Firefox lost ~16M users since last year | Hacker News Reader

Firefox lost ~16M users since last year

data.firefox.com

74 pointsfreediver213 comments

I hope they never give up, as it's been my favourite browser since its inception. Sure they messed stuff up along the way and not every update has been equally great, but I love using Firefox over any Chromium based browser and been doing so for almost 20 years now.

Same. And I love Android Firefox. Would be horrible not to have Firefox extensions on my phone (or the syncing).

After the Android Firefox rewrite in ~2020 you don't have 99% of Firefox extensions available on Android - only a short list of selected mainstream ones, like Ublock Origin.

If you want to install any other not in the blessed list you need to jump through a horrendous sequence of hoops every time:

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...

Killing off extensions has been a pastime of Mozilla programers from the outset decades ago.

It's by far the most annoying aspect of Mozilla yet the organization has never taken steps to prevent the practice.

Mozilla programmers are a law unto themselves—users bedamned.

Kiwi Browser on Android supports extensions. Have a look at it.

True. But the browser doesn't receive regular updates.

Firefox's extensions on Android are why I still use my smartphone to go on Internet.

Yes, obviously they did! they keep denying the importance of implementing things like this:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1542189

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/shortcut-for-different-...

Even if it's a highly requested feature, minimal effort, high impact, and something users expect to Just Work™, just like it does in Chrome; it's still getting ignored.

And all they have to do is copy what Chrome does 100% exactly the same, no effort to design something new. They have all the functionality already in place, under about:profiles, it just needs a nice UI on top, and to open new links in the "last active profile".

When a user sees this does not work like it does in Chrome, and they have to struggle to achieve the same functionality with a worse workflow and a hideous UI, they will simply claim the functionality does not exist and carry on with their life using Chrome. They will not bother to search and install the extension that does this for them, that's simply not a realistic expectation to have.

I can work around this because I appreciate the other things Firefox has more than the effort I put into profile management. But I'm tech, and highly tolerant of things like this. Normal users aren't, the simplest inconvenience will throw them off for good.

If something Just Work™ in Chrome then it has to Just Work™ in Firefox as well.

This was just one example, probably the most obvious example of them all.

This is where the corruption coming from Google money shows through.

I'd add that to store the Firefox search engines, they developed a custom file format. This is to make it more difficult to configure search engines (and make you more likely to keep the default ones).

https://www.jeffersonscher.com/ffu/searchjson.html

" This is where the corruption coming from Google money shows through."

Never thought of that, perhaps showering Mozilla with money had two goals, getting search users and corrupting Firefox for Chrome to take over.

Indeed, they might say they're not influenced by Google, or even believe it themselves, but when your job security relies on not addressing user needs, you won't.

I've hated that misfeature from the day chrome rolled it out and it was a major factor in pushing me back to Firefox.

Logging in to the browser and not a website? And then your account is indelibly imprinted on the browser? In what universe is that a good idea?

And then Google saw that people weren't using this so they made it that if I just go to Gmail and sign in, the browser casually slurps up the login anyway and anyone else who uses the computer later can see that my email address exists.

I think we're discussing different things here.

Profiles are entire separate namespaces at the browser level. The login functionality Chrome has is an extra piece on top, that ties your profile to your Google Login.

I too obviously hate that functionality, but it's unrelated.

We just switched from LastPass to Bitwarden at work and as I use Bitwarden for my personal stuff, I need to use browser profiles for separate Bitwarden extensions. Before I had been using Firefox containers to separate my work browsing from my personal browsing. It's really minor but the way Chrome handles profiles made me switch back after 3-4 years on Firefox.

I never ever had to switch profiles in Firefox in my 20 years of usage.

Neither did I for 10 years until I discovered the concept. Then I started making use of it and liked it. Same for everybody else around me, they either already knew of profiles and used them, or started using them once they learned about them.

Thing is, they used them in Chrome, because that's where it was easy and obvious to do. And since Firefox does not have an equivalently easy and obvious workflow, they keep using Chrome, and teach others as well to use Chrome. Reason why the drop in numbers happen.

Dont you think it's more because Chrome is backed by a trillion dollar company and it's kinda the go-to browser nowadays because everybody believes Chrome is faster than Firefox? I have a bunch of friends using Chrome, but they all say it's for speed, not for switching profiles?

And I have a bunch of friends that say it's because it lacks the profile functionality and they can tolerate the speed.

It's not the only issue Firefox has, but it's the highest impact, lowest effort one they have. Performance improvements are hard, PWA is hard to implement. Putting a better UI on existing functionality is simple by comparison. They could score an easy win here, but they choose not to.

What do you want to use profiles for?

Having separate accounts, bookmarks, history, state, and extensions for:

* My personal usage.

* My professional usage.

* Each individual client I contract for.

* Testing out extensions.

* Local development playground.

It's extremely convenient to have all of this be just 2 clicks away the way Chrome has it, simple and intuitive to use.

I have all of this in Firefox as well, but it's not as easy to set up and use, difficult to navigate and hard to look at. Plus links always open in the default profile instead of the last active one so I always have to copy things around and shuffle windows. I can deal with this, other people don't and won't. It has to Just Work™ like it does in Chrome. They use Chrome because that's where it's easy. And because of that Firefox looses potential users.

Maybe all the features still missing in the Android Firefox played some role ?

Stuff like no print support, no keyboard shortcuts or no tab-bar on tablets ?

Not to mention general extensions support being a shit show as well, with basically just a very small curated list of extensions (mainly add blockers) being supported out of the box.

All of these features were supported by Firefox on Android until ~2 years ago, when they did a rewrite and then ignored requests to bring this functionality back ever since.

A couple links to the Android Firefox open issues:

keyboard shortcuts - https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/3729

print support - https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/10217

tab bar in tablet mode - https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/2344

tablet UX improvements - https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/4498

> no print support

Um, somewhat tangential, but I built a statically generated CV in html, presuming that I could effortlessly print that to a PDF using a browser. Not so. Web page printing is extremely broken in every browser, and I tried them all. And, every browser had different defects. Chromium seemed to have the least horrible print functionality, but it was still really really broken. It's probably ok if you want to have a copy of some article content where presentation doesn't matter, but if it's something that you want to have a specific layout or design, tough luck.

Silly question, but did you just use the same CSS as for the screen, or also make use of the various `@media print {...}` related CSS properties (for things like page breaks, switching to more traditional print units instead of px and rem etc)

I didn't switch distance units, but I did try out more or less everything else. Print-specific css properties weren't well supported or well implemented. Dealing with page breaks was particularly annoying.

I switched to Iceraven [0] last year and never looked back. It is a fork of the new Firefox for Android but with a much longer list of extensions and about:config support. I specifically need the latter to route traffic through a local proxy before.

[0]: https://github.com/fork-maintainers/iceraven-browser

Oh and it is written in Kotlin. Maybe I should learn it just to try hacking more features in.

Interesting, thanks! Will definitely try it out as well! :-)

Still, sad that people have to invest their time to do this, instead of Mozilla providing it as default functionality by default. :P

Why not use Kiwi Browser? No limited list of extensions, all extensions just work.

That's also one of the few options if you want to run a browser with web extensions on Android, yeah. Most extensions do work, but its not 100%. Also its Chromium/Blink based, so one needs to use the Chrome extensions + at least for a while it looked like its not maintained, but I might have missed something.

it was abandoned for while, now regularly updated

Thanks for the heads up - tried it yesterday and it indeed looks much better now! :-)

You can install whatever add-ons you want on Firefox for Android (as long as they're compatible), you're not limited to the default list.

See here [1] for instructions (these were written for Nightly but they work on the stable channel now).

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...

"It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.‘"

Sorry, I could not resist posting this quote because that's very much what that guide for using custom addons in Firefox reminds me of.

Previously, you would just go to the addons page and install the addon, like on desktop.

Now since the Android Firefox rewrite you need to:

- use nigtly, not normal Android firefox - do some funky clicking on logos to enable a hidden setting - create a Mozilla account - create an addon list for that account - finding the addon list id and manually typing it into my specially configured nigly version of Android Firefox

THEN finally I can run than one addon & I can probably repeat most of that process every time I want to add another addon or enable this on another device. Perfect!

If I really wanted to kill an annoying feature while still technically providing a an almost impossible way for people to use it, that's exactly how I would do it!

This also makes sure the amount of users of any non-blessed extensions (that are on an official list and can be installed easily) will be so small as to brush off any bug reports and feature requests.

Even extension authors will likely not prioritize Android support in their projects due to the horrendous UX preventing users from actually installing their extensions.

> - use nigtly, not normal Android firefox

As I mentioned, this is not necessary anymore.

But I agree with the rest of your post.

Thank! That is at least some progress after so long. :P

Meanwhile Mozilla's CEO salary went from $2.9m to $5.6m from 2020 to 2021.

outrageaus

Mansions don’t pay for themselves

Just inherit them, nothing could go wrong.

I know. Buying a mansion is so nouveau riche.

Still got to pay that property tax

Not if you have the money for a mansion (or 10). Then you have the money for lawyers and schemes to legally avoid paying it.

Same with Wikimedia. The association seems to become some kind of cult where it is seen as OK to spend enormous amounts of money on overheads and salaries without really making anything better because "big salaries = good performance", I wish we had put that fallacy to rest already.

As a for-profit business, that CEO salary is typical for a company of their size.

People seem to always confuse Mozilla Foundation (non-profit) and Mozilla (for-profit) entities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation

That doesn't make it any more legitimate.

The salary is definitely typical. What's less typical is an under-performing employee getting a 93% raise.

What makes you say this individual is underperforming?

What metric are you measuring this individual against?

Because Revenues went from $441M (2020), to $527M (2021), that's a 20% YoY increase in topline revenue growth. That's huge for a company of this size.

https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-202...

The only metric that matters given the mission of Mozilla is user share...

> What metric are you measuring this individual against? Because Revenues went from $441M (2020), to $527M (2021), that's a 20% YoY increase in topline revenue growth. That's huge for a company of this size.

That annual report can be tl;dr-ed as "we're like years away from closing shop but we sampled data at juuust the right moment to make you wonder why". That's a huge for a company of this size, but it's also largely accidental.

The mechanisms behind the revenue growth are fragile and tied to the browser (if not directly, like Pocket, at least in the initial stages of the funnel and through branding, like Mozilla VPN). And the browser is bleeding users. There are plenty of alternatives for all these services which will be there if users decide to switch browsers. The only way it'll still look like growth next year is if adoption of paid services will be slow enough that it'll take more than an year to reach the declining user cap.

Mozilla can secure secure its position through attractive software and services, not bean counting bullshit -- paying customers pay for software and services, not numerology. Failing to deliver attractive software and services is a core failure, and the capital underperformance: unless it's rectified, annual reports won't look as pretty.

So yeah, my metric here is increasing paid service adoption base. $441M -> $527M is an attractive looking feature, but that's because it only contains the initial adoption uptick in a shrinking potential customer base.

Seems to me like the CEO is underperforming, shouldn't the company look for a new CEO like any company of this size?

They were originally a nonprofit, and then created a for-profit child company and moved all resources to it.

It's baffling to me that this is legal.

I really do not see the issue. The difference between a non-profit and for-profit owned by a non-profit is basically nil in my country (Sweden). Nothing prevents non-profits from paying their managers ridiculous salaries. You do not need to create a for profit company to enrich yourself.

The board and managers of Mozilla Foundation being unethical does not have anything to do with the existence of Mozilla Corporation or not, that is just minor administrative details and they could be just as unethical either way.

Mozilla needs a cheaper CEO who knows the fuck they’re doing. The current leadership has verifiably demonstrated that they don’t.

I’m using Firefox and not switching anytime soon, but the Mozilla situation is making me angry and sad at the same time.

I'm in this boat.

Interacting with the UI on Firefox for iOS incurs several seconds of waiting:

Clicking the tab icon, opening a new tab, clicking back. ANYTHING, really.

Often it just dies.

If I close all tabs, it gets better. So I basically have to choose between tabs or any acceptable UI speed.

They literally went from "browser is slow with many tabs" to "now tabs are super lightweight" to "this is a shitshow".

I'm not sure how they can be so deliberate and so accidental at the same time.

I wish the board would fire those incompetent leaders and regain market value, but I'm afraid it's a collusion where everyone in power is just ripping Mozilla for what it's got before the ship sinks.

Sure feels that way.

What device are you using? On my iPhone 14 and last-gen iPad, I don't notice any of that with Firefox.

iPhone 13

On iOS Mozilla might not be actually 100% at fault if their app does not work correctly.

This is because an inside apple policy dictates that all apps on iOS must use the Safari web engine and can't ship their own. As a result all browsers on iOS are just glorified Safari skins & Web application support continues to lag as a result among other things & Apple has complete control over what that one true web engine of iOS supports and what not.

It could be that making a good browser on iOS is difficult because of Apple's restrictions.

And I haven't run a lot of mobile browsers recently for comparison.

But I find it hard to believe that most browsers that are more popular than Firefox on mobile are doing worse at basic memory management when the number of tabs grow.

They're more concerned with wrongthink, hard to take them seriously anymore. Meanwhile, Brave is awesome.

All paid for by Google. Despite 14 years ago suggesting they wouldn't solely rely on Google's money [0] and laughing all the way to the bank after letting go 'Mozillians' in 2020.

Mozilla's so-called mission statement in a privacy focused browser is a complete failure. This cult around Mozilla needs to stop.

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

IIRC Yahoo also paid a fair share of it for a while. Didn't they even get a whopping 500 Million at the end?

By FF users who go to google if they type or misstype something in the address bar.

It shouldn't even be 1 million. What value could one person even hypothetically add, that would justify a multi-million dollar salary? Not even mentioning the fact that Firefox is losing market share.

It's more than justified if the Mozilla CEO's mission is to lose users and market share. They are doing an incredible job, and deserve every last cent.

Nothing, but their value isn't directly linked to their salary. It's more due to how unrestrained capitalism works, where you need to offer that kind of money to stop them going to someone who can offer more.

For places like Mozilla, there _is_ a solution to this though:

Altruistic organisations like Mozilla (which they at the very least are on the surface) would do their best work with altruistic individuals. Those kinds of people would sacrifice an unreasonably high salary, just so they can work for an organisation they believe does good.

So it's a win-win. You get the types of people you need, and you pay less.

Why this isn't happening, I don't know. My guess is that one dumb fuck infiltrated the organisation, and he's hiring more dumb fucks.

Apple and Google's CEO salary is what?

That is relevant how?

They shouldn't bring one a regular market CEO, and what their CEO has to do to win users and promote the FOSS engine has nothing or little to do with what Apple and Google's CEO has to do to pad stocks.

In fact, it's precisely of the BS focus they have, doing what any corporate spiky-haired boss CEO would do, that they lose users...

TANSTAAFL and a modern web rendering engine is one of the nuclear power plant projects of software engineering. There is going to have to be a large engineering effort behind building any of them. And expecting software to be completely free and for everyone to work for peanuts is just exploitative. There are also only three alternatives and you don't get to choose some naively idealistic FOSS implementation that doesn't exist. Tearing down Firefox only makes Google and Apple stronger.

Maybe the CEO's salary needs to be the number of daily active users gained over the past year. :)

I don't use Firefox because instead of a simple OSS software, it seems like something that wants to suck me into their ecosystem. Nearly every tab of Firefox settings has some "cloudy"/cross marketing stuff:

  - General: Recommend extensions as you browse
  - Home: Pocket, Sponsored {shortcuts,stories}, Tips and news from Mozilla
  - Search: nothing
  - Privacy & Security: Suggestions from Sponsors, Firefox data collection, Dangerous site blocking
  - Sync: (by it's nature)
  - More from Mozilla: (by it's nature)
  - Extensions & Themes: (by it's nature)
  - Firefox Support: (by it's nature)

Meanwhile you check Safari:

  - General: Nothing
  - Tabs: Nothing
  - Autofill: Nothing
  - Passwords: Nothing
  - Search: Nothing
  - Security: Fraudulent site warnings
  - Privacy: Apple Pay and Apple Card
  - Websites: Nothing
  - Extensions: (by it's nature)
  - advanced: Nothing

Maybe it doesn't feel sleazy compared to Chrome, but it does compared to Safari.

Safari, that only works in a full and absolute walled garden? The kind you did not want to get sucked into?

Well the OS pushes iCloud, Safari doesn't need to do so itself.

Seems that their plan to do everything possible to sabotage their browser and waste resources on stupid bullshit that doesn't improve Firefox is working.

What improvement should they add to Firefox that would pay the bills?

I dunno.

I wonder how much of this can be explained by people using desktops and laptops less and cell phones more.

I use FF on my phone, always have.

Me too, because of "send tab to device" which no one else seems able to implement cross platform. It's bloody rocket science, according to Brave and Microsoft.

That said, Firefox iOS is still mediocre. Tab management is still bad compared to Safari. But at least we got Colorways (and every time it updates it I get the Colorways popup screen)

Is that what that is? My perception has been that approximately monthly Firefox decides to interrupt me with a full screen “welcome to the internet!” popup. I’ve been using Firefox since it was Phoenix and in 2022 it decides to start doing this. Baffling.

One thing that made Firefox mobile stand apart from other browsers was full desktop extension support. Too bad they scrapped it a few years ago.

> and cell phones more.

sounds like they got that covered!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34367662

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34367690

I see these kinds of comments a lot, especially here. I've never understood them though, and always thought I was missing some insider knowledge.

Can you give some examples of bad things they've done to Firefox, to someone who thinks Firefox is pretty good?

There's definitely some on here that are a waste of resources... https://killedbymozilla.com/

Here's something done badly - Firefox View's Tab Pickup. Because as we know, no one ever opens more than 3 tabs. So that isn't used by many because of that and unless it's implemented into a proper list with actions against it then it will die a death of underuse.

I'd absolutely love to see Mitchell Baker do a Reddit AMA and actually answer inconvenient questions because there would be plenty of them.

> Here's something done badly - Firefox View's Tab Pickup. Because as we know, no one ever opens more than 3 tabs

Yup, I remember this coming out and playing around with it. The fact that I disabled it / never saw it again, probably re-enforces your argument that it was done badly. But when you say "So that isn't used by many because of that", do you mean because it was implemented poorly?

Hmm, now that I've looked at it again to see what it was, I'm wondering why I opted not to use it :/ Might give it another spin.

EDIT: Now I remember. It can't be set as the default page for new tabs or windows. Which is ... a strange decision?

Degrading and disabling by default separate search bar (don't remember what exactly was removed, it was a long time ago)

Degrading Uglybar (address bar), some functionality was cut, last searches are not displayed and replaced with pinned sites. UI of Uglybar was changed a lot and made gigantic and also just a little bit moving so that cursor selected text by 2-3 characters to the side. After a year of shouting and FF team demonstrating exemplary asshole attitude on r/firefox some of the UI only changes were toned down, not completely though. And functional changes remained.

Removal of some compatibility with older extensions.

URL trimming in Uglybar, thankfully that's can be re-enabled for now. (I consider this anti-consumer, just like Google's attempts to push centralized AMP on us).

I really like Firefox. I’ve been using it for years as I find its workflow meshes better with mine than Chrome. However, it’s been a huge pain on Linux for me on my desktop with an NVIDIA graphics card. It was locking up my CPU and causing total system crashes periodically while I was listening to YouTube videos in the background. I finally narrowed the problem down to having hardware acceleration enabled, but it was a frustrating period when those crashes were happening. I’m sure running Firefox on Linux with an NVIDIA graphics card and hardware acceleration enabled is a niche, but it really felt like that shouldn’t ever be happening. Fortunately it just works on my laptop running Fedora. The only thing that kept me on Firefox during that period was that Chrome was blurry out of the box, and I needed to focus on development rather than tinkering.

Addressing the loss of users, I’ve never met anyone in the real world that uses Firefox in my circles. It’s entirely Chrome and Safari on iPhones / iPads. I’m curious who besides myself actually uses Firefox. I have recommended it to others, but they always revert back to Chrome. The most I’ve seen with someone who was privacy concerned was switching to Brave.

I hope Firefox is able to continue its development long into the future because it’s good to have diversity from Google’s control of the internet in my opinion. It’s unfortunate that Mozilla has to rely on Google’s money to fuel that development however.

12 years ago Firefox had 30% browser market share. Today, at this rate, they have about 12 years left to 0 users.

Still plenty of time to fix things. Few suggestions to friends at Mozilla:

- Make a product person in charge

- Drop everything else that isn't Firefox from portfolio; introduce it later when trend reversed

- Listen to users, not telemetry

- Plan to switch business model to freemium; introduce Firefox Pro

I disagree with the second point. Their email relay service and VPN is excellent.

Might be because it's not theirs. They are just resellers with a bit branding and some integration, at the moment.

It will take far less.

Once its share sufficiently drops, Google will pull out of their aggreement and Mozilla will collapse on itself. Unless Google is keeping them around for anti-monopoly purposes, in which case Firefox will just continue deteriorating in a zombie-like state.

> introduce Firefox Pro

If people aren't using the full feature browser today, why would they use it when it's not free?

Supposedely proposed changes would make it better and worth paying for.

Maybe user/developer support or some services ?

How do they account for people who have disabled telemetry? I presume as privacy awareness widens, we will see more and more people disabling telemetry.

This is my question too. I'd guess the Venn between privacy conscious and ff user is closer to a circle than an oval.

Good question. I checked [about:telemetry] and I have telemetry disabled. I suppose many people are doing the same.

Even with disabled telemetry, there should be ways to get some data. Update-calls for the browser and add-ons should give some valid hints.

They can count the number of downloads and the number of requests to the update servers. Or they can just not count the people that disable telemetry.

Even when you have telemetry disabled the browser still regularly checks for updates - unless you have that disabled as well like I do as I prefer my executables to be read-only - so they can still get a good idea of the number of users out there.

I'm curious as to why people just stop using a browser? I currently use Firefox on both my laptop and my android device and unless a website just doesn't work on Firefox, I still use it.

Given this, what would cause someone to just stop using it and switch to Chrome?

- Aggressive marketing of platform defaults, such as Edge on Windows

- Aggressive misuse of incompatibilities, such as video calling for Chrome and Edge (e.g. Teams)

- Loss of websites optimizing for standards and instead optimizing for the monopolist (Chrome). Same as with IE.

you gotta admit the ads are catchy... "there's no place like Chrome"

I haven't seen this (though I'm not in an anglophone country) - it's def catchy, where have you seen/heard it?

on the side of a bus stop of all places in Philadelphia.

Ah cool thanks, you also read my mind and answered the question I meant to ask - whether it was a physical ad or just a digital one :D That's mad, you'd think Chrome is so ubiquitous, and Google ads themselves so popular, that they wouldn't need to shell out money on this kind of IRL ads.

Also: people buy a new computer, check out the browser shipping with it and find it acceptable.

I would guess many users whose niece/nephew/grandma installed Firefox for them on their old computer won’t even know they switched products.

In that particular case I blame fake web apps such as MS Teams, Netflix and a few others.

I still use firefox and librewolf as my primary browsers but sometimes I use Edge or chrome for some particular use cases, mostly driven by professionnal duties. In my particular case I don't mind because I never mix pro and personnal usage on the same browser but for someone who don't do that kind of separation I could easily see them give up and use chrome and only chrome.

That is what most typical users usually do. If they encounter a single mishap with one app that is not the most popular one, they switch to it and never go back, even though that most popular one suck at other things. When everyone is stuck with an issue, most people just accept it. What they hate is feeling left behind if only themselves are facing that particular issue. And it is unrelated to the actual annoyance created by those respective issues.

Firefox Sync doesn't work consistently. Sent tabs regularly vanish.

Edge sync works. That was my last straw, since I'm sending tabs to another device all the time.

To add another data point, it has been working like charm most of the time for me across five devices (Linux flavours + Android) (granted, sometimes I have experienced glitches, but no deal breakers).

It only takes one bad experience to cross the hurdle of installing another browser. I had to download chrome because Teams didn’t want to work in FF and I’ve found myself using it more since.

brave doesnt force me to install pocket

I stopped using the iOS version for 2 reasons. It had started to be very slow, hitting the address bar to enter a url would result in a multi-second freeze. Also it doesn't support the screen-time limits on iOS, so I was using it to browse HN when I shouldn't have been. I would like to return to it though, maybe if Apple open up their browser engine policy it would improve.

I'd rather not use a browser from an organization that explicitly promotes censorship.

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...

What is a better alternative? Safari is one platform. Google and Microsoft both have a very dubious track record with China.

It's more than likely that these are people who simply formatted their PCs, bought a new one, upgraded to Win11 (which btw made it a nightmare to set a new browser as default for non-tech people)... And they just install Chrome because Chrome has been heavily pushed for years and years, especially now on Android, and it's what non-techie people know and are used to on their phones.

Firefox has only gotten better in recent years, but it also has no advertising, while Chrome just dominates by being a Google product heavily pushed everywhere (I still remember when software bundled Chrome in).

It's still baffling to me how bad the Google add-ons page is comparatively to the Firefox ones. Firefox organizes all their add-ons so neatly.

Stupid as it sounds, I stopped using it when they switched to tabs that don't look like tabs. Might sound like a ridiculous reason but it was very much the straw that broke the camel's back.

Every new update made Firefox more chrome-like, what little money they make seems to be going everywhere except making the browser engine better, it keeps bleeding market share and getting more and more issues with website compatibility.

Why would I use Firefox when it is worse than Chrome in every way? To avoid Google? Google funds Mozilla, Firefox would be dead without Google money.

100%. Feeling the need to change stuff for the sake of it used to be the preserve of the large rich companies who need to find ways to spend their money. Did anyone honestly think that the old tabs were broken compared to various other "won't fix" bugs or useful new features?

I guess the problem with the browser is that it is a market to everyone in the world. You either try and optimise for one market and accept losing the rest or you try and make it the best of all worlds. I think FF never quite knew where it belonged.

Yes, rule #1 in UI design should be: don't change the UI!

Of course for new users you can try new stuff but don't bother existing, happy users with your experimentation.

Designers need to get off their high horses and thinking they can do better than the perfect visual metaphor tabs have been taking advantage of for YEARS. The tab is connected to the browser chrome = it's the active tab. It's so simple and intuitive. But Apple and Mozilla both have made attempts to reinvent this and every time it's in obviously worse ways. Thankfully Apple, in a rare display of acknowledging their mistake, backtracked on their horrible tab redesign shortly after shipping it. Well, it's still there in the Safari settings but the default is the old design that actually makes sense.

A good article about why the redesigned Safari tabs are bad:

https://daringfireball.net/2021/10/the_tragedy_of_safari_15_...

> Why would I use Firefox when it is worse than Chrome in every way? To avoid Google? Google funds Mozilla, Firefox would be dead without Google money.

Yep. I switched to chrome on mobile when Firefox gave me issues while developing for it. Just buggy and unintuitive behavior like cancelling drag events or not handling PWAs well.

I still use it on desktop though. I've never had issues with it there and the style changes don't bug me.

I also use it on mobile for YouTube, but it pisses me off that it won't play in the background anymore when it used to.

> Why would I use Firefox when it is worse than Chrome in every way? To avoid Google? Google funds Mozilla, Firefox would be dead without Google money.

Yes, to avoid Google. There is a huge difference between using Chrome and signing away all of your information to Google, and using Firefox which is insulated from Google even if it is funded by them.

Plus if you change your default search engine in Firefox, Google isn't exactly getting their money's worth.

To be honest, despite any issues with FF tab design, the Chrome ones are just horrible. When they contract to the 5 pixel size it's crazy.

1. Chrome is now tightly integrated with the Google ecosystem, and it works quite well. For instance, signing in to Chrome signs you into all google properties.

2. Firefox isn't doing that well on mobile devices (sadly), and people want passwords, bookmarks, Google logins etc to be shared between mobile and desktop browsers. Even for ex-Firefox desktop users (especially non-technical users), Chrome's it-just-works sync is quite compelling.

If you're on Android, please try Firefox mobile. You'll get extensions as well (such as adblock).

I'm not sure about 'power' users, but I can see a few routes for non-techie people to switch browsers:

• Response to an OS-based prompt to 'try' or 'default to' their 'recommended' browser (Looking at you, Windows), intended, accidental or purely from a position of ignorance

• Response to a search-based prompt to use their 'suggested' browser (looking at you, Google), intended, accidental or purely from a position of ignorance

• Similar as above from Google, where some really basic feature of their suite is hampered (intentionally or otherwise) from '100% intended' compatibility (even if that just means entirely inconsequential aesthetic features)

• Family/friend/neghbour acting in an IT support role just swapping it out because that's what they use (as happened to my father's computer, I was irritated to see last time I was in that role...)

Basically, I don't think many in our domain have a strong reason to change FROM Firefox, although I'd like to believe they should have good reasons to change FROM Chrome... .

>Given this, what would cause someone to just stop using it and switch to Chrome?

They

break muscle memory every few releases: order of entries in the right-click context menu, change design of frequently used functionality, remove keyboard shourtcuts or replace their action on already pre-existing installations

promised unforking Tor

promised adding chromecast casting on mobile

promote "unplatforming" people globally for views they don't agree with

Brave is just better overall and far more snappy.

Significantly less trustworthy though. Why not just use Chrome at that point?

Well I want all extensions to work on my Android phone so I use Kiwi Browser. Same for pull down to refresh. Same with having fast browser. Firefox offers none of these.

As for desktop I went from Firefox to Edge, then got tired being scared of every update MS making UI more and more hostile with each update and switched to customizable Vivaldi. Firefox was always slower and more memory hungry than Chromium and years of optimizations didn't change that.

Btw. what happened with Latest version chart in bottom of page?

My partner used it, until it stopped working for all live streaming, on all most frequent watched sites: starts watching some live stream, and some minutes later the stream is "stuck".

Switched to Edge, it works. Tried for some weeks, every time still stuck.

Now not trying anymore, starts Edge and watches.

Using much more powerful computer, much faster internet connection and a 64-bit OS (but older) the same content still "works" on Firefox too.

But I also observed that in some occasions when some videos are to be changed (one played, then another to appear) even in that different setup Firefox becomes completely non responsive.

The issues started abruptly to appear, so I'm quite sure it's some update with some (I hope) unintended consequences.

If the other users had similar experiences lately, then it was not their decision to abandon Firefox, it's Firefox directly "disqualifying itself".

The title at the moment is "editorialized" so for the case it becomes more neutral I'm preserving it for the context here:

"Firefox lost ~16M users since last year"

I switched back because of some issue with profile management I don't remember anymore and because I wanted to use WebAuthn with Touch ID. The bug is 4 years old and doesn't appear to be moving. Once it's done I expect it'll take a few more to get support for passkeys.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1536482

As someone who has repeatedly switched browsers in 20 years... for some reason, sometimes Firefox has performance issues on some platform, or maybe just how it's packaged. I've heard people describe Firefox on Windows as slow (I never had that, but on one Windows 7 installation I had Chrome be annoying and reinstalling/nuking profile didnt work), but I did have problems on Debian, 2 companies ago, so that's why I switched that machine to Chromium. Sometimes resetting the profile works, sometimes not. Sometimes you find yourself using Chrome features so often that you switch your main browser and don't look back for a few years. (FWIW, I use both on my work laptop, exclusively Firefox on home Windows machine + laptop, and again both on my older travel laptop). Also interestingly I semi often read about people ranting about Thunderbird being slow on Windows, something I've never experienced except when moving hundreds of mails manually - but I did have performance problems on Linux in the past..

I've been Firefox user for about 10 years. The UI update from last year almost pushed me to another browser, maybe Brave or just giving up and embracing Edge. BUT this UI fix exists [1] and is wonderful. You just paste it into your User profile folder and the custom CSS and user.js fixes the ugly UI.

1. https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix

Thanks for the link, just installed and it brings back "tabs" that are connected to the content instead of the disconnected buttons.

I do find the contrast slightly low between active and inactive tabs on macOS in dark mode, using the "original" profile, but I'm sure this is easy to tweak.

For all its faults, Safari in compact mode/dark mode does get the active/inactive tabs contrast right, although it's obviously fairly subjective.

I don’t know why people use chrome over Firefox. Chrome still uses a crazy amount of ram for me compared to Firefox

And I just discovered this week that zooming in chrome affects ALL tabs not just the one you’re on. And they marked the bug as won’t fix so you need a bloody plugin to zoom a single tab.

> And I just discovered this week that zooming in chrome affects ALL tabs not just the one you’re on.

I don't have this issue in ALL tabs, but only the tabs sharing the same origin which makes sense if you ask me, doesn't seem a bug.

Hmmm I’ll retest on Monday. I have an external monitor to my laptop and needed to zoom 1 tab on 1 screen to write a doc on the second screen and when I zoomed the laptop screen cos it was too small I zoomed the external screen. So annoying. Even if is only same origin, the fact they lock the setting for individual tab zooming so it can only be changed by a browser extension is so stupid.

I moved from Firefox to Chrome after using FF for a long time because of the opposite. FF randomnly locked up and used tonnes of RAM, not consistently but occasionally.

As someone who uses the browser a lot for work, I cannot have randomn lock ups happening for seconds at a time and not have this treated as a priority 1 bugfix by mozilla.

I get lock ups in Chrome but not Firefox… i always need to close tabs on my work laptop cos chrome gets laggy. (Other apps are fine when chrome is laggy)

I think this depends on which OS you are using. Firefox is stable on some and not others, while Chrome uses less RAM on some and more on others.

>And I just discovered this week that zooming in chrome affects ALL tabs

You mean all tabs sharing the same origin? eg I zoom in on the HN front page then I open a comment section on another tab that will be zommed in too. Make sense imo

This is how it works in Firefox for me, too.

I think firefox applies my settings across all devices cos you can change it in firefox, I forget that, so it's been set for so long I forgot it's a setting.

> browser.zoom.siteSpecific

Set that to false and it will apply to only the tab you're on.

The setting in Chrome exists but cannot be modified.

How many people who used firefox have been migrated to Win 11? From what I hear, (this could be wrong because I don't really care about win 11 and my eyes are usually glazing over when yet another person is complaining what a dog it it,) it could be getting harder for the average user to set firefox as the default browser.

I use FF with W11 without any problems

Functioning as it should is good.

The thing to consider here is, do you consider yourself an average user? Most of us here would not care if they didn't have firefox or chrome as their default browser, to myself it's practically meaningless apart from win98 days setting some near useless lump as the default to catch auto activating BS, but to ordinary folk they can get weird ideas they have to use it ... IIRC M$ went to a little bit of trouble to stop people easily making firefox the default browser, and some internal links are edge only without a really good work around. I don't see them going to all that trouble unless there's a slight benefit.

Well, internal documentation (moments when you missclick on ? icon and open it lol) was always IE and then edge as long as I remember, as well as lockscreen image when you click on it. Other than that, windows is respecting my default browser. They do go over-invasive when you try to download another browser while using edge tho, which is shady of course, but once I changed the default browser, I never had any issues

Talking of open source browsers, I'm super excited by the Ladybird Browser [0] from the SerenityOS [1] project. They have made such incredible progress in such a short time. For those that don't know its a completely new browser + renderer + js engine, everything from scratch.

Andreas has hinted that he is considering pushing the browser project to be a bigger thing, and positioning it as a legitimate and viable alternative to browsers with a corporate influence (which Firefox unfortunately is):

> Hypothetically, would you consider sponsoring a completely new web browser (no big tech companies involved) that refuses to take money from the advertising industry?

https://twitter.com/awesomekling/status/1612856174965129216

This could only be a good thing, and I for one would happily sponsor a browser (and rendering engine) that is independent and only serving users needs. All other open source browsers and engines are backed by corporations with their own agenda.

0: https://awesomekling.github.io/Ladybird-a-new-cross-platform...

1: https://serenityos.org

Looks interesting. Is there a macOS ready build avaialble somewhere?

Not yet, so far they have approached it the same at the rest of the Serenity project - compile it yourself. Which for the motivations of Serenity as a hobbyist OS make sense, but if Ladybird "graduates" from a hobby project I'm sure they will make builds available.

The only mobile browser with proper ad blocking

There is proper adblocking on iOS too with AdGuard. I'm literally using the same filters and rules with it as with uBlock Origin on desktop and works flawlessly.

Except you need an iPhone for that.

OP was already talking about mobile. I just pointed out FF is not the “only” option

AdGuard is quite limited.

Using the same filters =/= having the same capabilities.

For instance, AdGuard on iOS doesn’t protect me from “popunders”. Also, no filters protect me from reddit nudges for using their app. Whereas when I had an android(firefox+ublock) I never saw a popunder or reddit nags.

I'm one of them. I switched to Brave first, and have settled on Vivaldi going forward. Why? Because Firefox was increasingly problematic to use. Things like background blur on Google Meet didn't work.

Yes, I realize it was probably Google doing Google things to hurt Firefox, but day-to-day, I need a browser that works. So switching to a Chromium-based browser that had things like ad-block and other features I consider important was the best solution.

I have worked at Google (although in a different department). From what I could see there was never intentional hurting of other browsers. However, given a list of (always too long) TODOs, improving a non-critical feature for 10% of users often just doesn't make it to the top.

And yes, Google is a huge company with a ton of developers, but teams are not. In my experience, these kind of fixes are sometimes even done by individuals in their "spare" time, to contribute a bit back (even if it's for a competing browser).

What a surprise, when you consciously evolve FF into a Chrome, but never catching it completely, let alone overtaking, then users will probably switch to a better Chrome. Constantly disabling small features definitely can cause pro users to change one basic browser to another. I will use FF till it's dead, but recent actions and attitude of FF team over past years are definitely not a positive factor keeping me using FF.

Mostly stopped using it when the last few updates started to make my mac CPU crazy everytime I use it. It always been not great on macos but now it is just unusable.

Still using it on android but it takes ages to load the first page when the app just started. It really is bad.

I stopped donating to firefox too considering the hypocrisy of the for profit business parent business that fired a ton of good engineers to pay its CEO more.

You know I loved Firefox back in the day.

But reading the comments here it just sounds like a lot of you are stuck in a relationship with an abusive partner. Keep making excuses why you're staying, etc.

I feel for ya... I hated jumping ship at the time, but honestly looking back all I miss is the dream of what it was supposed to be, not what it actually became.

"it just sounds like a lot of you are stuck in a relationship"

As I said in several recent posts about the horrible performance of Mozilla Thunderbird, there has to be a Trojan horse in the Mozilla organization.

Why else would such an organization keep constantly shooting itself in the foot? Why else would it seemingly go out of its way to avoid giving its users what they want?

It's clearly a leadership problem, gut says it's a problem with the board. I don't know much about the people on their board but something something... follow the money?

"follow the money?"

Yeah. Money from Google has to be the Trojan. It ought to put a new perspective on how we view antitrust law.

Well I mean a rich guy can come in and buy a company and shut it down. Or kill its product line or whatever the heck they want it's their company now

Nothing stopping someone else from starting a new company and picking up from where Mozilla left off

Yeah it sucks that Mozilla got bought out and now is beholden to Google. I just don't see how it's illegal

It's not illegal. The problem started when Microsoft gave away its Internet Explorer and email package for 'free' with Windows.

The so-called 'free' model undermined all those small companies that were making competitive products and put them out of business.

If competition had been allowed to proceed as normal we'd have much, much better browser and email products today. All the nonsense with Mozilla and others would never have occurred.

The fact was these products weren't actually free as Microsoft costed them into the price of Windows. Unfortunately, until software came along no one assumed that anticompetitive practices could be used in this way to put competitors out of business. Even now, decades later, antitrust/anti-competition law still hasn't outlawed this practice.

Make no mistake about this. What happened should not be forgotten and antitrust/anticompetitive law strengthened to see that there's no such repetition.

—

Edit: don't forget Google is doing the same as Microsoft with Chrome. When behemoth companies can squash competition with 'free' giveaways of key products/essential technologies we've no longer free markets, it not olny distorts the process of competitive capitalism but stifles innovation. Simply, companies like Mozilla wouldn't be forced into devious practices just to survive.

Remember, browsers and email aren't just show bag giveaways, they're crucial products for our modern world. No company should be allowed to dominate them at the expense of other competition.

I bet people will crawl back to Firefox when all Chromium based browsers will have much worse ad blockers due to Manifest V3.

https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338

Well that might be me but until then I'm pretty happy with ungoogled-chromium, best browser by far I've used. If adblocking changes dramatically I'll look for alternatives.

Honestly if FF wants to win this battle (?) then adblocking is a worthy crusade. Brave is already there, curious what they will do with Manifest v3

Isn't firefox also going to move to Manifest v3?

Oh. You are right. Looks like I was not informed. Well, shucks.

"We believed then, as we do now, that users would be best served by having useful extensions available for as many browsers as possible."

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2022/05/18/manifest-v3-in-fi...

This will worsen chrome, not all other chromium-browsers. Most non-google-vendors made it already clear they will not follow this specific change. Even Google moved back for the moment because of the reactions. We have to still see whether they really will go through with this.

I guess the Firefox ship is sinking and Chrome's (and the derivatives) dominance is rising. The EU Digital Markets Act will just further increase its dominance and Firefox will be on course to irrelevancy since Mozilla is still unable to make money without Google keeping them on life support.

At this point Google should just spin out the Chromium engine as a separate non-profit organization and allowing others to freely make their own browsers based on a standard browser engine like Brave, Edge, Opera, Vivaldi etc to use it but done freely without Google's complete control.

Exactly just like what the Linux Kernel has done with 'distros' with the kernel as the central standard for anyone to freely make their own Linux distro, the same can be done for browser engines.

> to use it but done freely without Google's complete control.

This will never happen. In fact, Google's intention is to sabotage every other browser, and shove ads everywhere.

https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338

What effect will the EU Digital Markets Act have?

I'm a long time Firefox user, but some things are getting really irritating:

- The default toolbar layout looks really dumb with those spacers, especially when you enable the search bar

- Wizards in the first visible tab when you install the browser, or even a specific new browser version.

- Mozilla the organization in general

I'm kinda scared by this tendency, as most dev already see front end development as just supporting chrome and safari, instead of a standard. The fact me that most other browsers like edge or brave are WebKit or chromium reskins doesn't help this.

As a (Mosaic/Netscape/)FF user I'm no longer concerned as Ladybird is on the horizon with a clear focus on creating a browser instead of activism on the internet (which is fine of course, it's their money, but not in my interest).

Until chrome like browsers have multi account containers I'm a FF user for life

The best Firefox feature to come out in the last few years. It's so integrated into my workflow that It's now hard for me to imagine browsing the web without it.

Would put it down to a non product ceo

I use Firefox as my primary browser, but find many sites still stumble with it.

And not just some obscure ones written 10 years ago. On a backup laptop with Linux and Firefox, BBC iplayer and CBBC games(which my son loves) doesnt work at at all.

Even on my Linux/Mac machines, I see weird behaviour sometimes.

So sad, but you do need another Chromium based browser. On Windows, I find Edge pretty good. On my Mac and Linux, I use Vivaldi.

As other people in the thread have complained: Firefox dont help by pushing their other products and changing the UI

I see stumbles, too, but don't forget to reload with ad blocking off. That fixes it for me half the time.

During the last two/three COVID years, Firefox did a poor job supporting correctly and reliably WRTC and other features related with in-webbrowser videoconferencing (jitsi, Google Meet, etc).

Now, I think, maybe things are fixed and working correctly, but the damage is done.

Any, way, I alternate between Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Safari, Brave, etc, acording on the task I need to get done.

Web browsers usage scope is huge and beyond reading liquid and/or formated text. And Firefox was behind in some relevant areas.

> During the last two/three COVID years, Firefox did a poor job supporting correctly and reliably WRTC and other features related with in-webbrowser videoconferencing (jitsi, Google Meet, etc).

I think this is the most probable cause of all the stuff mentioned in this thread.

Similar problems have appeared for me far before COVID. The supposedly freedom-focused option was often significantly slower on Linux than on Windows thanks to lack of hardware acceleration for me. So I was basically forced to switch and now there are other things that I can't stand in FF, like the extra clicks in developer tools or annoying "security" prompts in console and so on.

Mabye it's the expirements that changed my settings until I found the about:config way to opt out, or the whitespace heavy and unclear UI changes.

More interessting is the lose of ~60M users in the last 4 years. Peak in the data was at ~254M at beginning of 2019. Now it's at ~194M. The Hard lose continues.

Another notable point is that roughly 10% of the users have an adblocker, but 35%+ of users are using addons. What is the rest using?

It would be interessing to have older data for this, to see how the different stages of the XUL-addon-drama impacted those numbers.

A big part of the loss of users was when they lost the German market due to bad press after the Cliqz scandal in late 2017. They lost a lot of trust in Germany from that and Germany was one of Mozilla's most important markets due to how many privacy focused people there are in Germany

Not sure how something from 2017 impacts the numbers from 2019? And it seems that scandal was some months before the big switch to quantum, which should had significant more impact on the user numbers.

It gained one today, I installed it after facing same issue with chrome on multiple sites.

Using FF for both iOS and macOS and the features are different. For example there is turn on dark mode on the iOS app but not in their mac app. Their iOS app needs some bug fixes and UI polish,

But for me Chrome turns on my laptop fans more compared to FF.

Why isn't firefox with uBlock the defacto standard on Android ? I can't use YT / Google without this combination. Although extensions are not supported on iPhone so this could be why it's not more generally used.

I love Firefox, but the default experience is covered with ads. I wouldn't be surprised if that's a major contributor. It feels like the budget browser compared to Chrome.

Alternate headline: Firefox added ~1 million users since July 2022.

Or: Firefox has lost ~60 million users since January 2019.

firefox is the reason why I use android. I have the benefit of using proper adblock.

on desktop i.e linux - firefox keeps leaking memory on many tabs / sites. whereas chromium browsers do it at a slower pace. which means on desktop linux - I have fewer tabs open on firefox than I would with a chromium based browser. my other biggest complaint - firefox forcing me to update itself on desktop by refusing to open a new tab.

I still use firefox though but not gonna deny the pain

I haven't had problems with FF being leaky on Linux desktop. Some sites were... Years ago Gmail on FF used to leak tons whereas Chrome didn't. Unclear where the fault lay, but I'm sure Google wasn't losing sleep over it.

But I don't use Gmail anymore and happily run FF everywhere.

My wild guess is that good part of this derives from many developers not needeing Linux desktop anymore and living happy on their company Windows machine + WSL 2.

I hope if I ever do switch of Firefox there is a chromium browser made by a trusted group with all telemetry turned off and focused on ad blocking and privacy.

I don't know the cause, but I wonder if this could be the result of more people sticking with microsoft's default browser after improvements in edge

Maybe they shouldn't have tossed Brendan Eich out

I still use it daily both on my PC and my phone.

I don't like the Chrome browser for Android. Can't quite tell why. I really like Firefox for Android.

Use Kiwi Browser, full extensions support, pull down to refresh, faster than Firefox and more customization.

Look on the bright side there is still 193M to go, so by this pace they still have about 10 years.

I love using Firefox Focus app.

It is nice to have something a bit more privacy focused on mobile.

I'll use Firefox on mobile for no other reason than ad blocking extensions.

You can have extensions in Kiwi Browser, actually more of them than bunch of approved by Firefox. It has also pull down to refresh Firefox users begged devs for for the last 10 years.

i really like it, but my worthless bank (lloyds) doesn't work with it anymore, so for their banking web site i have to use chrome. grrr. i still use firefox for everything else.

You could report this at https://webcompat.com

This sucks, maybe it couldn't have turned out any other way

What happened with Latest version chart in bottom of the page?

Bad, we need to avoid monopoly at all costs on the Internet...

"Q: Why bother? You can’t make a new browser engine without billions of dollars and hundreds of staff.

Sure you can. Don’t listen to armchair defeatists who never worked on a browser."

-Ladybird FAQ

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