Firefox future we might have bigger Chromium forks and new choices for the user.
Copying Chrome is a safe strategy that just doesn't seem to be working.
> more innovative up-and-coming browsers like Brave.
Copying Chrome is not a good plan, but copying a browser that engages in shady tactics, referral link hijacking, cryptocoin bullshit and... is a copy of Chrome... is instead your suggestion?
The browser engine really isn't that important, if Blink is doing a better job then damn right we may as well all be using it. It is BSD/LGPL.
The "cryptocoin bullshit" is one of the biggest threats to Google's revenue I've seen this decade and closer to genuine innovation than anything I can recall Mozilla doing in the same timeframe. This is the difference between being and not being a beneficiary of Google money.