Going by the numbers, that's far from the truth. Majority of user never used addons, not even adblockers. Even the most popular addons are only used by a small minority of users.
I'm also a big addon-user and complain what firefox has lost over time. But we should also admit that we are a minority, and addons are simply not the major selling point for a mainstream product's success.
It's entirely plausible that when you alienate a power user, you also alienate their entire social circle, dependent on them for tech advice, so you lose 20x-100x of your audience/users.
I'm not saying that's exactly what happened, but it definitely happened to some degree. Personally, I no longer recommend or use Firefox to anyone. The techy people in my circle use Brave or ungoogled Chromium.
The untechy ones use Chrome/Edge and maybe have Opera/Vivaldi as their backup browser or Safari if they're big Apple fans. Almost no one uses FF anymore. Without its extensibility, it simply doesn't compete anymore.
I'm sure I'm far from the only HNer that has recommended or installed Firefox for many friends and family. I mean, I used to recommend and install Firefox before their terrible management turned the org into a dumpster fire. They've lost both myself and everyone I would have turned onto Firefox.
Do they get those numbers via telemetry or from the server-side? If the former, those stats may be skewed by the overlap between the users who use several extensions and those who disable all telemetry.
In a mozilla bug report where they discuss removing user.js, they point to telemetry that indicates that no one uses this functionality. I'd argue that the Venn diagram between users of user.js and those who disable telemetry approximates a single circle.
You need data to support that claim. To me, it sounds unlikely. My guess, most users accept telemetry, tech savvy or not.
For instance, I'm tech savvy, and explicitly choose telemetry when on non-work computers because I want to enable companies to understand my behaviors so they can in the best cases deliver better features to me.
(I'm a 15+ year user, I started using it when I discovered I could run it off a flash drive on locked-down shared computers.)
They also blocked about:config (fixed by using F-Droid Fennec). I also lost functionality that I had relied on (not going to turn this into a rant on that - and that's probably due to the rewrite, but it's still unfortunate).
Here are the addons I'm still miss post change. There's been no modifications to the list since. "View Source" "Tampermonkey" "Old Reddit Redirect" "Custom Style Script" "Android PDF.js" "uMatrix" "Alt Text Viewer"
The only one they had an adequate replacement for was "Dark Mode" - "Dark Reader" does basically same job with slightly less convenient UI. "Dark Reader" is also an extremely crude alternative for custom CSS.
I feel like it should be obvious that, at least in the case of addons, some users want addons and some users don't care about addons, but very very few users explicitly don't want addons to be available at all, and that consequently the correct approach is to make addons available.
Since 2015 Firefox has become rapidly less capable and rapidly more 'secure' for non-technical users. It's just not what I or the original userbase want. But like with all things Mozilla (including the original employees and CEO) we've been replaced. There's plenty of users who just want Chrome that's not labeled Chrome and Firefox modern gives it to them.
I still think most of what Mozilla does with Firefox is absolutely stupid and I wish it was different because attracting or retaining more users would make Firefox less likely to die, and generally help the web.
Firefox isn't Chrome that's not labeled Chrome, though. Less customization doesn't mean it's necessarily more Chrome-like, especially lately where Chrome's implementing things like tab groups and keeping more or less the same UI design. The new Firefox looks more Safari-ish than Chrome-ish. to me.
https://earthweb.com/how-many-people-use-firefox/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...
Haha. Firefox went from above 20% marketshare in its early days, to below 4% today, and the number is continually dwindling. At this point it's the few defensive, aggressive fanboys left who are "speaking for themselves". We'll probably still hear this kind of comment from the likes of you even when usage drops below 0.01%.
And I don't want to hear the "it's chrome's fault" again from the FF brigade, IE had more marketshare in the IE vs Netscape days than Chrome has today, and it didn't stop Firefox from eating at IE's shares.
> And I don't want to hear the "it's chrome's fault" again from the FF brigade,
Sure, who cares about facts when you can have guts-feeling...
> IE had more marketshare in the IE vs Netscape days than Chrome has today, and it didn't stop Firefox from eating at IE's shares.
IE had no marketing at that point, while Firefox did had significant marketing at the time. Chrome then started also with big marketing, while Firefox was busy with dying projects. Coincidence? Seems like marketing is a major factor for success even here.
Chrome imitates Chrome far better than Firefox does. I just don't think they can catch up at this point.
edit: maybe you meant addons? Chrome has more addons, with more users, updated more often. Chrome fails at ublock because it wants to, but as long as you're not messing with Google's core business, Chrome is (of course) going to be better off than the product of the endangered company that solely survives from Google's donations.
Most open source chromium forks on Android don't have add-ons though, so kiwi is the best option. I guess it's usually because those forks are usually very privacy centric so add-on support is far from a priority. Kiwi on the other hand is basically stock desktop chrome
Edit: apparently they don't outright collect user data!
>The browser is getting paid by search engines for every search done using Kiwi Browser.
>Depending on the search engine choice, requests may go via Kiwibrowser / Kiwisearchservices servers. This is for invoicing our search partners and provide alternative search results (e.g. bangs aka "shortcuts").
>In some countries, the browser displays sponsored tiles or news on the homepage.
>User data (browsing, navigation, passwords, accounts) is not collected because we have no interest to know what you do in the browser. Our main goal is to convince you to use a search engine partner, and this search engine makes money / new partnerships and shares revenue with us.
And you know, even if I was indeed the minority, so what? I stand by liking FF and I will continue to use it until it's defunct. Because I can :)
In my mind, that was peak Firefox. Yes performance wasn't great, but I didn't care. It was good enough and I mostly browsed with JavaScript disabled.
The new vim mode plugins can't compete with the old plugins because they are much more restricted in what they can do.
Unfortunately, I'm now at a point where I can't be bothered constantly fucking around with my setup and have resigned myself to just accepting whatever Mozilla wants to shove down my throat.
From what I can tell, the community has forked pentadactyl[0] and are using it on Palemoon[1]. I'm guessing if it could still run on Firefox today, they would do that instead of using Palemoon (but I could be wrong). Anyway, I still hate that they killed what made Firefox unique. Trying to beat Chrome at it's own game seems like a pointless battle.
And somewhat ironically, while I already had it installed for quite a while, I only really started seriously using and valuing DownThemAll after Firefox 57 had already come out.
[1] Eventually they relented somewhat and said that they would accept an API extension whereby an extension could download to the last downloaded-to location (even outside of the Downloads folder) without having to explicitly prompt the user again – but until now it was never actually implemented (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1342563).
[2] You can only choose between "automatically rename" or "overwrite", and you can only choose in advance (!) when you don't actually have the necessary information to make that decision (especially seeing as Webextensions can't read any local files, so they have absolutely no idea what sort of filename conflicts could potentially exist). There's no "skip" option, and while there's a "prompt" option (however well/badly implemented that might be), Firefox doesn't even support it.
that's why they've killed XUL. that's why they're going even further by enforcing an inferior extension standard from their supposed competitor. that's why they've killed off the extensions and about:config for the android version. that's why you can't even use a private extension on desktop without jumping through the hoops. that's why usercss (toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets - legacy and disabled by default - the writing is on the wall already) and userjs will get axed. that's why about:config will get axed on the desktop version as well.
all of that is just off the top of my head. and in the end, Firefox will be a clunky and inferior alternative for Chrome with not 2%, but 0.2% of the market. which is the goal.
I don't think so. There's many more ways and decisions they could have gotten away with to make Firefox worse without outright killing it, that they haven't done (yet).
Rather, I think it's more likely that Firefox, the browser application, is a bit of an albatross to the Mozilla foundation. Something they begrudgingly have to live with, at least in the short term. It's their organization's 'product', but to a certain layer of leadership and above, it's just another vehicle for their broader mission which could be accomplished much easier by just being a chrome fork instead. It'd also remove the need to hire and retain so many pesky and annoying engineers.
Such that the Mozilla corp. is something they have to keep around, but definitely not something they want to keep around.
It is an attractive way of rationalizing the astonishing and bewildering decision making at Mozilla.
> that's why they've killed XUL
We couldn't deliver a multiprocess browser without doing it.
> about:config for the android version
I completely supported this and continue to do so. GeckoView on Android works completely differently than desktop Firefox, and about:config's semantics are not identical between the two. A few of us were interested in offering an alternative that gave users a way to make adjustments in a way that was "safe," but as you can imagine that has never been a management priority.
even if the management understood that advanced extensions were a major factor for choosing Firefox over the alternatives and were willing to dedicate enough time/people/money to tackling the issue?
my presumption of malice was primarily based on what followed - crippled android addons, forced addon signing on non-Nightly, upcoming adoption of manifest v3. put together, the poweruser experience we had in 2015 is better than the one we have now. and unlike XUL, the only explanation I see for all of these is either malice or stupidity.
So uh. What was that whole thing about making all the extensions rewrite their code to support multiprocess?
Which many extensions did, putting in huge amounts of work, only to be told shortly after that XUL was going away.
https://web.archive.org/web/20191220054834/https://developer...
But you did.[1]