Firefox is losing users fast | Hacker News Reader

Firefox is losing users fast

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If they focused more on the browser and spent less time and effort on these weird side projects they'd probably be in a better spot.

Some data points if anyone from FF sees this: I try and proselyte users to Firefox as often as I can. The biggest selling point I've had success with so far is the containers feature.

The big place I see people going is Brave under the idea it is more private or secure.

I'd also love to donate money to help the FF browser development but I have no guarantee that money will actually go to FF instead of some other crazy thing I don't really care for/about.

Please FF is the only place still not under the Chromium dictates, please save Firefox Mozilla.

Do you see Brave as more private and secure? Or do you think it gives a false sense of security relative to Firefox?

I like that it blocks ads by default. Other than that I don't care too much about privacy .

The thing with Firefox for me has always been that it feels heavy. I've been trying to use it every now and then since 2005. I even used it exclusively at some point in Linux because of Treestyle tab. But for me it has always felt heavy, sluggish and sometimes unresponsive (at some point it was single threaded, do 1 tab crashing/hanging killed the whole thing).

Firefox had its chance 17 years ago when it was at its prime and was in a position to expand and get more users to become the dominant browser. Instead, they chose not to and Google overtook and sabotaged them whilst Mozilla was under the spell of Google's billions even thinking that they could do without Google's billions. [0] Mozilla did not care and did nothing about that.

It is now too late to stop Google. All roads lead to Chromium.

> I'd also love to donate money to help the FF browser development but I have no guarantee that money will actually go to FF instead of some other crazy thing I don't really care for/about.

Exactly. Everyone knows donating would be pointless, since we all know who is bankrolling the development.

Mozilla is the only one that can save itself and is already at the mercy of Google. No one else can do anything about it to help them unless Mozilla steps up and properly leads itself by example rather being lead by Google.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.compu...

There needs to be a new effort like how Firefox was created. I remember the headlines at the time were that a "rebrlious" young guy was going against big Mozilla and it's full fledged navigator/browser that was pretty beefy.

Fast forward to today, someone gotta grab Ff engine, strip as all the crap and create a privacy first lean, fast and secure alternative.

Something like what the Brave guys did, but for FF .

> Please FF is the only place still not under the Chromium dictates, please save Firefox Mozilla.

There is WebKit! The only other remaining browser-engine held by WebKitGtk and Apple. WebKitGtk is used by many applications which use Gtk and the official web browser of GNOME, Epiphany. And as built-in engine by Apple on iOS and MacOS. Despite rumors, there is still a Qt5-Port used by Otter-Browser.

I would be happy to see a full integration of WebRTC in Epiphany. Luckily we will see soon support for WebExtensions.

Unfortunately the WebKit implementation in iOS is a rehash, even worse, of the IE days. So I definitely wouldn't call it WebKit or an alternate choice(Except it's Apple so for some bizarre reason it gets a free pass on HN).

The original comment is still effectively correct in spirit, Firefox is the only browser not under "hostage".

I can only tell you about my personal impressions:

    * Google has a lot power. Many Web-developers seem to think that "Chrome is correct" and other engines must behave the same. I'm questioning this.
    * Apple locks-down their devices. This is not acceptable, because the customers are the owners of these devices. As a side-effect - this prevents a complete dominance of Google's Blink Engine.
    * Google is pressing on every user of their website "Install the Google Search App", "Install Google Chrome" and especially annoying on iOS is Google Maps which constantly tries open the App-Store (somewhat also Apples fault?)
    * Finally Microsoft Teams allows using their website only with Edge (Blink) or Chrome (the original UI for Blink). So we're back in 2001?]
    * Opera, Trident and KHTML no longer maintained.
    * Other than WebKit the Gecko-Engine seems not be used often as integratable  engine. There was Galeon but replaced by Epiphany.

This is what Mozilla does. They did it with Mozilla, then Phoenix(now Firefox) saved them. Did they learn anything from that and keep developing Firefox as the best browser? Of course not, they slowly turned Firefox back into Mozilla.

People complain about Google and Chrome/Chromium for turning the browser market back into a monoculture, but it's just as much Mozilla's own fault for failing to keep up. I want to use Firefox, I want to LIKE Firefox, but Mozilla has for years now decided not to prioritize making Firefox a great browser.

15+ years ago Firefox was focused on a fast, stable browser. It was the alternative to the Mozilla browser. They did an excellent job of keeping it both. At some point they decided to make it an experimental browser. As soon as they started having regular breaking changes to plugins was when I switched to Chrome.

I recently went back to Firefox on mobile, because I like the idea of not giving google all of my data. Also, they have ublock origin, privacy badger and noscript.

I have to look at fewer advertisements, but it still isn't as stable or fast as Chrome.

It would be great if they refocused on stable fast browsing or spun off a new browser for that purpose (and this time kept it that way when the stable/fast option becomes vastly more popular).

Strange. I use Firefox on Android daily on both my phone and tablet and haven't seen it crash in months.

Well, that's kind of the point. I haven't seen Chrome crash in years and I use those plugins and a lot more on desktop. On Android I had the same stable fast experience as on desktop (and it wasn't even using ublock to filter 90% of the internet on Android). Chrome just seems a lot more stable and no slowdowns where I have to just close it. Sometimes the keyboard stops working on data entry with firefox. I have none of those problems when I switch back to Chrome. Maybe it's plugin support issues or maybe it's older-phone issues, but there are definitely issues that I don't have on Chrome using the same hardware.

Use Kiwi for Android. It is based on Chrome and has support for extensions. Win Win Situation for you

I haven't benchmarked it, but FF seems as fast as Chrome to me and in my case, tabs definitely crash less frequently.

And my overall memory usage is down.

I switched back about 6 months ago and am completely pleased with the change.

All that said, if they made it faster and more stable, I certainly wouldn't complain. :)

One thing I have noticed is that a handful of websites just don't work and I have to view them in Chrome. I think this is a consequence of our homogeneous environment now.

I hated the most recent redesign with the jumbo user chrome.

So much so that I jumped ship. Went to Opera for a bit, no on Vivaldi.

Vivaldi: Has a pleasant looking UI, is easy to customize the color scheme, has a TON of options for various workflows, is fast.

While FF likes to show strong benchmarks for Gecko, Blink is noticeably smoother in practice.

Mozilla really needs to inject new life into Firefox. Fix the UI; fix the perf problems. The Servo team was making great progress in the perf department. So sad that Mozilla dropped that program.

I'm an open source advocate. I used firefox for decades, even when it was being blown out of the water by Chrome performance wise. Recently I've switched to Brave due to many websites not rendering correctly or running slowly. Lots of government websites don't work with firefox for instance. You'll get decently far along in the form of a street parking permit, and then you can't submit it for some reason.

I wish Mozilla chose to pursue making the best browser engine possible. It's a winning strategy as we can see from the dominance of chromium based browsers. Instead they've tried adding features or products paired with the browser as their strategy. Some, such as containers, are great. Others, like pocket, are forgettable.

I'm also not a fan of how the CEO has been increasingly rewarded even though the market share has plummeted. At a certain point you need leadership to commit to improving market share and hold them to it. However, this has nothing to do with why I've switched browsers.

If Google had spent millions of dollars trying to kill Firefox they would not have done as much damage as the MBAs that have taken over.

hmm, isn't that what happened to Sun - the managers/mbas took over, then the engineers revolted

"Generally, MAU [monthly active users] fluctuates over the course of a year, dropping in the summer months and during holidays"

That seems to fit what's happening here. Longer term, firefox seems to have lost 15-20% of users in the past 3 years, which is substantial but not catastrophic. On the other hand, that probably means a much steeper decline in market share.

If you change the region from "Worldwide" to "United States", you can see a much more concerning long-term trend.

Anecdotally, I've noticed an increasing number of websites where basic functionality does not work on desktop Firefox. I now have to open Chrome on a daily basis whereas just a couple years ago I was 100% FF for browsing (not counting using other browsers for front end testing etc).

For example, FedEx tracking refuses to work on Firefox. Shapeways (3D printing service) landing page was (is?) broken/non interactive on FF. Also a vBulletin based forum I regularly visit started return 400 Bad Request responses when visiting with FF. All these work fine with Chrome and used to work with Firefox.

Chrome is the new IE

The IE reference was specific unreasonable technologies, forced defaults and restrictions placed on developers by the browser vendor. Not related to popularity.

Safari is the new IE by any measure.

You are giving me bad flashbacks to Internet Explorer websites. When I worked at a large (fortune 500) defense contractor the new timecard portal was ie only. We had no windows machines (we were a SunOS and HPUX shop). Solution was to set up a citrix windows NT environment, so we'd all have go to a separate terminal and remote into these machines to do our time in IE.

For me firefox was failing on some ordering sites, but it turned out to be I had ublock origin on my firefox which some sites won't work with.

I've noticed this more and more. What's strange, is that Safari is often more compatible with such websites than Firefox.

"Is the website down, or is it just Firefox?" is a question I ask myself several times a day nowadays.

I stopped using Firefox because of the poor text rendering compared to Chrome.

A lot of people here dismissed me, didn't believe me, or just said that I shouldn't care.

I can't help but think that the Firefox "community" is just kinda like that. They don't really care about things that regular users are bothered by.

Culture dictates priorities, right?

Huh, I left Chrome due to the poor rendering compared to Firefox.

Oh that's interesting, same here. None of the antialiasing levels can make it look like chrome which is just so odd. They even redesigned the tabs recently and inverted the selection colours so the tab you're in looks like the only one that's deselected which is just confusing and stupid. Luckily there's a painful way to install a theme that fixes that at least.

Neither of that stopped me from using it as the main browser though, it was the lack of specific-tab screen share that's sort of essential for work meetings and is for some reason just absent. I imagine for some people the lack of chromecast support may be a deal breaker too. There's just no end to the list of features it just doesn't have. Mostly I imagine, as all requests on Bugzilla are closed with wonfix, because clearly users don't know shit right? Their HR department must have "extreme arrogance" as a prerequisite for hiring people...

I think it's more likely that you can see something other people can't. I have this page open on macOS on identical monitors side by side, one in Chrome, and one in FF, and I legitimately can't tell a difference between the two in terms of text rendering. If I was in a discussion with you and you were going on about how poorly Firefox rendered text, I would be skeptical, because I don't see it.

Can someone who can see this issue with Firefox rendering poorly (or other browsers rendering poorly compared to Firefox) take some screenshots of both browsers side-by-side that captures this issue so the rest of us can see?

I use Chromium every now and then and notice this as well, however, Chromium instead have very poor rendering of images.

How do you come to this conclusion given that YOY data shows

July of last year: 197.8 million active users

July of this year: 196.2 million active users

Maybe they looked at the US statistics, 29 million users in July 2019 to 22 million users now is quite the drop.

The US has a lot of Apple products relative to the rest of the world. Perhaps this is why the US numbers are dropping.

Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but from the graphs it seems like there's been barely a change in the last few years? I wouldn't call that fast.

Yes the title has been editorialized.

"Firefox user activity" would be better.

I might be reading something wrong, but in 2019 the number is about 250 million. In 2022 the number is about 200 million. Losing a 5th of their users in a couple years seems like a big change to me?

Hmm I suppose. Got me wondering if this is just a general trend towards mobile browsers instead, so I looked into Chrome statistics:

2014: 1.29 billion

2015: 1.54 billion

2016: 1.88 billion

2017: 2.07 billion

2018: 2.40 billion

2019: 2.64 billion

2020: 2.65 billion

https://backlinko.com/chrome-users

Not that much gained recently it seems. Can't find a good source for 2021 and 2022, but looking at some it may have actually decreased too during that time.

That comparison is between early 2019 and summer 2022. The page mentions usage drops in the summer, and comparing July 2019 to July 2022 is quite close. However, the charts show United States usage has dropped much more significantly.

Is there a general trend of losing web users to mobile? That might explain the slow decline.

Firefox is on mobile, and I much prefer it to Chrome. Just an FYI.

Chrome for Android has no extensions at all. Most webpages are unusable on mobile without extensions like ublock origin or "I don't mind about cookies" (this last one is for removing the annoying warnings about cookies in EU).

Firefox do have ublock origin but is lacking other extensions.

I'm using chromium-based kiwi browser, fast as chrome, with full support for extensions

I was using firefox for Android but they removed the support for extensions (actually there is a restricted subset of curated extensions that are allowed).

So I moved to a chromium based browser.

I was using firefox on my laptop because it was in synch with my phone, but bit by bit I started using it less and less.

At firefox they are not paying attention to users, so they are losing them slowly...

Why not just say you moved to Kiwi Browser? Only Chromium browser properly supporting extensions.

It seems there is: https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share#monthly-202...

This definitely seems like a decent explanation in my opinion. Sure Firefox is available on mobile, but on iPhone there's not much point to it since its WebKit anyways, and Androids have Chrome on them by default, which most people are already comfortable with.

I feel like I care more about my browsing experience on my desktop than I do on my phone, and I would guess that's a fairly popular opinion, so on mobile I usually use the default, but on desktop use Firefox.

Don't you he stupid amounts of ads with chrome on android? I wouldn't want to miss uBo

I do most of my browsing on my desktop. On mobile, it's usually really light stuff like searching up a restaurant or store, reading HN or some other silly little thing. Occasionally I see ads which are annoying, but most of these things don't have many ads anyways, so its not a big deal.

I moved away from Firefox when Mozilla went "woke". What's the point of supporting an organisation distancing itself from its core ideals and laying off employees while the CEO gives herself a "raise"? I felt terrible for the people being laid off in the pandemic and the impact on their families. It's good to see Firefox haemorrhaging a slow uneventful death.

It's anecdotical, but I did use to have the common nitpicks with Firefox, the slight but annoying incompatibility with that what where the net is evolving these days, and weird performance chokes.

Then in the last few months... I noticed I do not notice these anymore. Using Firefox is pleasant and decent both on desktop and mobile now. They got their shit together, or my browsing habits have changed? Dunno... needs more time to decide.

Anyways, the deal maker for me is that still Firefox is the only browser that allows to export data from it in a tolerable manner. Sync data is accessible via the "About Sync" extension, and the ability to share multiple tabs on Android is golden. (As of Brave: Brave sync is great, but a third-party client or extension to explore its data does not yet exist [at least, it's hard to search for it, because "Brave sync extension" will bring up ways to sync your extensions in Brave, not extensions that interact with Brave sync].)

Is this based on Firefox's own telemetry? I disable that, but I'm not sure how many other users might also do that. Firefox is not a default browser on any platform, so people install it for a reason (perceived better privacy, security, etc), and might be more inclined to tweak the default settings.

Please try Firefox on mobile if you've been using Chrome on Android. The adblocker makes it faster than Chrome, as well as more pleasing to use. Google refuses to support extensions on Chrome, hence no adblock there - but various Chromium forks could also be alternatives.

Yep this is why I stopped using firefox for android, they restricted the list of extension they support. I had extensions I didn't want to stop using so I stopped using firefox on android and moved to chromium

Too bad

I really wonder what the future of browsers looks like. Personally, I prefer my apps to be fairly simple, but it feels like every browser is constantly adding new features to try and stand out somehow. All really I want is a way to browse the web, use some extensions, and maybe do some dev work. Feature bloat is really starting to annoy me, and I wish there was just more focus on things like performance/security updates, or additions to the engine for supporting new technologies.

I hope when the Chrome v3 Manifest changes launch, it drives a lot more users to Firefox when suddenly sites on Chrome are infested with ads. Firefox has a real opportunity there.

Correct it for seasonality and try the analysis again

Did you look at the graphs you posted? Looks like it's been fluctuating around the same number for over a year.

Browser which is toy for devs who completely ignore for years user requests is losing users, I'm shocked! Left the boat few years ago first for Edge, now on Vivaldi.

Never really used on mobile, it was always useless (slow for starters), I'm better of with Kiwi browser with proper extension support.

Killing extensions android users used as a way around them constantly removing features such as inspecting element showed they gave no fucks.

I've been using brave more and more, as soon as I migrate all my bookmarks I'm off it for good.

I used FF for testing apps, now I use Edge or Chrome to do so. The main problem with FF browser is their UX, IMO, it is so outdated. For example, it is hard to distinguish a active tab from the rest, as the difference is tiny.

Firefox on Linux is what works best for me. Konqueror doesn't work at all with TradingView, and Firefox loads faster, too. Chrome is a huge risk to user freedom and security. I refuse to install it.

Fix your mobile app first!

This can also be an overall industry trend as now all big players have native apps for smartphones/tablets. People might prefer to use phone or tablets compared to desktops.

Any hypothesis as to why China usage spiked since late 2021?

Is this data gathered from the "Firefox Data Collection and Use" section of the settings or another method?

from 2011 to 2021: https://backlinko.com/browser-market-share

So what is the alternative? Anything but chrome.

IE. I mean, Edge.

That’s Chrome, but with Microsoft telemetry. Hardly an upgrade.

I find Vivaldi most customizable, Brave has horible customization, was using Edge for few years after switching from Firefox, but I was scared of each update and their new annoyances and UI changes introduced, meanwhile in Vivaldi update notification gaves me option Skip this version or Remind me later, Microsoft will nag you with distracting icon unless you update.

I'll be the last !

And I hate chrome.

ff should make front end IDEs

There is a 4 word phrase that encapsulates what happened to Firefox. I won't post it, but it began with how they did Eich and with how they're rewarding whoever that new "CEO" is.

As a 15+ year Firefox user, I finally gave up and moved to Brave. Good riddance.

I find Brave customization abysmal (plus their crypto and other stuff makes them kinda shady), tried it and you could not customize even basic things, Vivaldi offers much more options.

For Android I recommend kiwi browser, only browser with proper extension support.

Thanks for the Kiwi hint! Exploring it now.

Their "crypto stuff" is opt-in and enables you to view ads, earn crypto and give it to content creators. I don't use it, but it's a cool feature to provide for those who want it. Even cooler is being able to access huge parts of the internet (Web 3 and alternate protocols in general) not accessible with other browsers.

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