A shrinking Firefox faces endangered species status | Hacker News Reader

A shrinking Firefox faces endangered species status

computerworld.com

58 pointsjalanco86 comments

The problem I feel with Mozilla is that they mistook why they were successful. They attributed the success of Firefox to the openness of the browser and the company and have doubled-down on that. In reality though, that wasn't why it was successful at all.

Firefox was great because it was a great browser at a time when other browsers weren't so good.

The fact that it was open-source was a huge plus for people in tech but it wasn't the main (or even a significant) reason for its success. As a result, as soon as Chrome comes out which many people consider to be better (or at least a better experience) people abandoned it.

I don't think Mozilla is naive enough to think that your average user cares about open source. But it is one of their core philosophies and not something that they will abandon.

Then why spend the time and money producing videos about being open and choice. I am a person that is knowledgable about OSS, free software, etc. and even I don't care to watch them. Instead, maybe they should worry about user experience a bit more. For example, can they make the browser look a bit slicker by default? Less buttons, no separate search bar? It's just so 2006. Honestly, most users care far more about a nicer back button than your license. And if they want to stay relevant they have to appeal to the average person, not just the OSS activists.

If Firefox is to ape Chrome so much, it should just give up.

(Not a fan of Chrome.)

If Firefox were nothing more than Chrome with the ability to run extensions like NoScript, it would still be the browser to choose.

The separate search bar is for privacy reasons. Mozilla doesn't want to send all key presses in the url bar to a search engine, yet search suggestions are useful enough to show them when users actually want to search.

So does it actually accomplish any privacy protection? There are two cases:

You blindly type in your search query into the Awesomebar and it works correctly. For users that do this, it works just like Chrome, no privacy protection.

You use the provided search bar for searches, and Awesomebar for URL's. Your searches are in no way protected. This does protect the URL's you type in, such that example.com is not sent to Google/Bing/Yahoo/DDG/etc. as you type out "example". Did Mozilla actually show that this is worth protecting, and that most people don't just type in "example", hit Enter, go to Google, then click on the first link? This is what I see 99.9% of users doing already.

Note that the autocomplete can pick up the difference between a URL and a search by the presence of a pattern that doesn't follow a URL. Chrome does this. Type in "example.com" vs "?example.com". The "?" is specifically there to indicate that you want search. Perhaps privacy conscious FF users could learn this shortcut, and everyone else can get the convenience they expect?

I am not trying to downplay the importance of privacy in browser implementations, just questioning the privacy implications of this feature.

They've been marketing Firefox with a strong focus on openess for sometime now. Someone at Mozilla clearly decided that openness was their main USP at some point.

If Mozilla didn't care about openness and just focused on making the best browser, what could they have done differently? They could have had H.264 earlier, but that's pretty minor. They haven't been hurting for money.

You're over-thinking things -- only a tiny proportion of people pick browsers on technical or philosophical merit. Chrome is popular because they have the support of Google's marketing heft. It really is that simple.

Every non-technical friend I have installed Chrome because "Google told them it was faster" from the link Google has on their site when you use a different browser or it is bundled with so much software.

That, or they had a technical friend who laughed at them for using IE and told them to use Chrome.

That's exactly the marketing heft I'm referring to.

> The problem I feel with Mozilla is that they mistook why they were successful. They attributed the success of Firefox to the openness of the browser and the company and have doubled-down on that.

I think you've mistaken the purpose of Mozilla: the purpose of Mozilla is not to have a successful company independent of openness, it is to promote "openness, innovation, and opportunity on the Web".

Mozilla isn't a for-profit company (well, the Foundation isn't, and the Corporation is wholly owned by, and exists to further the purposes of, the Foundation.)

The latest FF builds have been rock solid for me (Win7 x64 with 4 or 5 big name extensions and that's it).

I've currently got about 130 tabs open, FF is using ~ 1.1GB of RAM and has been sitting open & running in this state for 3 or 4 weeks with no problems or slow downs whatsoever. The plugin container also finally works reliably so shitty sites with buggy flash code don't take the browser down when flash decides to blow up. FF's PDF implementation has also gotten better and it's now rare (as in I can't remember the last time) that I need to jump out to Acrobat reader to get a properly rendered view of a PDF.

FF starts faster than Chrome, font rendering is a lot better and it seems most of the "weird" HTML issues I encounter these days doing webdev stuff are with Chrome rather than FF.

I don't understand why Firefox isn't crushing Chrome.

Edit: Latest FF mobile on Android is awesome too.

Google has put a lot of time and money into getting Chrome mainstreamed. IE Tab was a big help for enterprise adoption and that made more normal people accept it as a "normal" browser. Most people use Gmail, Google Search, and YouTube, all of which heavily promote Chrome.

Firefox has responded well to Chrome for the most part, but when Chrome was released, Fx had some long-standing problems that Chrome obviated, and many in the tech community have been Chrome devotees since. Mozilla sometimes gets confused and makes bad choices, like manually reviewing all code that gets published in its addon store and refusing to ship patent-encumbered H.264 codecs, that further hurt adoption and reinforce the reputation that Firefox makes it "harder" than necessary to use the web.

Google made a deal with Adobe to fix up some of the stability and performance issues in Flash and they ship the improved plugin as "Pepper", part of Chrome; Mozilla still doesn't have a good solution for this, though it has a small start in Shumway.

Google built an internal PDF reader so that people didn't have to worry about Adobe Reader popping up as they clicked around. Mozilla eventually copied them, though Mozilla's reader is written in JS, and Chrome's is written in C++.

Google systematically attacked the most annoying things about internet browsing and dispatched of them effectively in Chrome, didn't make excuses about how the bad experience was Adobe's fault. Mozilla is less effective because it's usually too busy with infighting over what technically counts as "open" and what doesn't to get the real work done, or at least to get it done before Google has already shipped the change to their users.

I used Chrome for about 18 months full-time but have been back on Fx since version 4, so I'm not a Chrome apologist, but these are the reasons why Firefox isn't crushing Chrome.

> Mozilla sometimes gets confused and makes bad choices, like manually reviewing all code that gets published in its addon store

To be fair, extension malware runs rampant in Google Chrome, so it wasn't necessarily a bad idea per se. Just perhaps not a great execution.

Could you please give some examples of extension malware running rampant?

Insightful points, thanks! I guess from all of that, the optimist in me only sees "Most people use Gmail, Google Search, and YouTube, all of which heavily promote Chrome." as an on-going threat.

On every other front FF is either at parity, will be shortly or already better. Plus Mozilla has the privacy card, which at least for me, means something. So... I'm calling it! This is the bottom and FF's fight back starts now :)

Chrome has just too much momentum. Firefox has to be significantly better at this point to be noticed again, and right now it's somewhere between "just as good" and "marginally better".

I'm a Mac user, and FF still stands out as not being very Mac-like. The big tabs look like something from Windows (not sure if third-party themes can improve this), the preferences look like something from an early version of OS X, etc.

I have considered switching since Safari has its share of problems, and extension support is lackluster/limited, but the main blocker for me is the location bar having a separate search field. Safari's single "omnibar" is just too good. It provides real-time search results from Google, bookmarks and history, and it's eerily exact. When you do a search, the search phrase stays in the location bar instead of giving me an unreadable Google search URL.

I used to use Firefox, so when I saw some hype around its tab collection stuff the other week I downloaded it and gave it another try. It was slow and paused the whole interface regularly for a second or two. I can't say I used it exactly like I use Chrome, but there wasn't much point using it if I can't use the tab collection stuff properly. Just another anecdote, this one from an outdated Macbook Air.

Google has advertisements for Chrome on their search page -- that's why they have a large market share. They also spread a lot of propaganda about Chrome's being faster.

In reality, Chrome is intentionally designed to slow users down by sending them to Google search results instead of directly to the destination URLs. People then click on the camouflaged AdSense.

Firefox is now faster than Chrome in independent tests, and it doesn't use up as much memory. Firefox is a much better browser in many ways.

Mozilla's big mistake is that they aren't reaching out enough to developers. It's developers who set the trends. Example: I started a Firefox developers group in the Bay Area, and no one from Mozilla replied to my messages about their helping out, even if nothing more than offering us occasional meetup space.

The SF office has a street-level room set aside for use as a community space, theoretically it shouldn't be too hard to convince them to let you use it. I know this because I intend to use it for various Rust-relates purposes for the next month or so. :)

Thanks for the info. I got too busy and stepped down from the Meetup group. I encouraged Mozilla to take over as organizer, but they didn't. I hope that someone else will start one up.

I really don't want to develop web code in a world where the only two popular browsers are one developed by and for Google, and one by and for Microsoft. But every time I come to a thread that mentions Firefox on this website, there are people claiming (usually wrongly) that it doesn't implement x, y, or z that someone else does. I really think the development community needs to wake up a bit, and start promoting FF internally, instead of just following the Google hype train.

Actually there will be three Google, Microsoft and Apple.

Whilst it is better to have some competition there really does need to be an open alternative.

Doesn't Apple use Webkit, same as Google? Isn't that functionally the same, except for Google's optimizations?

No Google forked Webkit into Blink[1] about two years ago.

[1] http://www.chromium.org/blink

Chrome no longer uses Webkit; it uses a fork called Blink. (Technically a fork of WebCore, the core of WebKit.) It's similar, but has diverged since the fork.

Not really anymore. Google forked part of WebKit to create Blink[1], and both Safari and Chrome have their own optimizations.

I'm not sure how close to each other these rendering engines are. I imagine they're still very very similar, but now that the fork has occurred, time will tell how divergent (or not) they become.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(layout_engine)

They actually forked WebKit and use Blink now, but they obviously still share a lot of the same code as the fork is relatively recent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_%28layout_engine%29

Even when they were using WebKit, it was never the same version, and they had patches. So there never was a unique WebKit rendering engine.

They forked webkit, actually, and use something called Blink.

Check this out for a good summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

Firefox is and for the forseeable future will continue to be the best browser for those concerned with privacy. It may be marginalized, but it won't go away. With Electrolysis coming along nicely and Servo on the distant horizon, Firefox can probably also retake the crown as undisputed most secure browser at some point. They're also doing a decent job of keeping performance competitive.

Overall, Firefox seems about as healthy as you could expect given that it's competing against Microsoft, Apple, and Google.

You have to seek out Firefox, so it has to be worth seeking out. Chrome comes with Android, Safari comes with Mac and iOS, and IE comes with Microsoft. So, as mobile increases, Firefox is not a default player.

Here's a question: "Why would a System Administrator take the time to install Firefox on all the company machines?"

A system administrator is going to most likely be using some sort of push tool or have Firefox in the default image - if they care enough to use it at all. In all my years of doing Network/Sysadmin (1999 - 2010), Microsoft always told us their browser was the best and easiest to configure with system policies... so the higher ups just bought it, hook, line and sinker. Never mind that Microsoft had never PROVEN that claim.

or deploy a package with some 3rd party... but it still takes effort, what are the reasons for spending it?

I recently switched back to Firefox as my primary browser because it's the company I distrust least. Turns out it's as exactly the same as Chrome now anyway - I keep forgetting which browser I'm using.

The reason I switched back was because Google's updater ping (according to Lil' Snitch) is very aggressive (several times a day) and also a long time ago I vowed to switch to the browser that first implemented ES6's arrow function syntax ;)

When someone asked me why I use Firefox, I always pointed out this feature (Tab Groups) which is very good but not publicized widely by Mozilla.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tab-groups-organize-tab...

Chrome bundles flash - which, despite HTML5, still runs half of sites I visit - stream/video. Installing/updating flash manually is a chore, especially on Linux. And it's yet another thing any non-tech person has to do if they want a replacement for IE - which is why I just recommend Chrome.

Chrome integrates all of my stuff in to my gmail account - don't need to have yet another "Mozilla cloud" account.

GMail works better on Chrome (faster loading/rendering from my experience).

Writing this from FF on Fedora 21, I still use FF from time to time to see what they are up to and test stuff.

At this point I don't see the purpose FF serves - Chrome ate their lunch as the portable "better than the default browser" replacement and native browsers are becoming decent. With Win 10 IE should get even better (evergreen AFAIK), there is plenty of competition between Microsoft/Apple/Android and they all seem to be behind the standardization effort and Chrome is there to provide a cross platform solution those not satisfied with native browsers.

The only inspiring tech from Mozilla that I know about is Rust - which is (ironically) a native/statically compiled language. Even Microsoft has done bigger stuff for web dev than Mozilla (TypeScript, OSS/cross platform ASP.NET, VS web dev tools + free VS) and Google shouldn't even need mentioning. The ASM.js stuff is iffy/niche - I'm much more hopeful things like Sane/Sound script. I don't see how Mozilla is going to stay relevant in the future - maybe if the Servo yields real gains with the experimental stuff they are doing and it gets integrated in to FF - but that's years out in the meantime it's just going to keep sinking.

I've just recently switched back to Firefox as part of an effort to eliminate as many Google products from my life as possible, and it's a really nice browser. I had no idea Firefox's market share had fallen so far.

My choice to dump Firefox has absolutely nothing to do with Eich's termination. Or his comments.

Firefox on the Mac has gotten increasingly slower for me, since about version 28. Version 36 is when it became absolutely intolerable, where the pinwheel pauses during navigating to a new page or opening a new tab achieved a duration of 10 - 30 seconds. I could handle 1-2 seconds. Even 3-5 seconds was annoying but not enough to get me to stop using Firefox. Version 36 did it for me. Some may have a lower threshold for pain than I, and exited earlier.

Yes, I disabled ALL of my add-ons, which consisted of Firebug and ABP, and while the performance improved slightly, it still exceeded the 5-second annoyance barrier all too often. I finally gave up and started using Chrome, which BTW, runs like a banshee even with ABP installed.

Do Apple diagnostics, someone at our company was having problems specifically with Firefox. It turned out to be a bad stick of RAM.

That's interesting, I've switched back to Firefox because Chrome was getting slower and currently for my usage (I tend to have 100+ tabs open) under Yosemite, Firefox wins hands down compared to Safari and Chrome.

I thought that they've improved a lot in recent times whereas Chrome has become more and more bloated...

That doesn't sound normal. Are you sure your system is working properly?

To add another data point, I'm using Firefox on the Mac with a half dozen plug-ins and I have never experienced pauses remotely like what you describe.

Furthermore, Firefox has been consistently smoother than my near-virgin install of Chrome. It's weird -- while Chrome definitely finishes loading pages a bit faster, it performs incomplete page repaints in the process, causing unpleasant whole-of-screen flashes as I jump from page to page. With Firefox, moving from page to page is butter smooth.

Unless you want bloatware that sucks RAM and battery, what else are you supposed to use?

I went from Firefox to Safari to Chrome and back to Firefox. Firefox was bloatware before. Now it's acceptable when compared to Chrome and Safari.

Either Firefox was improved, or wasn't improved while hardware was, and while Safari and Chrome added useless feature after useless feature.

In any case, I do not see any alternative to Firefox for 'power users'. I'm very happy to use it. The report that Firefox marketshare is shrinking is weird. I've seen more and more people using it recently.

Maybe I'm just odd but I love firefox on MacOS, Linux and android because it just works at a decent speed.

I had moved to Chrome, then switched back because I just couldn't stand it any more. Sure, at its best, Chrome is a bit faster than Firefox. At their worst, Chrome bogs down more heavily and more often than Firefox ever has for me.

Mozilla doesn't have the same leverage as other players to push their browser. Apple has OS X and iOS to push Safari, Microsoft has with Windows the most popular desktop OS to promote IE and Google can use its search domination and Android to advertise and push Chrome. Mozilla tries to create its own mobile platform with Firefox OS and I hope they succeed with that, because they can use all the leverage. I really like Firefox. It's fast and stable, has some very useful plug-ins, it's well supported and I trust Mozilla more than the big 3. That last bit may be naive, I know.

That last part isn't naive at all. The last time all of the browsers were owned by private corporations, was called the browser wars, and we all know had bad that was for innovation and development.

My mum always told me not to extrapolate so I'm not very worried about Computer World's alarmist forecasts of Firefox going the way of the typewriter and Smallpox.

That said, while I'm a fan of Firefox - I have used it since it was called Phoenix and I had unzip it off a CD I got with a magazine - I can't help but think this is partially their own fault. Sure, Google has a massive advertising budget for Chrome, and they do their best to ensure that Google products perform best on Chrome - but Firefox is slow to react, and slow to implement - and perhaps unsure of what people actually want?

We continually get useless features - the social API, the "share" button (no one can look at me with a straight face and tell me that shouldn't be an addon, surely), a redesign which takes away features - while actual useful features that Chrome has had for seven years - like per tab processes and chromeless app windows - are still nowhere to be seen. It took Firefox years to get private browsing, and then years again for it to let us do it at the same time as regular browsing. They really need to be faster moving.

Mozilla certainly seems to be far more effective at delivering UI features (especially inadvisable ones) than engine features, but it's important to keep in mind how Firefox extensions can pick up the slack better than for other browsers. NoScript is the leading example of this.

> per tab processes [...] are still nowhere to be seen.

Electrolysis (separate content processes) is available now in Nightly, and "The e10s team estimates e10s with a single content process will be enabled in Firefox Release by the end of 2015."

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis

Its pretty naive to think present market share is any kind of reliable predictor for the future viability of Firefox. Its most recent ideologically compatible competitor, Chrome, has recently (<12 months) been shown to have deeply rooted problems relating to its independence that in a post-Snowden age, Tech community aside, have become factors in the decisionmakng processes of regular people. Accounting for those that accelerate adoption most, the tech enthusiast community, sites like HN show Mozilla still has a (potentially growing) great deal of love from the decision makers that matter.. there is a strong and still valid sheppard/sheep network effect in play here (the same that originally caused Mozilla's 90s/00s popularity) and it's still far too early to discount its value just yet.

The comments on that site are sickening. Yes, I do not agree with Eich's views. Mozilla owned up to it. Someone should tell them to disable JS everywhere because of Eich.

Plus, Firefox is a community project with more momentum than almost any FOSS project. It won't die.

edit: read that in reverse

The comments I read took rather a different position I thought - that they believe people should not use Firefox because Mozilla "fired" Eich. Still a sickening position.

Oh, I guess I read too quickly. Comments on those sites really are terrible.

At the time, Mozilla was savaged by both the far left and far right. Both sides called for boycotts.

The comments in this story appear to be from the right in this case. I guess the left lost interest (not surprising since they got what they demanded, for Eich to be removed - or maybe just leftists don't read that website).

The article wasn't talking about the browser's development but it's marketshare. To me it doesn't look like they have too much to worry about there. They are still ahead of Safari on the desktop and are still way ahead of Opera.

I don't believe Firefox will ever gain marketshare again but Mozilla still has some time to come up with another bread winner before they've lost relevance. They got some serious technology in the works with Servo and there is still lots room to improve browsing on mobile for those that are paying attention.

"The article wasn't talking about the browser's development but it's marketshare. To me it doesn't look like they have too much to worry about there. They are still ahead of Safari on the desktop and are still way ahead of Opera."

What's the leading browser on mini-computers and mainframes? Mozilla is not a significant player in mobile and that does not look to be changing and that's where we are headed.

Sure, but they still have time before we get there and like I said before there is a lot of room for improvement in terms of web browsing on mobile. There is a reason people prefer to use apps instead of the web on mobile but not the desktop.

This is a shame - Browser Wars II...

Having any company have dominance (be it Microsoft, Apple, Google, whatever) is dangerous for the open web. I don't look forward to walled gardens again where "This site only works with X" becomes prevalent.

Even if you don't use Firefox, if you value diversity in the browser ecosystem, you should consider donating to Mozilla. https://sendto.mozilla.org/

I donated code, time, and money to Mozilla in those early days when they were just scraping by. To me, in recent years they seem to have become bloated and wasteful thanks to the Google and now Yahoo money. Yes, they have accomplished great things, but right now Mozilla doesn't feel like an organization that needs my help or would even appreciate my help.

Computerworld faces endangered species status, tries to regain lost ground with click bait articles.

So let's actually read the article:

>the iconic browser dropped another three-tenths of a percentage point in analytics firm Net Applications' tracking, ending February with 11.6%.

That seems a lot less serious than is actually made out. Lets find out some more about Net Applications:

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

That says to read this: http://web.archive.org/web/20081205105936/http://www.thestan...

>The company tracks browser usage -- how many hits are coming from browser A vs. browser B. In November, several factors skewed the results toward Safari. Thanks to the presidential election (which kept people visiting news sites) and the Thanksgiving holiday, an unusually high percentage of overall browsing in November happened outside of the office. So it's no surprise that browsers with higher home usage, such as Safari, would do better. (Firefox also did better, gaining more than 20%, while Internet Explorer -- popular in corporate environments -- dropped below 70% for the first time.)

>Net Applications tracks usage across its more than 40,000 client websites. Although these sites are located all over the world, they're skewed towards Europe and North America. That happens to be where Apple has a strong presence. Vince Vizzaccaro, the Net Application's Executive Vice President for Marketing and Strategic Alliances, acknowledged the problem and informed The Industry Standard that they will start weighting their statistics by country in January. "We need to better represent Asia and Africa," Vizzaccaro said.

Oh right, so they get access to the logs of "client websites", of which microsoft and apple seem to be some of the largest. So scientifically lets open the logs of my sites and see what browsers are represented there. Oh dear, it looks like safari has a 30% market share on mine over the last week. But what's this? Virtually all those hits are from the same IP address group. Oh it turns out that a whole bunch of mac scrappers hit my sites. And look! The same user shows up both as a internet explorer hit, a safari hit, and a chrome hit, turns out the same person uses different devices and the default browser that comes with each. This would be three different people according to Net Applications.

If Firefox dies I will go with him.

Its not about Eich - or, gasp, open source. Neither of those words capture the attention of your 'mainstream' users staring at their mobile phone as they walk down the street. Don't believe me, ask the next 20-something you see.

"Back in the day" (read: when the world relied on internet explorer) tabbed browsing was not a mainstream feature. Nor was pop-up blocking, containerized scripting(active-x anyone?) and browsing not being tied to window managers. Times have changed and now while we have diversity, we also strangely have more of the same. Aside from interface, Safari, Chrome and Firefox all offer very similar experiences. Those game changing features that made Firefox popular are now mainstream.

The stats mentioned above are interesting but should not be surprising to anyone here. Google has heavily promoted Chrome and built it in to the android platform. Apple has done something similar with Safari and iOS. No surprises here. Also, keep in mind that Mozilla walked away from an entire market of mobile users. (Source: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=firefox+ios )

Wrt moving forward, what about listening to current trends in the market? Security, privacy and speed all seem to be popular buzzwords these days (now, if more than ever). Why not focus here first?

Users have proven time and time again that unless there is a major compelling reason to change they will stick with what they know and what has worked in the past. With the built-in browsers being 'good enough', what reason(s) do they have to change?

Man, it almost seems like we've been here before..

Mozilla "walked away" from a platform that doesn't allow Firefox. I don't think you can blame them for not doing what Google did with Chrome for iOS.

First, I don't blame them, but wonder if more could not have been done. However, I do appreciate how that is your only take away. Kudos.

No other browser can beat Firefox, because all the others including Vivaldi are RAM hungry, GPU and CPU abuser show-offs. I don't even talk about their dictative approaches such as minimal feature UI, unauthorized update daemons runnin on background, etc. Firefix does have an Android version and it works great on my 2010 HTC phone, it doesn't dictate a minimum version of Android or something.

If the majority of users aren't familiar with such concepts than I don't need to worry on Mozilla's side because they don't do something fundamentally wrong.

Only thing I use chrome for is netflix and web testing. Otherwise it is Firefox all the way baby!

Who knew that continually ignoring your userbase and changing things in ways they don't like for roughly a decade could have negative consequences?

The list is getting too long for me to even remember, but I'll try: they moved tabs to the top (can't even toggle it via about:config anymore), they killed regular download dialogs, they killed the regular status bar, they removed the ability to keep browser history but not keep download history, they radically changed their address bar search function (Awesomebar) and appearance and provided no option to use the old method people were used to, they made accepting a self-signed certificate more difficult than filing your taxes, they fought Debian over petty license branding issues (that other software had no issue with) giving many of us "iceweasel", they radically altered their interface to be a poor Chrome clone and killed all customization (can't put refresh button on the left, can't unmerge back/next buttons, etc), they started putting adware onto their new tab page, they made it so that extensions must be signed by Mozilla to be installed with no ability to override, they turned HTTP/2 into an agenda by making TLS mandatory in spite of the IETF's decision on that. They continue to blow off per-tab process support, and 64-bit Windows builds are still not mainstream. And that's off the top of my head, I'm sure there's more. Eich doesn't even have to factor into this, no matter which side of that you're on.

You can like or hate any one of those, and yes if you want 20 extensions you can mostly make it look and act like it used to. (Plus, they talk about removing all that stuff to simplify and unbloat the UI, and then they add useless crap like Firefox Hello in its place.) But each time they changed things and completely ignored their user's feedback, they lost a few more users to Chrome. I don't really like Chrome all that much either, but at least it's not a constantly changing target, where you never know what feature you're going to lose because of an auto-update.

Firefox's decline wasn't any one great catastrophe: it's been death by a thousand papercuts.

It's really simple: if you offer a feature at one point, and you want to keep your users happy, then you don't completely remove that feature from them in the future. You can default to something else, fine, but you make an effort for people who liked the old way. Microsoft understood this up until Windows 8. And it looks like they're relearning that lesson again a bit with Windows 10's changes.

Funny, the list you provide are all the changes I really like. I wish they made these sooner and more of these types of changes. Awesomebar, tabs on top, all that just makes good sense to me.

Which is why I specifically pointed out that it doesn't matter whether you personally like any specific change or not. (I actually like some of those changes too, eg dropping the status bar in favor of hover hints.)

Every single one of those had a very vocal minority protest the change. Nearly every single one was very easy to leave as an option; at least as an about:config toggle. And every time they didn't, they lost a lot of those vocal users to another browser. And this happens so often that, well, this is why Firefox's market share is currently at 11.6%.

You can either have a browser that your users think is pretty great with a 50% market share; or a browser that your users think is absolutely fantastic with a 10% market share. Firefox has chosen the latter. It's no surprise that the few remaining users love it: it's a browser highly customized to exactly what they like, to the exclusion of everyone else.

I've done and seen this exact same thing with my own software. It's not nearly at the scale of Firefox, but the effect has been the same. I went from catering to what my users wanted and having tons of options, with about 100,000 downloads per release; to now doing things the way I want, with few options, and about 10,000 downloads a release. Many people now insist on using a release I put out three years ago; kind of like how I insist on sticking with Firefox 28.

It's fine if you want to go the route of making the software you want, rather than the software your users want, just don't act surprised about the inevitable result.

I never stopped using firefox but I've started using it more recently including on android. It isn't perfect but no browser is which is why i have chome, ie, and old opera around.

Well, I quit using firefox after the Eich ridiculousness. Chrome is quite good...wasn't difficult. Doesn't seem all that hard to believe that others might have, too.

Are not people afraid of Chrome being backed by Google?

I am still a firefox user...but I don't want to be.

I will admit the whole Eich thing, when we was promoted I quickly lost my attachment to Mozilla - they clearly were not the organization I thought they were. But aside from that Firefox seems to be the worst of all choices - the only thing keeping me attached to it is the lack of an open source alternative.

Chrome seems to be far ahead in terms of security (XSS protection, Sandboxing etc.) and in many cases appears to be faster - but I don't trust an advertising company with my browser.

I think we need a fresh contender - an open browser, built from the start with an understanding of the security and privacy lessons we have learned over the last 30 years. I'm not sure how realistic that dream is, but I believe it is worth the thought.

Could that be Servo? I think maybe, but it is way too early to tell.

So who then? The Eich incident was probably the only incident I can think of where Mozilla did a bad (if that). Consider Eich contributing to a campaign (admittedly a very bad one), vs all the bad things that came out of The Microsoft and Google dominated years. It's not like you are picking between TWC and EFF. The alternatives are much more willing to corrupt the web to make a buck.

Servo is that project, when it's beta I'll go back to Mozilla as I feel like I'm ushering in the Stallman dystopia by supporting proprietary software. I dumped FF when they almost cloned Chrome's UI. If I'm going to use the same UI might as well apt-get install browser-chromium and get a sandbox with it.

I dumped Firefox ages ago, when I first heard of Eich's hatred towards the gay and lesbian community.

It is inconceivable that his colleagues at Mozilla did not know about his bigoted beliefs and the financial support he gives to similarly bigoted organisations. Yet they decided he was the best person to run Mozilla, a company that only pays lip service to equal rights - clearly at the top levels of management it is a vile, homophobic, racist organisation.

There is no way I am using a homophobic web browser on any of my desktops, so off it went.

I now happily use Safari for my everyday browsing, knowing that Apple is in the safe hands of Tim Cook, a proud gay man who I admire greatly.

Eich resigned less than two weeks after being made CEO after the outcry from both outside and within Mozilla.

Mozilla isn't homophobic. They put him in that position because they thought he was the best candidate - clearly they were wrong, but I expect this is a Hanlon's razor case.

I was saddened that he was made CEO, but he was only CEO for a very brief period and Mozilla has learned its lesson.

(Speaking as an LGBT person myself)

They chose Eich because he is a great engineer and a great manager. He's evidently also able to separate his job from his political views. I'd like to think that's what really matters, but I'd be wrong :) We are in year 2015 and marketing is what makes-or-breaks one's company. He'd piss off LGBT people - in that and only that sense he was a bad CEO pick. There was this joke running - when Samsung's CEO learned that Tim Cook is gay, he announced he's twice as gay AND waterproof.

Apart from the ridiculous slowness (in real world usage, not specialized javascript benchmarks), I think the biggest issue is the single-thread design. Every serious problem with the browser (well, apart from the UI) stems from that. The fix has been in the pipeline for what, half a decade at this point? Probably more, even.

Firefox apologists say the silliest things about it ("I don't like process-per-tab because it pollutes the task manager"), but really at this point there are no excuses.

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