The fall of Firefox: Mozilla's once-popular web browser slides into irrelevance | Hacker News Reader

The fall of Firefox: Mozilla's once-popular web browser slides into irrelevance

zdnet.com

63 pointsCrankyBear109 comments

I feel like this article is going to age poorly.

I used Chrome because the devtools were better and they supported the same sorts of extensions.

I've switched back to Firefox 2 years ago and haven't looked back. I've heard from friends that they've also switched back all largely due to the looming manifest v3 ad blocker limitations.

There are no other mainstream browsers that I trust at this point.

Agreed, it seems inevitable that Google will enshitify Chrome by making ad-block tools unreliable. They've already started. That makes FF the "ad-block browser", and anyone who hates ads, scams, and malvertising will flee Chrome. Maybe we will see Chromium forks dominate, but I'm less sure about that.

I hope you're right and that Firefox gets enough investment to be a viable alternative at the right moment.

I've been using Firefox daily for over twenty years. It's viable.

Why would you think that people burned by Firefox would go back to it instead of switching to different Chromium-based browsers? Firefox market shared declined to a single digit for a reason...

If people were really switching back more than leaving the trends in the article would be positive instead of negative. That's not to say nobody is switching back, obviously people are, but they are also continually either not staying or grossly outnumbered by those choosing to leave for the first time.

It's a shame, I really like Firefox and having the browser decoupled from a big tech company, but it's also what the data is saying and has been for over a decade as people continue to deny it.

No mention of arguably illegal browser bundling and anti-competitive tactics by Microsoft, Apple, and Google to push their own browsers over Firefox:

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3674858/mozilla-apple-...

No mention of Google's sabotage of its web properties' operation and performance on Firefox:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...

edit: grammar

Mozzilla had an opportunity with Firefox OS and blew it, by caring too much about FOSS ideals instead of OEMs willing to make great experiences.

Oh it wasn't just FOSS, it was ideology over everything ( e.g Everything should be Javascript ) and complete lack of understanding on hardware. It is also an observation that to this day most people working on web related technology has similar problems.

True, at least WebOS also has first class for C and C++ apps, and LG takes advantage of it.

I would not trust the statistics, Firefox blocks tracking cookies by default. The statistics in the article come from companies that use 3rd party tracking cookies.

> By default, Firefox blocks the cookies that track your browsing activity across multiple websites. This includes cross-site tracking cookies set by ad, social media, and analytics companies

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/trackers-and-scripts-fi...

You don't need tracking cookies to find out what browser someone is using. Looking at the user agent string is mostly enough. (On the bright side, "Mozilla/5.0" has near 100% market share.)

I don't think this affects these statistics much. Statcounter numbers are based on pageviews for example, and Firefox hasn't given up on having its own UA yet. The numbers also align too well with the internal stats to be blanketly ignored https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity where MAU is 180,000,000/~5,000,000. That's a different approach to calculating usage share than page views from an internal source and external source that come to about the same number.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38531261

Whether the numbers from Google Analytics can be assumed accurate on its own is unrelated to the above, as are any of the other tracking protections Firefox currently employs.

Correction: 180,000,000/~5,000,000,000

See Cloudflare Radar [1] stats which do not use JavaScript/Cookies for tracking browser usage.

[1]: https://radar.cloudflare.com/adoption-and-usage

How does that keep track? If it's calls to cloudflareinsights.com, I suspect a very large proportion of Firefox users will block it through uBO + tracker lists or other means.

Significant portions of the web are hidden behind Cloudflare's CDN who terminate TLS and therefore have access to plaintext traffic. They can just observe User-Agent headers on every request to any CF-protected website.

I'm not all that interested in what Cloudflare can do. I was asking about how Cloudflare Radar does work.

That's exactly it.

> Cloudflare's unique understanding of the Internet comes from it's global network – one of the world's largest, spanning 270+ cities in 100+ countries [...] Cloudflare is used as a reverse proxy by nearly 20% of all websites.

Desktop sum = Chrome + Edge + Firefox + Safari = 39.4%

Firefox share = 4.2 / 39.4 = 10.7%

That's significantly higher than other reported figures.

On Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection, note that it’s actually two different things, and the default doesn’t shield you from most of these stat-collection sources. I wrote more about that at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38532931.

Firefox is still going to be chronically undercounted, but unfortunately I don’t think the difference is enough to materially affect the narrative. Maybe a true measurement would boost the US DAP figures as much as from 2.2% to 2.5% (maybe), but it’s very unlikely to be reaching even 3%, in my assessment.

(Notwithstanding this, https://radar.cloudflare.com/embed/TopBrowsersWidget?locatio... with its probably-more-reliable methodology does put Firefox at 4.5% for the USA, and https://radar.cloudflare.com/embed/TopBrowsersWidget at 4.1% for the world.)

Cloudflare’s stats also put mobile traffic and desktop traffic from the main browsers (assuming Edge and Firefox are for their desktop versions) at roughly equal 46%, causing Firefox to jump to ~9-10% of the desktop browser market.

That really isn’t bad imho.

Unfortunately Firefox has an absolutely dismal mobile usage share to the point it doesn't much matter if the number is for both or just the desktop version since it's still about 4% combined either way. E.g. Statcounter puts Firefox at 7.46% of Desktop browser share and 0.5% on mobile for an overall 3.43% share.

Based on the stats of other browsers on mobile vs desktop it seems there are two drivers for this. One is iOS Safari is extremely popular for users with those devices. On Android Chrom* browsers are extremely popular, even moreso than desktop though. For a long time the Android version of Firefox was held back on a legacy engine vs the desktop version and it'd chew through battery while having bad performance on top of compatibility issues due to the desktop version getting less popular as well. Then when they released the updated version it lacked many of the more niche things like arbitrary extension support for years that would have made it worth switching to. It's better now, but the damage was done and people are happy enough with the other browsers they've installed and been using for years at this point. I'd say Chrome being the default is the main factor and that explains both iOS and Android except it doesn't explain Firefox mobile being lower than so many other non-default browsers as well. Plus Chrome still manages to be decently popular on iOS, even if Safari is king there.

Apple's market share is only 8.6%. I can remember the click-bait headlines 20 or 30 years ago lamenting the Mac's demise and portraying it as an irrelevant platform doomed for the Information Age scrap heap. (See https://apple.slashdot.org/story/02/06/19/218246/dvorak-disc... about a 2002 John C. Dvorak column calling for the Macintosh to be discontinued - Dvorak's column is no longer online but the Mac is still around)

Firefox is still used by millions of people every day. It's not going anywhere.

If Firefox were 8.6% and growing it'd be a completely different article. It's 3x less than that an shrinking though.

"Apple PC Shipments Dropped 2X More Than Any Other Manufacturer In Q3"

https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2023/10/10/apple-p...

"Sky is falling" headlines around Firefox, Apple, Linux and a host of other technologies miss the point that these platforms may be small, but have dedicated followings, often with niche use cases that can't be replicated elsewhere.

Because the Web is evolving, niche browsers are not able to keep up with the changes and become useless at some point.

The fault with that headlines has little to do with a small dedicated following. Apple isn't a "small" PC manufacturer when it's got more than half the shipments of the largest manufacturer. The real fault with that clickbait is it ignores Apple desktops had an enormous boon with people migrating to M* based desktops and they aren't ready to upgrade yet while simultaneously ignoring shipments are still higher than pre M* Apple desktops. Besides that, clickbait articles about other things other companies do don't even say anything about this topic.

Again, focusing on how the usage share is abysmal compared to competitors while consistently shrinking down to where it is over the last decade lets you easily see why this particular headline isn't clickbait. Even with millions of users, Firefox having such low usage share, especially compared to alternative competitors, is a risk to its main funding source. This is a problem for an organization like Mozilla which makes very little from its users vs one like Apple which has become the most valuable in the world through the exact opposite.

It depends on which market, for example according to Cloudflare[0] Firefox is around 9% in France, and rather stable. Safari is only about twice that.

Just like for the Android/iOS situation, I think the US is an outlier that skews all global statistics because of their weight.

[0]https://radar.cloudflare.com/adoption-and-usage/fr?dateRange...

Apple charges a premium on its hardware. Firefox is free and Mozilla makes most of its money from the default browser agreement, which is potentially now in jeopardy.

This same author wrote an article titled "Is Firefox Toast?" back in 2011: https://www.zdnet.com/article/is-firefox-toast/

> Firefox's market-share is fading; the browser itself isn't that good anymore; and its money supply may be drying up. Is Firefox coming to the end of the road?

Everyone in this comment section seems to forget that we are an extremely small minority of the entire population of people who use web browsers. A vast majority of people don't think about their web browser and simply use whatever they're used to, which for most is Chrome or Safari. They have much better brand recognition and unless Chrome gives them an unusable experience, they won't have any reason to consider changing browsers.

Exactly. Thinking "I use, works for me, so whatever" is very shortsighted, if it falls even more on usage, we can expect more and more websites to not even bother to test.

People will use whatever comes by default on Android (which is Chrome or Samsung Internet [which is Chrome]), Safari on iOS and Chrome/Edge on Windows. Plus Windows has been very pushy about Edge.

Yeah, I suppose so. I still always try to convert friends and family members to Firefox with uBlock Origin. The experience is just so much better.

It wasn't always this way though. When I was first using a computer my parents had Firefox. Not for any particular reason as they aren't savy at all.

Back in the day IE, and most other default browsers of the time, were damn near unusable. Firefox was pushed by sites, techies, and even Google (pre-Chrome). There is no such push currently. Chrome works either well enough or even better for the vast majority of people. The ones talking about going back to Firefox for ideological reasons are a niche crowd with reasoning different than the last shifts.

I flipped back to FF about a year ago, performs flawlessly and all the extensions I used on Chrome are available too.

I don't care. It's been working great for years; it's the only browser I am willing to use.

Same here. FF is fast, stable, and functional for me.

I'm using the web 50+ hours per week and my usage is something like 80% Firefox 20% Chrome.

So, that is a lot of hours per year comparing them on a level playing field. I don't notice a performance difference. The only thing that "feels faster" on Chrome is creating a new window by dragging a tab out of an existing window.

Never had runaway RAM usage or anything with either browser in apporoximately 50,000 hours of browser usage.

I've always had decent amounts of RAM (16GB since ~2009, 64GB currently) ...maybe people are running into issues with different kinds of machines.

Being the only "tech guy" in my family, I have installed Firefox with uBlock Origin and NewPipe in my parents', siblings' phone and some of my close friends'.

The end result is their browsing experience has vastly improved. Once I saw that my mother had clicked a spam link in WhatsApp but UBlock Origin had blocked it. She called me and said that she is not able to open a link. Then I told her that is a spam and that's why her "browser" blocked it.

Similarly I have told my close friends about advantages of Firefox with UBlock Origin over Chrome or Opera etc. 99% of them try and tell me that they wish they knew about this earlier. The remaining 1% will have Firefox as secondary because of their work or accounts that is available only on Chrome.

For an average user, from my observation, Firefox is definitely awesome. The only issue is many of them don't know its existence. Sadly, many don't even know existence of adblockers.

I really wish Firefox invested more into promotion and may be governments and phone manufacturers come forward to have Firefox as an option. :)

Firefox is irrelevant to most users because it just doesn't "work". It just takes a few sites that under perform for a firefox user to switch to chrome where it does indeed "just works". This happened to me personally with roll20.net. Recently with Air India, where I literally couldn't buy a ticket with them with firefox (it spins and shows a blank page)... with chrome, perfectly works fine.

It's a combination of factors (anti-competition, default installed, devs/designers do not have firefox @ tier 1 testing, mozilla executive board fat & happy "Everything is fine").

My main browser is still firefox, but, let's be real, I keep chrome/chromium around to jump to when needed. The web has failed. There's a thin veneer over it, but we're basically back to client/server.

I keep hearing about these sites that don't work in Firefox but I never seem to run into any despite using the web for 2000+ hours per year.

That includes a lot of Youtube usage. Works fine for me. I guess my machine was sprinkled with magic pixie dust or something.

I've run into a few. I still use FF near exclusively, but have other browsers installed just in case.

I made this chart yesterday of CEO pay and Firefox market share to try and better understand the situation: https://ibb.co/rGd9QQf

Was this the beginning of the end?

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/brendan-eich-steps-down-...

Yes absolutely. It didn't need to be, they could have found another CEO with an engineering background. Now it's too late, Mozilla has been "captured", the board is under the control of the person it is responsible for paying. I don't see any out once that's happened, even if the current CEO leaves the next will be the same.

Besides being the person responsible for paying, she's the person responsible for the income. Google pays them half a billion a year for a reason.

And that reason is to not get in the way of Chrome dominance but pretend that you are trying

The article body is a decent (though myopic) history, but what a misleading headline. Irrelevance to whom?

While I still make a question to use Firefox, since 2019 I never had to actually care if our projects work on it, as it no longer takes part on browser matrixes for project acceptance guidelines.

The US government: https://www.brycewray.com/posts/2023/11/firefox-brink/

I'm using Firefox right now. i use Firefox on windows, Linux and android.

i only use chrome when i need to awkwardly cast something i can't do otherwise.

the only stupid thing was when they screwed up their extension policy on mobile and required you to use nightly with a special "bundle" to install stuff like RES.

edit: this is a cnet/zdnet article and probably written by chatgpt from a prompt by the editor.

It's hugely relevant to me and has been one of my all-time most appreciated pieces of software.

I've used FF since it's inception. Not going to stop now.

Echo chamber ping. Had some sort stint with Opera but basically FF on all platforms since I stopped using NCSA Mosaic. I would feel unsafe without uBO and Firefox (and NoScript on Desktop Linux).

I think most users like having their sync setup automatically with their email, and most Chrome users have Gmail so it’s one simple step to sync.

Firefox has a separate profile process that is cumbersome. And switching profiles is even worse, I think you have to use command line switches to get profile manager?

I think you're talking about the Mozilla Accounts feature (recently renamed from Firefox Accounts). It is not as smooth an experience as Google accounts, but it works reasonably well.

Firefox has a separate profile feature, and it is one of the great things about Firefox. You can access profiles through "about:profiles". You can (at least on Linux, don't think it's possble on MacOS) start firefox with a profile chooser. Each profile is a completely isolated browser instance -- no shared bookmarks, cookies, history, anything.

Go to your "mozilla/firefox" folder, and locate the file "profile.ini". On linux the path is

     ~/.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini

It is a regular text file. And here's a shortcut for you:

    $ nano ~/.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini

Once you've opened it, find this line:

    StartWithLastProfile=1

- edit 1 to become 0 in stead, then save[0]. You only need to do this once.

Added: After this edit you will be able to choose a profile on each launch (forgot that little detail). Also, Thunderbird works the same way if you want a set of alternative profiles for your email.

[0] To save: [ctrl]+[s] or [ctrl]+[o]. To exit [ctrl]+[x] (can't assume everyone knows nano)

I really appreciate the detailed tutorial and I will use this, but this is kind of illustrating the problem with Firefox.

And yeah the Profiles are not automatically associated with Mozilla accounts, you have to setup each separately per profile I think.

Or use containers — which are amazing but another complex use case for the average user compared to chrome sync experience.

Browse to "about:profiles" and you can create/delete/switch profiles (including set which is default) without any command line anything. It's a bit ugly looking though.

This is the best way currently IMHO. I have a link to it in the toolbar.

Adding to the anecdotes, I'm using Firefox as my main browser on Windows and macOS and have been for years. Very very rarely do I find websites that don't work and need to switch back to the built-in browser (Edge or Safari).

I hope Firefox doesn't die because the open web will die with it (no, I don't trust Apple to be the hero of anything given the intentionally locked down features on Safari iOS).

For Firefox to succeed, it has to differentiate. There are two meaningful ways it does, or will do, in the near future:

1. Mobile extensions: that's a unique value prop

2. Fight for the user: manifest v3, web environment integrity, and whatever comes next are degradations in user experience, and following a different path puts FF apart

Why should they fight for users?

The users who should care the most, such as the HN crowd, overwhelmingly have voted and the consensus is we read some synthetic benchmarks where Chrome is faster, and we are comfortable trading our freedoms away for that.

Everybody has a price.

It's just depressing that ours was so cheap.

(Not me personally. I would use FF even if it was worse, but it performs identically to Chrome for me. I don't understand what people are even doing with their f'ing web browsers that gets them into these pathological poor performance states with FF.)

There’s a mention of Safari’s popularity thanks to the iPhone but otherwise the article seem to miss that most of the smartphone and tablet boom happened during the period since. I think that’s a major point to Firefox’s demise, making the 2% of the whole market possibly represent quite a bit more of the desktop market.

It also mentions the revenue to point out how dependent the foundation is on Google, but fails to mention that the market share of 34% in 2010 generated $123M and the market share of 2.2% in 2022 generated $593M.

None of this will prevent an eventual demise of Mozilla and Firefox/Gecko (one possible future is what happened to Opera and Firefox adopting either Blink or WebKit – I’d personally consider that completing the slide into irrelevance), but I don’t think Firefox is as close to its last gasp as the article suggests.

Really? Have not been using anything other than FF last 5 years

Firefox was my browser of choice for many years, then I switched to Chrome since it just plain seemed like the better browser at the time.

Now that Chrome has a dominant market share, it seems to be getting worse and worse as Google uses that market share to push their agenda around telemetry and ads.

It still feels like Chrome has the better dev team overall but has some major conflicts of interest with the greater Google agenda. Mozilla have also made some questionable decisions leading to less focus on core browser development and their upper management seems pretty suspect in their own ways.

Safari and Edge feel like a tier below, they both work but I wouldn't want either as my daily driver. The rest of the web browsers are much more niche. Kinda feel like I don't have a great browser option given all that...

I am suspect of how they measure usage. When many of us use Firefox forks or configurations that leave as little fingerprints as possible through a VPN, we are intentionally not identified as unique visitors. If this is the case, these results are a testament to the advantage of Firefox.

100s of millions of users, highly concentrated around the types of user who build and influence software and create new technology startups [1] does not sound like irrelevance to me.

[1] exhibit 1: this comment page

iOS’ webkit-only requirement, whatever else one might think of that rule, is the only reason anyone still cares about or builds for any browser engines other than Blink. The rule has (by accident) been more beneficial to Firefox than harmful, overall—it’s the single thing keeping more than one browser engine on the test list, even for smaller development shops and teams.

[edit] nb this would not be the case if Firefox’s usage share were still large enough to “defend itself”, as it were. It’s purely due to circumstance.

FF is my primary browser on MacOS and it’s great never any probs.

I don't believe these numbers.

Here is a screenshot from my self hosted Matomo installation for my traffic today up until now:

https://i.imgur.com/WcfQKdT.png

Firefox blocks most analytics scripts by default, so these articles rely on very skewed data.

Any other devs with self hosted tracking solutions want to share how their browser stats look like?

The tech-crowd uses Firefox quite a bit. Four of my tech oriented sites show FF between 15% and 20% of traffic. But that uses goatcounter (not self hosted), which I know can get blocked by ad-ons.

The other challenge is that most bots use Chrome as their UA string, so any bots you fail to filter out will inflate Chrome's numbers.

I actually see more traffic from Pale Moon than from Edge. Edge looks dead.

There's no reason to expect that FF will "fall" any day soon. If not for any other reason then Europe. We have EU-wide legislation that demands alternatives in the browser space. And while Eurocrats are not extremely tech-savvy they are not extremely stupid either, they will not likely be fooled by four flavours of Chromium. Just an opinion.

It'd be interesting to see what they'd do. I don't think the legislation existed because the legislature agreed there needs to be a diversity in browser engines as much as they didn't want one company in control of web browsing. If Microsoft and Apple were to submit that they felt they did not feel a loss of control over Edge for being based on Chromium or unfair competition from Chrome in either case I'm not sure Firefox would be kept alive for the sake of source code diversity alone. That said, maybe Microsoft/Apple would not be aligned with supporting Google - though I think they would to protect themselves the same.

Or they might not even care. iPhones have a significantly larger penetration than Firefox on the whole of the EU but they haven't (yet) been even forced to offer a browser selection at all during setup. It'd be interesting to imagine what the regulation would be though. "Google, you must pay more to keep Firefox alive better"?

One thing I'd like to see is more crackdown on "first party browser advertisement" for the lack of a better word. I don't think that'd save Firefox as much as help other browsers though.

It's a browser, not a religion. If FF is working for you, then fine - use it. If you're not currently using FF and there's something bothering you with your current tool, try FF and see if it's still a problem. If you're happy with what you've been using then keep using what you've been using.

Religion? We're talking practical reality here.

The reality is that when alternative browsers finally slip into irrelevance the web will belong to Google.

We had a monoculture on the web once with IE. It went poorly.

If you literally don't care about the health of the open web, fine -- but that is what I would call a near-religious dedication to ignorance

You act as though Safari doesn't have a significant market presence. Also, Microsoft developed new web technologies and then patented them - preventing their competitors from using them. All of Microsoft's development tools of course used those new technologies and therefore required the web site visitor to use IE.

The situation today with Google is markedly different.

    You act as though Safari doesn't have a significant market presence.

Safari is not good enough as a bulwark of the free web. It's only available on Apple platforms and doesn't support ad-blockers as robust as FF.

    Microsoft developed new web technologies and then patented them

What patented web technologies are you thinking of? ActiveX controls?

    The situation today with Google is markedly different.

Sure. Microsoft wanted to lock you into IE and Windows.

Google wants to lock you into Chrome and ensure that the web is utterly bent to serve their advertising platform.

If you don't understand the massive commonality here -- which, again, is domination and ownership of the web -- because you're focused on implementation details, I don't know what to tell you.

Life with Google is much better. Google isn't telling my employer which OS and which DB I have to use to build solutions. Oh sure, if I need a web UI then it needs to run correctly on Chrome, but that's an order of magnitude less than what Microsoft was mandating. Microsoft wanted EVERYTHING. Google is after web advertising.

Also, I don't support the use of ad blockers. If you don't want ads, then don't visit the site. You and I may have different ideas as to what constitutes the free web. When I'm talking about "free", I'm talking about free as in freedom, not free as in beer.

I remember the day I stopped giving a crap about Firefox.

It was the day they broke my extensions for the second time within a week.

If you switched to Chrome, I guess it was also the day you stopped giving a crap about the web.

Chrome with bucket loads of extensions is speedier for me compared to bare-bones Firefox.

I think it is the slide that gives the wrong impression.

4% of a near-universal product? That's hardly irrelevant. Can anyone name a small non-profit tech company dominating a daily essential consumer-facing product ?

The Wikimedia Foundation is the example that comes to mind, though it may be a bit of a unicorn.

Author completely missed the boat, imho. Brave post by BigTex, only one who nailed it.

Karma is a biotch. No rearranging of the FFox deck chairs will ever save that lost bunch from themselves.

People still read zdnet? Talk about irrelevance.

It is more relevant more than ever, after Chrome disabled manifest V2 and made ad blocking way worse.

I'm going to share what Bryce Wray said on that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38524790

FWIW Firefox is only slow on Windows. It's much faster on Linux.

It was[0] excruciatingly slow on 32 bit Linux too. Had to use an alternative lightweight browser most of the time, but some sites worked only with FF (eg banking and such). There was no alternative for these sites, as no Chromium or MS browser supported 32 bit Linux. There was plenty of lightweight browsers that would work with anything else than these (very few) sites though. I've read somewhere that FF will soon no longer support 32 bit at all (if it has not happened already)

[0] Probably still is. "Was" because the most used keys on the keyboard of my 32-bit 12 YO laptop went fubar around half a year ago, so I had to go 64 bit only for a while until I got a replacement KB. I've not used FF on the 32 bit machine since.

Is Chrome "slow" for you on Windows as well? Because Firefox beats it or is within ~50% on every benchmark I can find.

Can you talk about what kinds of sites are slow in Windows or what kind of machine you're running? I've been doing full-stack development since the 90s using a range of browsers and I just don't feel the FF performance issues that others swear are a problem.

YouTube is particularly janky on Firefox on Windows. For example the full screen transition on Firefox uses a fade to / from black screen animation to hide the sluggishness. You have to disable this in about:config to see the behind the scenes jankiness.

Edge and Chrome (on windows) are slower than Chromium / Firefox on Linux for me but still faster than Firefox on Windows.

On Linux Chrome is faster than Firefox, but barely. IPython notebooks render seamlessly when scrolled in Chrome but the rendering is laggy in Firefox.

Machine spec: AMD 5800X Ryzen, 64GB RAM, 1TB Samsung Evo NVME SSD, NVIDIA 1660 Ti GPU

Let me make sure I understand what you're putting out here.

Google's web site, YouTube, which they have demonstrably gimped in Firefox at times, has a slightly nicer "window to full screen" transition in Chrome (a Google browser) than Firefox.

I just compared it on Windows (Core i5 13400 64GB, AMD 6600, 1080p) in FF versus Chrome and the transition is.... I don't know, a hair faster on Chrome? I don't even know what is "janky" about the Firefox version. I might even say it looks a little nicer in Firefox because of that fade.

If I was to describe what I'm feeling right now, I think "exasperation" would be the closest word but that doesn't really begin to describe how frustrating that sort of "evidence" for Chrome's superiority is.

I don't have a Linux desktop environment at the moment to compare the rest.

> I don't even know what is "janky" about the Firefox version

It is a bit too slow for me (tries my patience). Also Firefox does a weird multi-step transition to full-screen in which it changes to an intermediate video size which is larger than the current video size but smaller than the whole screen. I may be hallucinating this since I don't use Windows that often. I think the Firefox team agrees with me since they felt the need for a fade to/from black screen animation.

> If I was to describe what I'm feeling right now, I think "exasperation" would be the closest word but that doesn't really begin to describe how frustrating that sort of "evidence" for Chrome's superiority is.

I get that but I also provided a non-google example. Jupyter notebook on Firefox is laggy too (regardless of OS).

To slide into irrelevance it first needs any viable alternatives.

Shoot that messenger!

Mitchell Baker, earned $6,903,089 in 2022

I left Chrome 10 years ago and have been a happy Firefox user. I think this article is clickbait. I know more and more people using Firefox.

Like a Phoenix, it will rise again.

they never implemented crypto, they are slipping away very slowly

I'm not sure what version of Firefox you are using, but mine has full support for HTTPS, which is about the level of encryption support that I expect from a browser.

I assumed GP was saying that Mozilla's mistake was not to bundle Foxcoin.

I fail to see how that's a mistake. My toaster, garage door opener, or my webmail app don't support it either.

I'm assuming it was sarcasm.

Sure they have crypto, they've had TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_CHACHA20_POLY1305_SHA256 since at least 2017. Source: https://stackoverflow.com/a/43249703/73681

A company (sorry “nonprofit”) going from 30% to nothing should be disbanded

Reply on news.ycombinator.com