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Comment by vvoyer | Hacker News Reader

> The true reasons Firefox lost market share

I would say:

The true reasons Firefox lost market share is because we, developer & tech people started to install Chrome on family computers instead of Firefox because it was safer & faster (way way faster). And we never came back from it.

Performance is a feature.

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I agree with this opinion.

When Chrome came out, it was way better. Now I don't really see big difference in performance, they have similar extensions, frequent updates, sync, etc.

I prefer Firefox but I don't really need to install it on family computers because whatever browser they use is probably good enough.

I recently moved back to chromium from Firefox. FF tended to waste a lot more cpu; and, I tend not to restart my machines for days on end, and those memory leaks were killer.

Chromium is just much better built.

Firefox sync and Chrome sync came out about the same time if I remember correctly. The first release was in Firefox 4.0, but Mozilla Weave (the addon that eventually developed into the first version of Firefox Sync) existed since 2007, before Chrome's first release.

An old Ars Technica article comparing the two protocols (much has changed since then): https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/10/ars-e...

"developer & tech people started to install Chrome on family computers instead of Firefox..."

I'm not so certain those numbers compare with the 10s of millions of people(100s?) who's default browser was hijacked by nefarious bundles in every 3rd party installer under the sun back in the 2000s and early 2010s.. Those people knew no better and have been conditioned(or just don't care) to continue whatever gets them interneting.

Why would I even want to install Firefox on my families computer? The thing is, I want them to have a long term, good working solution that doesn't become a pain in my ass. Firefox isn't very stable for non-tech people, that's the sad truth. Mozilla is badly missmanaged, they are killing Mozilla and specially Firefox. Things need to change, badly.

> Firefox isn't very stable for non-tech people, that's the sad truth.

What are you talking about? It's been working flawlessly for many years, without any maintenance for me and my non-technical relatives.

Firefox just pushed yet another pointless UI change six months ago. People using their software just to go about with their lives don't like pointless UI changes.

This. I don't want to have my family asking to teach them how to use the browser everytime Mozilla decides to do a pointless UI change.

Chrome pretty much barely changes where things are and how things behave and it's a pretty fast browser. If you want to fix Firefox go complain with their management.

>If you want to fix Firefox go complain with their management.

Despite being an open source project, Firefox management seems to be much less in touch with and responsive to their user's feedback compared to other browsers. As an example, both Safari and Firefox had the same bad idea at about the same time - converting tabs into floating buttons (although in the case of Safari the bad at least served a useful purpose: increasing vertical real estate for the browser). Both got negative feedback. The difference? Firefox management dug their heels deeper and told their users, "suck it up, this is the future of web browsing", whereas Apple listened to the feedback and killed the bad idea during the beta itself.

Yet another example: killing off single site browsing or progressive web apps.

Yeah there's need to be changes around Mozilla, something like it happened to AMD I guess, otherwise the latest of us still using Firefox will get tired of it and change to any Chromium-based browser (or Safari...).

I'm not ironic just puzzled: what was the UI change months ago? I'm using Firefox on two laptops and one Android and haven't noticed it...

What Firefox version are you on?

Always latest - it updates itself everywhere. So if there was a change, it was so minor I haven't even noticed it, less complain about it. But either way: what was the breaking UI change months ago again?

https://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2021/06/firefox-89-0-re...

On desktop (Windows 10) Firefox, I can't see which tab is active because all the buttons on the "tab" bar look almost exactly the same.

Okay I missed that because I don't use Firefox's tabs, but the Tree Style Tab extension.

Yeah, they changed a lot of stuff, even I, a techy person got confused about it.

On the whole, people using their software just to go about with their lives don't notice pointless UI changes of the scale you're talking about (changing the appearance of tabs). They don't even know what parts of the window are controlled by the application and which parts are controlled by the web page (if they even understand that distinction), and web pages change their UIs a lot faster than Firefox does.

And Chrome pushed another pointless UI change six months before that.

To be fair, he does have a point. Firefox constantly nags you about new "features", the vast majority of which are bullshit (and even if they were useful, ultimately it's still getting in the way at the worst possible time). I could see this throwing less technical users off.

I'm not sure whether Chrome is any worse on this front, but either way Firefox is terribly annoying. I think it's the most user-hostile open source software I know of.

It is pretty annoying. I tried daily driving Firefox for some time, and found it inferior to chrome, though if you'd ask me to define exactly why, I wouldn't be able to do so. However, when an update wiped my profile, requiring manual fixing, that was it. I did restore it, but that shouldn't have been an issue to begin with.

I use firefox exclusively. Every few weeks, it installs an update and refuses to open a new tab until a restart. It frequently fails to restart. It occasionally nukes my session so I can't restore my tabs. It seems to occasionally forget/unset my preference to not auto-update. If it just had a status indicator to show that an update is available, I'd happily update at the end of a workday. Instead, it's interrupted a talk I was giving at work because it silently updated and spontaneously wouldn't let me open a new tab. It's not even stable for tech people.

Are you using Firefox on Linux, installed via a package manager? What you describe is the behaviour when your package manager updates Firefox in the background from under its feet - not the fault of Firefox. Firefox's own updater will not automatically update without warning.

Only, I don't experience anything like this behavior on any other application. This is a Firefox problem, even if Ubuntu is to blame for overriding my setting.

And, no, I just checked. I don't have any auto-updates in Ubuntu either.

It's really a you problem. The market share of Linux desktops is low enough that in reality it doesn't matter, and you're pulling the rug(binaries) from underneath a web browser (one of the most complex software projects known to man) and expect it to keep running flawlessly.

I'm using NixOS where every version of every dependency of every program I install will be saved until I cleanup the garbage (1 command) so I don't have your issue.

If this was Windows you wouldn't be able to update Firefox while it was running because Windows doesn't support overwriting open files (technically you can rename them and insert new ones with the same name, but that's not the point).

You're holding it wrong and blaming the project, close the software you update before you update and you might have more success.

Yes. The market share of Firefox is low enough that in reality it doesn't matter. So very insightful. Thank you for showing me the light.

Also, I like that you think that Firefox's default settings is "holding it wrong." That's rather the point, isn't it?

It's not Firefox's default settings, It's a technical challenge that they haven't solved. But that I would argue shouldn't really be solved. _YOU_ chose to update your browser while it was running, you're on a non-mainstream platform (Linux Desktop) and you're unable to grasp that pulling binaries and replacing them with others could cause issues.

Reddit will have you back now.

No, Firefox's default setting is to upgrade even more aggressively than I'm experiencing. And, it's worth pointing out, the browser works fine, except that I'm prevented from opening a new tab. Sometimes I really don't want the interruption, and I just copy URLs and recycle tabs. That goes fine, it's just an annoyance considered by the developers to be a feature.

When the distro updates Firefox out from underneath it Firefox's options are; crash because API call does not match, detect the API incompatibility and prompt the user to do a clean restart, or spend a monumental amount of engineering work to maintain API compatibility while running mixed Gecko versions.

Using the Mozilla build in /opt, the Snap [1] or Flatpack [2] versions will avoid the distro updating Firefox out from underneath it.

[1] https://snapcraft.io/firefox [2] https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.mozilla.firefox

Linux also does not allow you to overwrite a running program; you'll get ETXTBSY.

The difference to Windows is that Linux allows you to delete (unlink) files that are in use. The inode actually owning the data continues to exist until the program is dead.

Yes the file still exists physically in disk, but if you were to execute the binary path again, would that give you the old or new result? I'm not sure how Firefox process isolation works, but it could be (armchair guess) that they just spawn the binary with inputs, which would be a possible cause of incompability.

> Firefox isn't very stable for non-tech people

What does this mean?

I answered that question above.

>The true reasons Firefox lost market share is because we, developer & tech people started to install Chrome on family computers instead of Firefox because it was safer & faster (way way faster). And we never came back from it.

Which comes down to the reasons I've already stated.

Those reasons might have applied half a decade ago. I was one of the early adopters of chrome and I've since switched back to Firefox for a better experience

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