Nothing can kill Firefox, because it’s already dead for all practical purposes.
Nothing can kill Firefox, because it’s already dead for all practical purposes.
... damn do I have adhd?????
(I'm kidding)
I cannot remember the last time I came across one myself.
A few: Developer tools are quite slow; Airline websites often break during checkout; JS games and video players sometimes stutter or use a lot of CPU
And when people ask them what they meant, they revealed that they used some package from the arch user repository that apparently required manual compiling for every update.
And instead of thinking that this wasn't the unusual behavior of a particular package, they insisted that this was the normal Linux packaging experience, which was why Linux as a whole was a terrible operating system.
A bunch of commenters chimed in emphasizing that the whole package distribution system in Linux is designed to among other things, handle dependencies and avoid manual compiling (though it's available as an option), and they were all dismissed as just being fanboy apologists.
And I'm able to access my bank, my credit cards, my utility bills, in Firefox without issue. So I'm not sure what people are talking about.
One thing I am familiar with though in the aftermath of gamergate was a bunch of motivated reasoning to complain about games and insist that they had design flaws or bugs, when really? The bugs weren't real but were kind of just a different way of saying We Don't Like This Game. And so reports of perceived bugs in some cases are as much a social phenomenon as they are a sincere representation of software functionality.
I don't want to say there's no bugs but for every one person's unsubstantiated anecdote, I seem to be able to find two people able to reproduce a functional version of the experience without issue. And just to zoom in on the bank login issue in particular, I use a credit union with an old decrepit HTTP site that was recently updated to a slightly less old and decrepit HTTP site. Plaid is unable to successfully log in, but the web interface works perfectly fine on Firefox mobile.
It happens so rarely, I don’t keep Chrome installed and have to download a new version of Ungoogled Chromium when I need to see if something only works in Chrome, which I can only remember doing about twice in the last year!
What you run into the most is the website saying, hey, it looks like you are not using a browser we have tested against, so we are not going to let you log in. Please come back when you have Chrome, edge, or Safari.
Also many sites show significant degradation in FF lately. Youtube works like shit in FF, once every 10 page opens it just gets stuck half way with part of the background loaded, like black with black empty frames on top. Or just empty page. No, it never finishes loading from that state, and neither it can reload on F5. But opening a new tab works fine and YT loads normally.
And to finish off this rant, FF has now started corrupting my open tabs after opening FF with saved session. This never happened since this feature was implemented and in 2025 has happened 3 times already. And in mozilla bugtracker all tickets about this are ignored for years now. Meanwhile they are developing some crappy bells and whistles, instead of fixing fundamental bugs.
If not for Chrome monopoly, I would consider switching browsers. Ladybird can't come soon enough. Mozilla has lost touch with reality.
How much of that is Firefox rendering being worse vs artificial slowdowns by Google owned sites kind of doesn't matter in the end. Objectively it's a slower browsing experience but I solely use it for uBlock Origin.
For me the biggest offender are usually Google products and sometimes the lazy-coded website written by incompetents and whose audience is the tech illiterate (i.e. some websites involving schools/teaching) that just tell you "use latest Chrome just to be sure, download here" to, well, just be sure. Notable mentions for government websites that are like 10 years in the past and that are still on the "Supports Firefox" side because, well, they are just always late to everything.
Which service do you have issues with?
While governments battle big tech on some issues, they are very much on the same side on others. They both want more tracking for example - the governments want to regulate it, and there is a battle for control of the data, but both want the data to be collected by someone.
Gosh, I really wish Mozilla would just dig into their user-base and find a way to adequately become sustainable... or find a way to make it work better as a foundation that is NOT maintained by Google, ie like the Wiki Foundation. I do spend a LOT of time in FF, can't anyone see there's a value beyond selling ads and personal info that could make Mozilla more sustainable, dependable and resilient?
The whole desktop market is cratering.
I was talking to a reddit mod a few months ago. He was looking at the subreddit stats. 95% of his users were on mobile.
Think about that. We desktop users are dinosaurs.
So FireFox having a 3% market share might actually mean more than half of desktop users are on FireFox.
Source: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...
For some reason that part of the story always seems to get omitted, which I find bizarre. But the web pivoted to mobile and Google flexed its monopoly powers. I would argue that upwards of 95% of the change in market share is explained by those two factors.
Looking at the last 10 years gives a different perspective (not great for Firefox but maybe underscores something is different recently in general):
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...
You can't install UBlock Origin on mobile.
Like I still use FireFox on mobile, just purely out of habit. I don't really see anything better about it (I am quite inexperienced when it comes to phones).
I just looked it up. 2023 was when it started. I'm surprised Android even allows something like this.
Because their web developers are too lazy to write anything to proper standards. They're doing some kind of lazy "Check for Chrome, because everyone must be running that, if not, redirect to an Unsupported page".
I've yet to find a website that "refuses" to work in Firefox which doesn't work just fine when I use a user agent switching extension to present a standard Chrome on MacOS or Chrome on Windows useragent.
Another pretty common experience for developers is wanting to do things "the right way", but being overridden by management.
Global browser marketshare never made much sense. You need to figure out what your users use, then aim to be compatible for most of those, and ignore any global stats.
As of December 7th, Firefox is 10.3% of traffic there. This makes it the #2 browser, after Chrome (at 62.2%) -- a spot it has been dueling with Edge over for the last year or so.
I'm inclined to think that "people visiting wikipedia" is a fairly representative sample of "normal users", overall.
Not sure how users cope with Chrome-based browsers and intrusive ads.
I also suspect that those who lived through the days of frequent Windows errors and Chrome running out of memory all the time often expect software to fail in weird and unexpected ways, and a lot of people adopt a "don't fix it if it isn't broken" mindset.
Still, uBlock Lite and Brave browser are definitely easy wins and I'm glad to see more random people in my life using them than I would have expected. :)
I used to try to patiently explain why people should do xyz. Now I explain to people why I'm going to change xyz on their device, and if they don't slam the breaks I just do what needs to be done right then. If someone doesn't know what an adblocker is they are getting one so they can see for themselves and reflect on what companies have been putting them through for years to make some incremental amount of money.
Granted in Google's case, it seems that the Monopoly judgment was with respect to ad markets, but locking people into search to serve ads might be understood as part of the structure of that monopoly.
(Hey, if you work at Snapchat: fix your shit. Your desktop site is by far the most mainstream website I've come across that lies like this)
I can’t remember the last time a website was unusable on firefox. It’s certainly not common.
Funny, because chrome has always been the browser for laptops users, while Firefox has always been the browser of power users.