
Firefox marketshare revisited - ronjouch
https://andreasgal.com/2017/07/19/firefox-marketshare-revisited/
======
JohnTHaller
One additional cause of new Chrome installs taking over from Firefox:
bundleware. Chrome is foisted upon users as install-by-default bundleware when
users install or update lots of different apps, especially free antivirus apps
on Windows. Just clicking "Continue" when your free antivirus on Windows
updates will cause Chrome to be installed and set as the default browser.
Here's an image of Avast tricking you into installing Chrome:
[http://imgur.com/hNZLbmL](http://imgur.com/hNZLbmL)

I've had to fix this for three family members previously as they were using a
free antivirus and couldn't figure out why their browser looked different and
didn't have an ad-blocker now.

~~~
kibwen
In addition to Chrome's bundling deals which override your default browser
settings, major Windows updates now appear to reset your default browser to
Edge every time.

~~~
r00fus
Isn't that in direct opposition to their EU antitrust settlement? How does MS
get away with this?

~~~
majewsky
I'm actually wondering more how Google is getting away with those screenshots
from the submission. That's exactly the same behavior that it was recently
fined for wrt product search.

~~~
zokier
One reason might be that EU doesn't have many browser vendors who would put in
a official complaint.

~~~
gorkonsine
Why wouldn't MS complain? If MS can be good for anything, helping keep Google
in check ranks #1 on my list.

~~~
avarun
They reached a deal last year to stop complaining to regulators about each
other:

[https://www.recode.net/2016/4/22/11586336/microsoft-
google-a...](https://www.recode.net/2016/4/22/11586336/microsoft-google-agree-
to-stop-complaining-to-regulators-about-each)

~~~
gorkonsine
This should be proof of illegal collusion and grounds for a gigantic fine for
each of them. It's just like the no-poaching agreement they got in trouble
with a few years ago.

~~~
endominus
IANAL, but I think that would count as "compelling speech" ("You MUST complain
to regulators about each other!") which is explicitly forbidden in the States
(not sure about Europe, but I think it's the same).

~~~
gorkonsine
We're not talking about individuals here, we're talking about corporations.
Collusion between companies for the sake of negatively affecting the market
(such as establishing a cartel) is illegal in any jurisdiction with proper,
functioning laws. As I mentioned before, this is similar to the no-poaching
agreement which they got into trouble (not nearly enough though) before.

------
epoch1970
I think the "Why?" section's conclusions are off the mark. It basically blames
Google's advertising of Chrome for Firefox's decline, and even goes so far as
to say "Firefox’s decline is not an engineering problem."

While I don't doubt that Google's advertising of Chrome has drawn away some
Firefox users, I also don't think that we can ignore or deny the many
controversial changes to Firefox that have likely had an impact, too.

Just off of the top of my head I can think of things like:

* Frequent breakage of extensions when first switching to the more rapid release schedule.

* Frequent and disruptive UI changes that didn't bring users much benefit, such as Australis.

* Removing the ability to easily disable JavaScript.

* Taking many years to get multiprocess support working. (Not that I'm suggesting they should have rushed it, of course.)

* The inclusion of Pocket and Hello.

* Sponsored tiles.

* Users who report experiencing poor performance and high memory usage.

* Disruption caused by requiring signed extensions.

* The removal of support for OSes or OS releases that are moderately older, but still do have active users.

I'm sure there are others that I'm forgetting.

Even if they seem minor, those are the kinds of things that can cause users to
switch away from Firefox, or not even start using it in the first place.
Losing a small number of users for a variety of minor reasons can add up very
quickly, as well. Furthermore, those issues don't really have anything to do
with Google or Chrome.

~~~
Pxtl
Honestly, as a firefox die-hard who finally gave up, all of those issues were
dwarfed by the performance one. The only one I even bothered to config away
was the search-engine change.

I stopped using firefox because of performance. Nothing more, nothing less.

~~~
kleiba
Something I could never quite understand. I'm using Firefox but occasionally
run Chrome for a few minutes. I do have a couple of extensions installed in
Firefox. To me, Chrome might be faster, or maybe not. But honestly, I couldn't
care less: even if Firefox takes a second, or two or even three more to show
me a page sometimes, so what? I mean, two seconds? I guess I can wait that
long, even if I look at tens of websites each day (which I'm not even sure I
do).

If somebody gave me a Ferrari for free with the caveat that there's a guy
sitting on the passengers seat who keeps track of where I'm going at all
times, I guess I'd still keep driving my current car (hint: it's not a
Ferrari).

And before the downvote reflex sets in in some of you: I'm not saying that
_you_ should be like _me_. If you like Chrome, great, good for you! It's just
that the speed difference to _me_ personally has never been a good enough
reason to switch. YMMV.

~~~
Pxtl
The problem is that when you get more and more tabs going, Firefox's single-
threadedness becomes more and more painful. When one misbehaving tab locks up
(or crashes) the whole browser, that's bad.

~~~
callahad
This has been fixed. Firefox is now fully multi-process on all release
channels.

~~~
jetpacktuxedo
Unless you have an add on that isn't compatible, like the one that ubuntu for
some reason bundles with the browser out of the box.

~~~
pmontra
It looks like the development of that extension stopped in 2014 but it's still
bundled with Firefox in Ubuntu
[https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=xul-ext-
ubufox](https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=xul-ext-ubufox)

That could explain why it doesn't support multiprocessing. I disabled it
because it doesn't do much. This is a list of its functionality from
[https://ubuntu-mate.community/t/what-are-the-ubuntu-
firefox-...](https://ubuntu-mate.community/t/what-are-the-ubuntu-firefox-
modifications-about/7164)

* Enable searching for missing plugins from Ubuntu software catalog

* Add the following options to the Help menu

 __Get help on-line

 __Help translating Firefox

 __Ubuntu Release Notes

* Set homepage to Ubuntu Start Page

* Display a restart notification after upgrading Firefox

* Add ask.com to the search engines. You can uninstall this if you prefer to use a pristine Firefox install.

------
ssivark
> Firefox’s decline is not an engineering problem. Its a market disruption
> (Desktop to Mobile shift) and monopoly problem. There are no engineering
> solutions to these market problems. The only way to escape this is to pivot
> to a different market [...]

 _Privacy_ is the one problem that Mozilla/Firefox can address, which Google
and Microsoft will be fundamentally conflicted about addressing. It is also a
growing market; that is the market Firefox should be aiming for!

It seems to me that Mozilla/Firefox folks don't appreciate this at a deep
level. They are eroding user trust in the attempt to gather data for
engineering better features. Eg. see the recent controversy regarding
Firefox's usage of Google Analytics:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14753546](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14753546)
.

I made some comments on that thread, on how Mozilla/Firefox could try to win
the privacy market. I don't want to repeat those comments, so I'll just link
to them:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14754672](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14754672)

~~~
tedmielczarek
Note that Mozilla is working more closely with the Tor project with an eye
towards making it easier for more people to get the privacy enhancing benefits
of browsing over the Tor network.

~~~
Endy
Just as a thought, would it be impossible for Firefox to render the Tor
browser bundle unnecessary, by making every release of Firefox feature Tor
functions (and other privacy controls) by default?

~~~
bzbarsky
Here are some Tor privacy controls that might be a bit hard to ship by
default:

1) Various navigator.* APIs all claim you're on Windows. Some people on non-
Windows platforms may have issues with this.

2) Various window-sizing APIs lie about sizing, so pages that use them will
end up making windows too small for their content.

3) Geolocation is disabled altogether.

4) The performance API is effectively disabled (claims pretty much everything
took 0 time).

5) Media queries on the device pixel ratio lie and claim it's 1, no matter
what it actually is.

6) All timing functions are clamped to the nearest 100ms. That means
Date.now(), performance.now(), etc. If nothing else, shipping this by default
will make all benchmark results _very_ weird.

There's also various other functionality that gets disabled (gamepad API,
orientation API, etc, etc). These are generally not used much yet, so might be
ok to remove, if people think these should actually not exist as web APIs.

~~~
Endy
1) So make a request that Tor-like functions tell servers that our OS is
Ubuntu. Perhaps I'm obtuse here, but who gives a darn if it's a matter of
privacy - isn't the issue to hide under the most common OS?

2) So we send (through a Tor-backed PGP/GPG-encrypted message) a message
saying "hey dev.dork, your minimuum window size is unrealistic".

3) Yay!

4) Yay!

5) And...? maybe it'd be wise to declare 4:3, but otherwise I see no issue.

6) Well, obviously we should have a button of "This page is requesting private
data - Share for this page load? Y/N"

And I really, really don't mind if literally everything called an "API" were
to go out the bloody window. Sure, it's throwing the baby out with the
bathwater, but there's too much bathwater and the baby's a squalling jerkface
anyhow.

~~~
bzbarsky
> Perhaps I'm obtuse here, but who gives a darn if it's a matter of privacy

Some sites actually work incorrectly (e.g. keep giving you an .exe to download
instead of something you can actually use) if they think you're on Windows
when you actually aren't. I'm not saying this is good practice, just that
people do it.

> So we send

Normal users don't do that. Remember, we're not talking about a "privacy mode
you can enable", but a "privacy mode that is shipped by default out of the
box". Obviously for an opt-in mode things are simpler.

> 3) Yay!

Turns out some sites break without geolocation. Again, not saying it's a good
idea, but it is what it is.

> 4) Yay!

Just so you understand, the next likely step is Facebook blocking your
browser.

> 5) And...? maybe it'd be wise to declare 4:3, but otherwise I see no issue.

Um... I don't think you understand what device pixel ratio is. This is the
ratio of CSS to device pixels. Aka "is this a high-dpi screen", aka "which
images should actually be used to look nice?

> 6) Well, obviously we should have a button of "This page is requesting
> private data - Share for this page load? Y/N"

So every page that uses performance.now() (hint: pretty much everything) would
have this thing appear? Again, remember that we're talking about a default
mode here. Do you really think this is the experience most users are looking
for?

I really think you're talking about a quite different situation (opt-in
privacy mode) than the one I was responding to...

~~~
Endy
I'd be happier with a more private experience, at whatever cost it takes. As
far as device pixel ratio, when I think of pixel ratio, I think of 4:3, 16:10,
etc. Frankly, loading larger images means more data sent and received, which
in turn gives the website longer to attempt to inject tracking data through
EXIF or whatnot. Frankly, disabling off-page CSS wouldn't bother me either
unless somehow we'd be able to show different "user instances" to the server
when we request the CSS sheet from one part of the server compared to the one
where we render the page we actually want.

If sites break because people control their web experience, then one of two
things will happen:

1) People who are not security-focused will switch to Chrome, which is what's
already happened. So focus on a specific group and push the edge-case agenda
with both the browser product and an ongoing marketing budget.

2) People will become aware of what webpages are demanding by default and just
how little respect these groups have for their privacy - and have a means to
fight back through browser selection.

I'm willing to accept that there will be the need for certain opt-out options
because some people are going to actually want to give up private data, for
purposes of online shopping, online banking, etc.. I want it default closed
down, but again, I accept that most people aren't focused on it.

~~~
bzbarsky
> People who are not security-focused will switch to Chrome, which is what's
> already happened

No, it hasn't. And I think explaining to people exactly why a web page
expecting Date.now() to work is somehow demanding something and invading their
privacy is a pretty tough job. Like "requires reading academic papers to
understand why it could be a problem" tough.

So what you're basically suggesting is that Firefox resign itself to being an
extremely niche browser. I don't think that really aligns with Mozilla's
goals, for what it's worth.

------
dhekir
Some crappy companies such as Eurostar currently experience issues in their
website when using Firefox (e.g. impossibility of using vouchers in some
cases), and when you contact customer support, they clearly state that "Chrome
is recommended" for better results, and that "there are known issues with
Firefox". I initially thought it was due to some Firefox add-ons, but even
with all of them disabled, things do work better in Chrome.

I've also seen other (somewhat badly-designed) websites where using Chrome
leads to less issues, probably because its developers are only testing with it
and using non-standard or legacy features/plug-ins. Because of those issues, I
am forced to recommend family members to try Chrome when things seem broken,
to the point that some have now switched to it by default. I really hope this
will not become another IE-like situation...

~~~
wichert
I have heard designer friends say that Firefox is the new IE for them: so many
rendering problems that they always need to do special Firefox-specific
workarounds.

Now the next remark tends to be that Chrome is pretty awful as well with very
weird rendering errors happening all too often - for example HTML comments can
shift paragraphs up or down (lots of fun with React inserting those
everywhere), or toggling a class from JS making things disappear completely.

Safari seems to be a designer-favourite with a very strong focus on things
designers need. I don't think I've heard any complaints about Edge either.

~~~
soperj
Safari is the worst for me. Everything works as it should in Firefox/Chrome,
and it's always Safari with the weird issues, like not doing flex-box
properly.

~~~
dest
experienced problems with Safari and flex-box as well. And when you don't own
a Mac to run Safari on it, it's difficult to do tests! You have to annoy
friends/colleagues with Macbooks.

------
dannysu
It's not just marketing. It's also Google websites that only work with Chrome.

For example, Hangout. I can no longer use Hangout using Firefox.

Or I think Gmail Inbox, which also came out only working on Chrome initially.

It's the sum of all these things that look very much like "best viewed with
internet explorer" type stuff. I don't ever want to go back to such a world.

~~~
cakeface
Yes! It's really frustrating that Hangout / Meet don't work on Firefox. This
isn't just Google's fault I think. Firefox changed how plugins work and I
think that broke Google's Hangout implementation.

Also I can only use my U2F security key for Google when on Chrome. Firefox
doesn't support it.

~~~
nachtigall
> Firefox changed how plugins work and I think that broke Google's Hangout
> implementation.

IIRC, there was s public notice by Firefox about the API change more than a
year in advance. Google does not have the resources for implementation?
Firefox support is just low prio for Google. I think it's a deliberate
(non)-action because instead of switching away from Hangout, people rather
start using Chrome... So not-browser-compat seems to help Google :-/ (see also
my other comment)

~~~
cpeterso
Google Hangouts switched from the NPAPI plugin to WebRTC in Chrome back in
2014 [1], but still used plugins (NPAPI or ActiveX) for other browsers.
Hangouts depends on non-standard WebRTC functionality in Chrome [2].

Google has had three years to adapt to other browsers' standard WebRTC stacks,
but it was apparently not a priority for the company as long as the legacy
Hangouts plugins still worked in other browsers. Mozilla announced in 2015 [3]
that it would remove NPAPI plugin support in 2017, so Google had plenty of
notice that the Hangouts plugin would stop working in Firefox. Google's new
"Hangouts Meet" service is supposed to work with standard WebRTC in Firefox
and Edge, but Hangouts Meet is still in beta and its system requirements page
still only lists Chrome.

[1]
[https://plus.google.com/103171586947853434456/posts/39TCW3Pc...](https://plus.google.com/103171586947853434456/posts/39TCW3PcLye)

[2] [https://webrtchacks.com/hangout-analysis-philipp-
hancke/](https://webrtchacks.com/hangout-analysis-philipp-hancke/)

[3] [https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2015/10/08/npapi-
plu...](https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2015/10/08/npapi-plugins-in-
firefox/)

~~~
cakeface
I have Meet enabled on my GSuite account at work. It most definitely does not
work in Firefox. If you go a Meet link you get "Meet doesn't work on your
browser yet To join the video meeting, you can install the current version of
Google Chrome"

It's certainly unfortunate that Google hasn't updated their software but
Firefox didn't need to remove NPAPI. They chose to do that and when they did
they broke software for lots of companies, not just Google. That's a trade off
and decision that Firefox made and I'm suffering for it. They had their
reasons for making that decision but that decision had costs and downsides for
me.

------
carussell
Side note. From Andreas's post:

> looks like the site requires a login now. It used to be available publicly
> for years and was public until a few days ago

I'm no longer a Mozillian, but stuff like this is really, _really_ weird. I'm
referring in general to things being hidden or locked up—Mozilla as an
organization operated more openly than anything else I can think of, which is
part of what used to make it so beautiful (and successful)—but specifically,
I'm talking about sign ins.

I stopped touching stuff on developer.mozilla.org 5+ years ago (or even
consulting it, really), but I was reading some docs on the site last week and
saw something that was so outright wrong that I felt it had to be fixed. I
tried to, and it turns out that you have to use GitHub to sign in. The idea of
requiring a social media sign in for a Mozilla web property is one of the most
un-Mozilla things possible and really blew me away.

~~~
dao-
[https://www.arewestableyet.com/](https://www.arewestableyet.com/) is for
internal tracking and rather hard to make sense of externally. It's cluttered
with jargon and abbreviations and raw numbers. (I can tell because I just
logged in. I work for Mozilla.) For example, this is how the rows are labeled
in one table: usage_khours, Main (M), M + Content (M+C), C - Content Shutdown
(C-S), M + C - S, NPAPI + GMP Plugin Crashes (P), GPU.

It's easy to see how exposing this site to the world might not be a good idea,
especially when it's referenced from a blog post appearing on the hacker news
front page and people start drawing all kinds of uninformed conclusions.

~~~
the8472
Locking out people because they might be confused by data seems... quite
patronizing.

I'm not saying I am entitled to mozilla's data, but if that were the reason
behind closing data that was once open I would feel a little insulted.

Lack of openness also makes participation more difficult. For example I
occasionally see links by mozilla developers posted on IRC (some telemetry,
google spreadsheets) that require login, which makes it more difficult to
follow what's going on.

~~~
dao-
Dunno, can you make sense of the jargon I pasted? This site really isn't
useful to the outside and probably shouldn't have been public in the first
place. It would _never_ have been public at Apple or Microsoft or Google. But
Mozilla is open by default, so people often don't think twice before making
something public.

Also, (unpaid) Mozilla contributors do get access to this stuff.

~~~
the8472
> Dunno, can you make sense of the jargon I pasted?

yes, the crash stats site shows similar categories

------
blunte
Google definitely has been a (major) contributor to the decline of Firefox,
both with all the google site notices suggesting users switch to Chrome and
the works-on-chrome-first features of Gmail, Drive, etc. That last issue is
years old, but I would bet it got a lot of people to first try Chrome.

Another factor could have been Mozilla's defaulting to Yahoo for search (and
the difficulty some people had with changing and keeping the change to another
search provider). For quite a few years Yahoo has not been very good at
search, and Mozilla's insistence on teaming up with them probably brought
Mozilla's name down.

~~~
suby
The change over to yahoo as the default search, as well as the ui changes a
few years ago which made it a hassle to change search engines has, I would
wager, done more harm to mozilla than whatever monetary benefit they gained
from the switch. The fact that they made it difficult to change search engines
is probably the worse offense. It's just blatantly anti user. i like firefox,
but they needlessly erode people's goodwill toward them.

~~~
pessimizer
Firefox's primary advantage was that it was pro-user. At some point, it
started consciously herding users by intentionally making certain choices that
they didn't like which users made more difficult or impossible to find in the
UI. That's a distinct philosophical break, and an open user antagonism. That
didn't make it worse than other browsers; that made it the same as other
browsers. The only criteria you're left to choose on are distinct features,
and Firefox started methodically eliminating theirs. After the ending of the
old extensions API, Firefox has finally reached its goal of having absolutely
no advantages compared to any other browser, with the bonus of not working as
well with google properties as the google-owned browser.

~~~
reitanqild
For the Mozillans around here:

This is sadly almost what I feel.

Then again I'll stick with FF for now since Google has managed to annoy me
with their Chrome campaign and since FF is slightly better for my use cases
and uses less resources AFAIK.

~~~
blunte
We are in quite a sad state regardless of which browser we use...

... the popups requesting your email address or that you turn off your ad
blocker, the auto-playing videos (that relocate themselves as you try to
scroll away from them!), the javascript hijacked page scrolling, and so on.

So really it doesn't matter which browser you use. Your browser is going to
feel slow, and it's going to use a ton of resources.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
You can disable auto-playing video in Firefox about:config.

------
Touche
I still believe that Mozilla biggest mistake with mobile was not Firefox OS,
it was that they started on Android too late. They should have been on Android
from day one, but they weren't, and when they did build Fennec, it was really
bad. They eventually fixed it, but by that point Chrome for Android was
already out.

And then they pivoted to Firefox OS. At a time when WebOS had already failed,
Nokia had already failed, and the writing was on the wall for Blackberry and
Windows Phone. It was already well known that the market couldn't support
another mobile OS, and that was the moment they decided to build one, totally
bizarre.

I firmly believe that if Mozilla had gone all-in on Firefox for Android at the
time when Android's browser was just atrociously bad, they could have been the
hip option there, and had a leg-up on Chrome for Android.

To everyone that says "people don't install 3rd party browsers on mobile",
that's 100% wrong. Chrome for Android was a 3rd party browser for several
years and was popular.

~~~
lucb1e
> They eventually fixed it

And then broke it down, step by step. It used to be perfect but over the years
gradually got changed/removed features that I loved, with no about:config
option to get them back. Things like no menu button[1] (my device has a
physical menu button), text reflow when zooming was removed, double tap to
zoom to a paragraph now (sometimes?!) selects text instead of zooming, the tab
you have open is no longer on the bottom side of the tab menu (it would slide
open fast, as soon as your finger touched it and would feel _super_ snappy;
now there's some fancy animation)... etc.

It got to the point where I started looking for other browsers, but there just
are no good options. Chromium sometimes bugs and uses 100% CPU for hours until
I notice, and most other things are closed source. So I'm stuck with a mix of
Firefox and Habit browser.

Habit seems to be what Firefox used to be: configure it any way you like (and
it does a fantastic job at that). The trouble is that it's closed source and
it has an inferior rendering engine, so I don't dare using it for things with
a login that are valuable and it doesn't work for some websites.

Edit: by the way, the desktop story is completely different. I could never go
without Firefox on non-mobile for various features (besides the privacy
matter).

[1] What does that matter: Well, space (now there's two buttons next to the
already-small address bar) and usability. I used to be able to hit the tab
button without really looking. It was on the side of the screen, I'd just
finger along that edge and I'd open my tab menu. Now I need to tap somewhere
specific, and if I accidentally hit the menu button, I need to either reach
over to the other side of the screen (on a 5.5" phone, that's a stretch for my
thumb) or hit the back button (which would require shifting my phone, then
touching it, then shifting back, all balancing it in one hand, oftentimes at
least). How friggin' difficult is it to make an about:config setting to hide a
button?

~~~
digi_owl
I can't help feel that what is going on with Firefox is also going on with a
bunch of other big name FOSS projects.

There seems to be a generation of devs taking over that is less about making
sure things work and more about padding their CV with the latest bling tech.

End result is that unless you manage to keep up with their bleeding edge web
dev mentality of moving fast and breaking things, the stuff you depend on for
whatever you are doing will be mothballed or tossed out in short order.

------
osoba
Maybe this is a good opportunity for Firefox to abandon its "forced
mediocrity" model.

The vanilla installation of Firefox lacks basic UI components (mouse gestures
for example), lacks session management, and the bookmark and history
interfaces look like they were made in 1995.

When you click an old entry in History I don't understand why it's so
difficult for the selection to stay near the formerly clicked item, instead of
it selecting the top most entry forcing you to scroll all the way down again
if you want to open another entry that's near the previously clicked entry.

Why can't Bookmarks employ a simple logistic classifier? OK I've stopped using
Firefox's bookmark system a long time ago (because its so shitty) but if I
were to be still using it I would expect the browser to be smart enough to
figure out that if all my bookmarks from a certain site are in a specific
bookmark folder that most likely means this new bookmark from that same site
should go there and should be offered as the 1st choice.

Now, yes, of course you can add all these features in a slow JavaScript-based
addon which will eat your memory and cpu time and allow the Firefox team to
blame the addons when something goes wrong with Firefox, but at some point you
have to reconsider if this is such a good idea.

Sure very few people use mouse gestures in Firefox and adding them out of the
box could be interpreted as bloat, but maybe if more users even knew what
mouse gestures were and how useful they are, they would start considering them
a fundamental aspect of a browser's interface and not just a fancy knick-
knack.

I miss the old Opera so much :(

~~~
yamaneko
What are your thoughts on Vivaldi?

I try it occasionally and I'm enjoying it. Most tools come out of the box,
like Adblock, screenshot, window tiling, and mouse gestures. Not sure if the
Adblock is as good as uBlock origin, though. Some new features like an
improved history (haven't used thoroughly yet) and tab stacking.

It still is a bit buggy for me on Ubuntu 16.04. Sometimes when playing videos
the window flickers.

------
cpeterso
The article's ADI charts do not account for Mozilla moving Windows XP and
Vista users from the Firefox release channel to the ESR (Extended Support
Release) channel in March 2017 [1]. New versions of Firefox do not support XP
or Vista, but XP and Vista users will continue to receive ESR security updates
at least through 2018 Q1. You can see a similar "drop" in Mozilla's Firefox
Hardware Report [2].

[1]
[https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2016/12/23/firefox-s...](https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2016/12/23/firefox-
support-for-xp-and-vista/)

[2]
[https://hardware.metrics.mozilla.com/](https://hardware.metrics.mozilla.com/)

~~~
andreasgal
A comment said the same and I added a note to the text. If you have concrete
data happy to update charts. Pull request welcome :) All code and data for
charts on github.

------
shmerl
It is indeed a monopoly problem. Google should be required to give browser
choice in such ads, same as MS were.

What I worry about, is the increasing situation of "best viewed in Chrome" and
sites starting to break in Firefox. That's going to be very bad.

~~~
dblohm7
We're already at that point IMHO.

~~~
shmerl
Yeah, I mean it will only get worse. And it is highly annoying, since I have
no interest in using Chrome.

------
rossdavidh
While Firefox on mobile is virtually nonexistent, what this post asserts just
doesn't look true to me. He's basically asserting that Chrome is where
Internet Explorer was in the late 90's, but when I see what browser people are
using for presentations, or when I am pair-programming or otherwise able to
see directly what people are using, I see Firefox commonly. Outside the U.S.,
I don't have much visibility, but the StatCounter data
([https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-
share.aspx?qpr...](https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-
share.aspx?qprid=1&qpcustomb=0)) which shows Firefox on the increase in the
last year, looks a lot more like what I am witnessing.

~~~
mtgx
I was one of those few who used Firefox on mobile because I could install
ublock origin on it, so I preferred it over Chrome because of that.

However, at the time (about a year ago), I didn't think Firefox was as fast as
Chrome. So I eventually switched to the Chromium-based Brave (run by Mozilla's
former CEO) due to its speed and (Chromium) security architecture (and of
course ad-blocking).

I would use Brave on the desktop, too, if not for the awful UI decisions there
(on mobile it's more like a Chrome clone). They really need to replace their
UI guy, because I feel like he (or she) has been getting it wrong since day
one. Too much UI fluff getting in the way and controls being hidden from you.

~~~
BrendanEich
Hi, which controls do you want that are hidden from you on desktop Brave?
Thanks.

~~~
adrianlmm
I'm not that guy, but I'd like to see a dark chrome in Brave, I dislike bright
colors.

~~~
BrendanEich
Got it, on our todo list.

------
blauditore
I've been saying this for years, that Chrome's market share is mostly caused
by Google's aggressive advertisement. Many users don't even know exactly what
a browser is, they just clicked that button at some point because the text
next to it told them to do so.

~~~
victorhooi
I don't buy it.

Chrome for years and years was sold as lightning fast and secure from malware
- and it delivered.

That was why I switched back in the day.

Even today, it has a reputation for being lightning fast, and having a fast
pace of development.

In my (admittedly mostly/predominantly) technical circle - I don't know many
who switched to ads. In fact, those people are the least likely to click on
ads.

Most of them switched because Chrome is fast, and lightweight - or for the
non-technical people, because their technical friends told them to.

~~~
blauditore
Yes, it's fast in many aspects, but totally not lightweight. It eats memory
like there's no tomorrow, and spams the OS with processes. But to be fair,
that's not super relevant for most users.

I've seen technical people switch because of performance, and I occasionally
use it for certain tasks too for that reason.

But almost every time I see it on a non-techie computer and ask them something
like, "ah, you're using Chrome?", they look at me like I'm speaking a
different language. So I suppose they were not aware when they installed it.

~~~
victorhooi
Our of curiosity - how many tabs do you have open?

I have many tabs open, and did notice high memory usage.

I'll reference my comment elsewhere here - tl;dr - they/we aggressively
throttle background tasks now:

> Chrome recently introduced some changes to background tabs (to a bit of
> grumbling from sites that wanted to use background resources/service
> workers): >
> [https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/03/background...](https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/03/background..).
> > And also - they're aggressively throttling background tabs: >
> [http://blog.strml.net/2017/01/chrome-56-now-aggressively-
> thr...](http://blog.strml.net/2017/01/chrome-56-now-aggressively-thr..). >
> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13471543](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13471543)
> > I'm on Chrome Canary - and there's been noticeable improvements in
> memory/responsive wise for a few months now. > I have around 320+ tabs open,
> spread over 2 Chrome profiles (around 160 per profile).

------
notatoad
With every new version, i give firefox another try and it always just _feels_
sluggish compared to chrome. The UI is not as responsive and the pages don't
seem to load as quickly. I don't know if there's any actual data or
measurements to back this up and i haven't tried to measure any speed
differences, but for me the reason I use chrome instead of firefox is
_absolutely_ an engineering problem and not a marketing one.

I'd much rather use a Mozilla product than a Google one, but chrome is simply
a better browser.

~~~
nachtigall
I am running Firefox 56 (Nightly) and it is _very_ fast due to project
Quantum. Even faster than Firefox 54 which also got a big boost due to e10s.

[https://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/channel/desktop/#night...](https://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/channel/desktop/#nightly)

If Firefox 54 is still slow for you, I would be interested if multiprocess is
enabled (look at about:support). Also, what does about:performance say?

If still slow you might want to do a Refresh: [https://support.mozilla.org/en-
US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-a...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-
US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-add-ons-and-settings)

~~~
lucb1e
For me things only got worse since they started that multiprocess thing. It's
great that tabs hang instead of the browser, but previously it would just
never hang. Now tabs hang randomly, even when they're not doing anything. I
guess because it's all still beta and testing.

Anyway, still not annoying enough to switch away. It'd take a lot for me to
switch away again.

Edit: Ironically, that about:performance page you linked reports everything
runs fine, except the about:performance page!

------
owly
Lots of haters on here! :) Like most of you, I use all browsers to test sites
and applications. But Firefox is my main browser on all platforms for a bunch
of reasons and I have no issues with performance. It has all the add-ins I
need. I like the way it looks compared to the alternatives. The test pilot
add-ins have been great.
[https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments](https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments)
And last but not least, by using it I'm supporting the open web and not
feeding a monopoly.

~~~
Rotareti
Don't forget to mention _privacy_. Why would I use a browser which is spying
on me if there is an alternative that doesn't? Same goes for other software.

~~~
victorhooi
Could you substantiate this claim?

Because it sounds like FUD at this stage, until somebody provides a shred of
evidence.

~~~
Rotareti
No I can't since it's closed source software. But why would they not read your
personal data in the browser, if they did (do?) with other products like
Gmail? Give me one reason why I should trust them?

There are people who care more about their private data and others that care
less. If you find Chrome trustworthy, go with it. For me a closed source
browser is not an option.

~~~
victorhooi
I'm sorry - but this just comes across as wild paranoia - you're basically
saying they _could_ read your data - so they must?

That's like saying your school could install cameras in the toilets - so they
must have?

Or that your landlord is secretly going through your stuff, because he has
keys?

Actually - the Chromium browser project is open source:

[https://www.chromium.org/](https://www.chromium.org/)

It's what Google Chrome is built on - you could just compile that if you
wanted. (You lose out on a bunch of integrations - but it sounds like that
might be what you want, anyhow).

~~~
Rotareti
> Or that your landlord is secretly going through your stuff, because he has
> keys?

If he is known for doing such things, yes, I have to expect him doing so.

> Actually - the Chromium browser project is open source.

I know and Chrome is not.

~~~
victorhooi
And what evidence do you have for it ever having happened?

I'm sorry to be so blunt, but I see a lot of conjecture and wild paranoia -
but not much factual reporting.

~~~
Rotareti
[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/15/gmail-
sca...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/15/gmail-scans-all-
emails-new-google-terms-clarify)

I really must be a _wild paranoid_ if I would ever think that a big corp or
gov would read the private data that I throw into their cloud.

You think it's paranoid to expect it, I think it's naive to not expect it.

------
norea-armozel
I think half the problem with Firefox is that it has a marketing problem. Most
folks today just trust Google and so Chrome is a product that has
trustworthiness that will stand out for folks especially on the matter of
speed/reliability. If Mozilla wants to do anything to save their project then
they have to start re/building their brand recognition and trustworthiness
among COMMON USERS (technical users tend to inform themselves so it's really
not an issue IMO beyond actually talking to us). It'll be an uphill battle all
the way but I think they'll find it's worth it.

------
FollowSteph3
I disagree with the article. When Firefox first got popular the default was
internet explorer which was already installed on your computer. However
because Firefox was so far ahead word spread and people took the time to
install it.

These however there is no really big advantage to using Firefox over chrome,
and when the difference is that close marketing and convenience will win. In
other words if Firefox would've been on or with internet explorer years ago it
would never have gained the market share it did in the first place.

It's not just a marketing issue but a combination of a marketing and
engineering issue.

~~~
DiThi
> no really big advantage

No _user perceived advantage_ but they are important: Privacy, freedom and
avoiding the monoculture of a single web engine. The amount of websites that
don't quite work well or outright has bugs on firefox is increasing.

~~~
davidcbc
The average user is going to care more about whether or not websites work than
about privacy, freedom, and avoiding the monoculture of a single web engine.

~~~
DiThi
Web standards are supposed to work everywhere the same. The result of having a
vast majority with a single rendering engine is having pages use quirks of
this engine and not following standards. (edit: also a security risk when a
vulnerability affects most people)

The average user does not care but it should care. People like us should
inform them since we can.

------
moocowtruck
I was expecting a bit more than blaming google... The reason I stopped using
firefox is because it became nothing more than a 'meh' chrome clone and slowly
killed its ecosystem.

------
jchw
I find it pretty amusing that nobody is going to acknowledge the idea that
maybe, just maybe, there's also a component of the fact that Firefox has
simply fallen behind Chrome in many aspects, losing the preference of many
developers and power users. They are far from the majority, but there are
without a doubt cascading effects. Google's marketing is probably only getting
more aggressive because there's going to be diminishing returns the further
they go.

~~~
lucb1e
If you read the thread, you'll see that many people are discussing points on
which it fell behind, sometimes on specific platforms and sometimes in
general.

(Then again, your comment is 6 hours old, maybe it wasn't discussed yet back
then.)

------
swiley
They argue they're privacy minded and then remove control from the user.

Everyone who doesn't care about control is just going to use chrome, edge or
IE so going after that market is probably not a good use of resources.

I don't quite get the whole performance thing, chrome eats memory constantly
and trashes the machine which is something firefox doesn't do. It's single
threaded though so shitty pages will hang it.

------
Karunamon
I really don't think the author backed up their hypothesis here. I'd place a
lot more of that blame on Mozilla's poor decision-making (detailed elsewhere
in this thread) than any amount of google.com popups.

If I were to boil it all down, (and I say this with zero snark), I'd say that
they have little to no differentiation with Chrome. It looks like Chrome, it
will soon be no more powerful than Chrome, it's developed ignoring community
input like Chrome, and the kiss of death: it performs worse than Chrome.

With all that in mind, why not just use Chrome like those popups suggest I
should, and get a speed boost while I'm at it? (Note: open source politics do
not factor into this)

------
mcjiggerlog
I really want to like Firefox Android (addons are awesome!) and try it out
every now and then, but every time I just end up uninstalling and reverting to
Chrome.

The number one reason is that scroll seems to work differently to every single
other app I have installed. It's "sticky" and doesn't feel native. It also
takes a noticeable amount of time to render the page when scrolling quickly,
which is not something I've ever noticed with Chrome. What gives?

~~~
rwmj
The most annoying thing is that Firefox's tabs don't integrate with the normal
Android mechanism of switching windows.

~~~
glogla
That's probably because you can't do it without using special Google-only API
- I don't know of any other Android app that could do it.

So this is a monopoly problem again.

~~~
veeti
This is not true at all.

[https://developer.android.com/guide/components/activities/re...](https://developer.android.com/guide/components/activities/recents.html)

~~~
BoorishBears
It's true, Recents showing Task instances isn't the same as the integrated
tabs feature

~~~
veeti
It is literally the same thing. You can download a third party browser called
Chromer that opens every link as a separate task and see it for yourself.

It's based on Chrome custom tabs, which is a pluggable protocol. Firefox is
working on support for it as well [1]. There doesn't seem to be any ongoing
work to support per-tab tasks in Firefox for Android itself right now [2].

[1]
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1208655](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1208655)

[2]
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1098543](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1098543)

~~~
BoorishBears
Chrome custom tabs have nothing at all to do with the Tasks from the activity
model. Chromer _doesn 't_ do what the tabs in recent option does.

Supporting being a provider for Custom Tabs has nothing to do with being able
to have your tabs show up in Recents. Are you an Android Dev?

~~~
veeti
> Chromer doesn't do what the tabs in recent option does.

Yes, it does. Which part do you not understand?

> Supporting being a provider for Custom Tabs has nothing to do with being
> able to have your tabs show up in Recents.

No, but if Firefox supported Custom Tabs, you could use it with Chromer.

~~~
BoorishBears
I'm not asking if you're an Android dev to disparage you, I'm asking because
the two features are outwardly very similar, but have internal differences.
And you can use one to get a result that looks similar, but is not the same,
as the other.

~~~
veeti
> I'm asking because the two features are outwardly very similar, but have
> internal differences.

Prove it, then. What are these "internal differences"?

Let me reiterate: there is literally nothing that relies on a proprietary or
private API in the former Chrome merged apps and tabs implementation. Any app
can do the same thing using completely public API's.

I've already linked the API's required to do this. I've linked a third party
app that provides the exact same functionality. Which part is unclear to you?

------
ksk
Its quite surprising that Google has avoided anti-trust scrutiny for as long
as it has.

~~~
digi_owl
EU seems more on top there than USA. And frankly USA seems unwilling to engage
any kind of antitrust against tech companies since the anemic slap on the
wrist Microsoft got.

------
Aissen
I've been a firm Firefox on Android user for years, but I recently switched to
Brave. While Desktop performance is acceptable, Android cold-launch
performance is very bad, and Chromium-based browser beat it to the punch. And
the native (implemented in C++) adblocking means better performance than
uBlock Origin.

Too bad, I really liked Firefox Sync, it was such a superior solution (for
privacy, at least).

~~~
digi_owl
Yeah i have noticed this cold launch issue myself.

------
buster
So not true. I try Firefox once in a while, but Chrome still is more
responsive and has the better UI -> better UX.

Basically i am waiting for a Servo-based browser which will hopefully change
the UX in favor of Mozilla again.

Oh, and PLEASE Mozilla. Unify that f __* search toolbar into the adress bar,
already. It 's stupid.

~~~
jrimbault
You can remove the search bar, as the address already acts as a search bar.
(the "customize" menu)

edit: but sometimes the separate search bar is useful eg. when searching
wikipedia instead of google? maybe it's just not your use case, I know it's
not mine, I just append "wiki" to my searches, but we have to consider many
different users.

------
hendersoon
I used Firefox since it was called Phoenix in 2002. Fifteen years. None of my
friends or acquaintances used Firefox. I was the last man standing.

I switched to Vivaldi last month due to webextensions breaking fully
functional mouse gestures in the Firegestures addon. They finally forced me
away. Thankfully Vivaldi exists!

~~~
pvdebbe
I'm using firefox 50 until it's not safe to do so. When the time comes, it's
going to be hard to choose from bad & worse.

Firefox is the only browser out there that supports text-only page zooming!
And until recently, the only browser that supported these total-conversion
extensions like Vimperator.

~~~
hendersoon
There are chrome extensions (which also work in Vivaldi) to do text-only zoom.
I haven't tried them and can't vouch for them, though.

Before Vivaldi added customizable mouse gestures, my plan was to stick to a
Firefox fork that will still support XUL addons, like Pale Moon. That's my
suggestion, if the text zoom addon doesn't work and your use-case really needs
that.

~~~
pvdebbe
Pale Moon might be my refuge too. Currently it looks like a minor hassle but
if/when Firefox does south...

------
dep_b
I don't use Firefox that much because I'm mostly on macOS, but every time I
use Windows and I open Firefox it seems more snappy again. I am making sure
nobody in my family uses Chrome because it's a resource hog and effectively
helps the same kind of monopoly we had with Internet Explorer.

------
iopq
I love the chart that goes from -7% to -22%

it cuts off exactly where you would think there's ten times fewer Firefox
users

------
rrggrr
Extensions are tipping in favor of Chrome. Many of the extensions I use are
Chrome only.

------
PeterStuer
Long term FF user here. I still use it as I stand behind the independence, but
... I have found FF speed and stability gradually lacking. What was once a
fast and lean browser has turned into a behemoth. Of course, part of it is
beyond their control as it seems more and more publishers only QA on Chrome
nowadays leaving FF behavior in the 'hope and pray' category of UX. I'll stick
with it for now, but saying I'm at the verge of switching wouldn't be far from
the truth. If it were not for the ideological, I would have switched to Chrome
long time ago.

------
reacweb
For me, the compelling feature of Firefox over chrome is that using Firefox
portable, I can avoid company policy and configure proxy to bypass bluecoat
filter.

------
nevir
> This explains why the market share decline of Firefox has accelerated so
> dramatically the last 12 months despite Firefox getting much better during
> the same time window.

(this quote is from the article, in reference to Google aggressively
advertising Chrome)

I'm _pretty sure_ that all the ads mentioned in the article have been around
for far longer than 12 months. What else might have happened 12 months ago to
influence the decline?

------
remir
The reality is that for a while, Chrome was simply a better browser.
Extensions "just worked", it silently auto-updated (huge for non technical
users), was very secure (anti-phishing), it came with Flash, sandboxing from
day 1, etc...

I installed Chrome on the PCs of family members and it was trouble free for
them. No need to update Flash separately, no random crashes, the anti-phishing
is great, too.

------
makecheck
I really wish Google's Chrome spam wasn't "working" because I am so tired of
it (and anything like it). This is a variation of the "Here's what's new in
the app that you didn't know you updated!" dialogs that developers seem to
like now.

If I could have software and services not _totally derail what I was trying to
do_ , that would be greaaaaaat.

------
ashitlerferad
Since my 10AM EST blog post comment has not been approved . I'll paste it
here:

"...the “falling off the cliff” is just the snowball effect of bad management
and decisions made many years ago. Its to late now to stop the bleeding as-is.
The solution is right there, although obvious, its probably to much for
Mozilla to undertake at this point."

------
rubatuga
Well maybe if they updated their shitty UI, I would be inclined to install it.
Why can’t firefox combine the search and address bar like every other major
browser? Why can’t Firefox ditch their slow animations, buttons, menus, and do
with less skeumorphisms? They need a serious refresh if I were to ever start
using it again.

~~~
bzbarsky
> Why can’t firefox combine the search and address bar like every other major
> browser?

Because they don't want to send all your keystrokes in the URL to your search
provider just so you can get autosuggest. So there is one bar that does
autosuggest and a different bar where you can put things that your search
provider should not see.

Obviously Chrome doesn't have that problem, since they _want_ your search
provider to see all the URLs you visit.

~~~
rubatuga
You can combine them and then turn off search autocomplete. Seems like the
best option for me.

~~~
bzbarsky
Except users actually want search autocomplete.

If you personally don't, then you can combine them yourself in Firefox right
away: just remove the search bar entirely via the normal UI customization
mechanism, and use only the URL bar, which doesn't do search autocomplete.

~~~
glandium
Note that the URL bar does search autocomplete now (new in 55 maybe?).

~~~
bzbarsky
Hmm. It doesn't seem to in 54, but you're right that it does in a 55 beta. If
that's the case, then there's really no point to two separate bars. Looks like
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1344928](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1344928)
is where the behavior change happened.

Based on the diffs there, looks like the 55 feature can at least be turned off
by setting the "browser.urlbar.suggest.searches" preference to false... (That
preference doesn't affect the search bar.) Also looks like there's preferences
UI for this (the "Show search suggestions in location bar results" checkbox).

~~~
glandium
There's also a dropdown showing up the first time you use the url bar.
Depending on the value set for browser.urlbar.suggest.searches on that first
run, the dropdown will either tell you about suggestions with a button leading
to the prefs where you can disable them, or ask you whether you want to enable
or disable them.

I think there were talks about not presenting the search box for new profiles,
too, but it looks like that hasn't happened yet.

------
HellDunkel
I know how much better Chrome is yet i stick with Firefox all because of the
idea of a free web.

It is slow. the ui sucks. it looks dated. it crashes far too often and eats up
loads of mem. Don't blame Google for its ads, the problems are homegrown. Its
sad to say this but i guess i will turn my back on it too if things dont
change.

------
Rjevski
One of the issues I see with Firefox is that they did some stupid stuff like
Pocket, Hello and this awful Australis UI that as a result alienated a lot of
power users.

Power users are Firefox's best chance at regaining market share, and some of
those users are now gone as a result of Mozilla's stupid decisions.

------
digi_owl
For me at least Firefox have been burning bridges like crazy.

The change in UI to Australis i could deal with, as it could be mitigated with
extensions.

But "recently" they changed to GTK3 on *nix, and are now in the process of
making extensions less potent.

All this makes it harder to continue using Firefox where it used to be the
flagship browser.

------
gator-io
Here is a view of browser market share with detectable bot traffic removed.

[https://truemarketshare.com](https://truemarketshare.com)

Firefox is dropping, but not collapsing. And my opinion as to the primary
reason why is the Yahoo default search.

------
apeace
It strikes me that the reason Firefox rose to prominence in the first place
was because of the same thing: web sites all over put banners on the top of
their pages (for IE users), saying something like "You should upgrade to a
modern browser".

The difference is that in those days, it was the developers of many different
web sites doing it. I did it on many sites I worked on. We were sick of
working in IE and wanted a browser that followed web standards we could all
use.

I don't think Chrome's dominance is a bad thing. Because if Chrome ever breaks
the web for developers, we'll just do it all over again (or force Chrome to
follow us, as we did with NaCL vs. WebAssembly).

------
corford
Maybe Firefox is slow on Linux but on Windows I don't notice a difference
between it and Chrome. If anything FF starts faster on my Win10 box. The UI is
just as snappy and I vastly prefer FFs settings dialogs to the kid gloves one
in Chrome.

Also can't remember the last time FF crashed on me (and I usually have
hundreds of tabs open for weeks/months on end).

Dev tools are a toss up but I tend to use the ones in FF more than Chrome,
probably simply out of habit.

Once servo becomes mainline (and assuming it delivers on its promise) I can't
see why anyone would choose anything other than FF.

¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ works for me

Edit: I'm not big on extensions but do have a few installed: session manager,
foxyproxy, one tab and fireshot.

~~~
octorian
> Maybe Firefox is slow on Linux but on Windows I don't notice a difference
> between it and Chrome.

I really think this is a big part of the discrepancy in opinions of
performance here. In my own experience, Firefox on Linux just has sluggish
responsiveness. It doesn't happen everywhere, and sometimes the effect feels
cumulative (depending on how long the process has been running). I've also
found the occasional website (usually forums) where the text input box is
painfully sluggish in Firefox (for no good reason), while its just fine and
dandy in Chrome.

Now I've also run Firefox on Windows, where it seems quite snappy and I don't
really have any performance complaints.

(Of course there's also the part where "hip web designers" are now treating
Chrome like the modern MSIE6, which probably affects "internal" sites more
than public-facing ones. But that's a topic for rants elsewhere in this
thread.)

~~~
digi_owl
Do wonder if it has anything to do with their switch of GTK version
"recently"...

------
zimbatm
Chrome has other advantages as well.

If you buy into the Google Suite then you get synched profiles. Firefox has
the same but the account is only useful for keeping Firefox in sync whereas
Google's also give you access to all their other products, plus oauth to third
party services.

Google Chrome exists inside of an ecosystem, which means that is stays simple.
On the other hand, Mozilla has a tendency of treating the browser as a goal in
itself, which is understandable but creates things like the Pocket extension
and other UX complexities.

Android's unremovable Google search doesn't open the default browser but
presents the result in a Chrome WebViewer.

~~~
midgetjones
> If you buy into the Google Suite then you get synched profiles. Firefox has
> the same but the account is only useful for keeping Firefox in sync whereas
> Google's also give you access to all their other products, plus oauth to
> third party services.

That's the exact reason some of us avoid Chrome :)

~~~
digi_owl
Especially as Google have locked whole accounts because it was found to
violate the TOS for one of their services...

------
morekozhambu
I was a firefox fan until recently. I guess it was firefox 51 or so and I
switched to chromium purely for usability and performance sake. The page
loading and bookmarks management was horrible at that point. Not sure how it
is now.

------
twobyfour
Returning to a browser monoculture would be a loss for the web and its users.

------
abiox
> Firefox’s decline is not an engineering problem

possibly. however for me, technical problems are why i avoid it in general.

i still use it a bit, as i'm lazy about switching between user accounts with
various services and separate browsers makes this easy.

sadly, nearly every day firefox will crash, often when i'm not even using it.
it happens so often i don't even get annoyed anymore... it's just _normal_. my
system is a fairly new build and nothing else crashes (or at least, so
infrequently i don't recall anything).

~~~
thr0w__4w4y
Came here to quote the same sentence and post a similar reply. I've been using
Firefox forever, esp. b/c of some of the extensions, but it just isn't stable,
reliable, or performance-oriented anymore. Chrome is more stable, snappier,
and smoother.

I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for Firefox, but the reality is that
Firefox's engineering __is __inferior when compared to Chrome or Safari IMO.
To deny this is perhaps illustrative of why Mozilla 's browser is suffering.
It crashes, it leaks, it sputters, it freezes. It's shameful and embarrassing.

------
nfriedly
> _...Firefox Desktop is probably headed for extinction over the next couple
> years,..._

Yikes! I _hope_ that was an exaggeration! I'm a long-time Firefox user on
desktop and mobile, and I certainly don't want to see it die on the desktop.

I prefer FF both because of the motivations behind the browser, and because on
Android it supports extensions, making it much more useful to me.

I do wish they'd release an iOS version that had the ad blocking of Firefox
Focus, and the tabs and Sync and such from regular Firefox.

------
usharf
It is really a shame as Firefox is really great to use these days. I've
noticed that when switching back from safari and chrome. I now use it both on
macOS, Linux and on my iOS devices, where I mostly use Firefox Klar for
privacy. I find the the sync feature is very useful (bookmarks, history,
passwords) and I trust Mozilla more than I do google. Those notices though,
when I do use google services are frustrating and annoying, not to say off
putting.

------
bla2
Google has been pushing chrome on their sites for years. Firefox's drop in
desktop is recent. So just marketing can't be the explanation.

~~~
adventured
I've been a loyal Firefox user since the earliest couple versions. Something
like 12-13 years or whatever. I like the interface more than Chrome, among a
few other things about how it operates.

I can't leave Firefox open on even simple pages, without it consuming ~5% or
more of the processor with one tab doing nothing. If I open numerous tabs,
forget about it, Firefox will eat the processor (brand new machine, i5-7400,
new Firefox install). I can leave Chrome running almost perpetually without
problems with tons of tabs open. Right now I've got seven tabs open in
Firefox, and it's consuming 706mb of ram, for a few stackoverflow pages and
HN. I've had that resource abuse problem with Firefox essentially since the
beginning, across a lot of varied PC systems.

Over the last year I've gradually stopped using Firefox because I can't stand
its _horrible_ performance any longer.

~~~
minitech
This is exactly the opposite of what I experience; Chrome eats up 6GB of
memory with a couple dozen tabs open, but I can have as many and more active
in Firefox on 2GB (and over 1000 tabs open but inactive – leftovers from when
tab groups were removed… that was a shame). Firefox just also feels faster in
general.

I _am_ using the developer edition instead of stable, though, and there have
been a lot of somewhat recent improvements; maybe that accounts for the
difference.

------
johndoe489
I originally switched to Chrome soon after it came out because it was fast.

I still use it today because usability wise it's just better for me.

I can't for the life of me get used to a separate search box. The "omnibar" is
simply fantastic. Coupled with turning off "search suggestions" in the
Settings, you have a wiki on hand pretty much. Anything you type will match a
personal bookmark, or a personal search. Or title of a page visited earlier.
This means I don't need to make bookmark in many cases. I can also manage
omnibar to give optimal results by making random, useless searches in a
private window, which again, is so easy to use in Google Chrome (Ctrl Shift
N). And then if a search match is inconvenient for speed or just not useful
anymore, just shift+del to remove it.

Firefox completelty lost me when I looked back and it was like version "52"
instead of the version 14 or something I was one, just a year or two later. I
was like "what the hell??" "WOW what are all these amazings updates they
made?" Only to realize barely anything changed at all.

And lately they just lost me completely as a developer. They wanted to
integrate the Firebug extension, arguably the most useful aspect of Firefox
for developers. I kept using Firefox for firebug for years, while Chrome was
my main browser. But since they integrated it, it just performs worse. It's so
damn slow and unusable, meanwhile Google console just gets better and better.

------
dandare
Dear Mozilla team, I for a change think Chrome is better browser than Firefox.

I am not talking about the performance of JavaScript, compliance with
standards or developer tools, no, I am talking about Firefox's outdated UI and
inconsistent user experience. Chrome is slick and fast while FF often lags,
wastes space in the tabs and address bar and confuses me with additional
search bar.

------
ue_
I've seen people frequently say that they don't use Firefox because Chrome is
faster, and despite being a Firefox user myself, it's close to what I've
noticed. In Chrome (on GNU/Linux and mobile at least), pages seem to load
instantly. I don't know why that is, but apparently it's not just me who has
noticed this. Meanwhile, the most frequent complaint about Chrome is RAM
usage, and only when using many tabs. Most people don't use many tabs.

It's a shame that Chrome which appears to be on track to become the most
popular browser by a considerable margin is proprietary software. And before I
get a reply telling me that Chromium exists, I know that - but I also know
that it's not Chromium that's popular.

I think it is also a shame for two more reasons: Mozilla wants to make Firefox
look like Chrome, probably to replicate features which seem to draw users in,
by changing the extensions API to make it less powerful, by supporting
standardised DRM in the browser (though this is a different issue) etc.
Secondly, we may see a world in which only Webkit matters, and standards no
longer rule, similar to the situation with Internet Explorer years ago. This
will also put pressure on Mozilla and other "third party" browser authors to
support features just because Webkit supports them, or even to break standard
features so that they render like they do in Webkit.

I'd probably get shouted at for thinking it would become a "monopoly", but
that's exactly what it is, just not in the legal sense.

~~~
Manishearth
[Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla, but I'm not involved in Firefox decision
making]

> Mozilla wants to make Firefox look like Chrome, probably to replicate
> features which seem to draw users in

This is false IMO

> by changing the extensions API to make it less powerful

This is not about copying Chrome. This is about moving off of an API which was
effectively "our entire codebase is your public API, here, have fun", which is
_horrible_ for making it easy to evolve the codebase. We had this problem with
electrolysis (multiprocess firefox) already, lots of addons broke because of
it. Additionally, the base of this API is XUL, which is a technology many want
to phase out.

Firefox is using the same _base_ extension API as Chrome. It's a sensible
choice -- if you're going to design an extensions API from scratch, why not
standardize the base so that many extensions become interoperable. The base
manifest format and most of the normal APIs from Chrome are the same, however
the new system has many other APIs which chrome doesn't have, and the intent
is to continue adding these so that most of the former very powerful
extensions are still possible. But I'm already using extensions that won't
work in Chrome because Chrome doesn't expose that functionality.

> by supporting standardised DRM in the browser

If Netflix didn't work in the browser Firefox would not have any users left.

Mozilla fought this battle, and lost.

~~~
the8472
> > by changing the extensions API to make it less powerful

> This is not about copying Chrome. This is about moving off of an API which
> was effectively "our entire codebase is your public API, here, have fun"

But at the same time it also breaks access to non-mozilla things, i.e.
external libraries and the operating system (e.v. via js-ctypes). Which means
it becomes more difficult to interact with native, which turns the browser
more into a non-interoperating silo.

It also prevents valid use-cases such as modifying the UI, download
management, implementing novel network protocols (think ipfs) and integrating
it with the internal network request APIs.

While the arguments for webextensions are clear to me the no-compromise
approach is not. There are no escape hatches that are conceptually comparable
to sudo, rust's unsafe blocks, phone unlocking or whatever.

Mozilla was fairly loudly warned by developers that this will hurt specific
addons and exclude entire categories of addon features and they went ahead
anyway. In other words they did choose to make their addon system less useful.
I don't think this can be argued away.

~~~
Manishearth
> I don't think this can be argued away.

I'm not arguing that away.

I'm saying that it doesn't imply firefox is copying Chrome.

There are tradeoffs here. The team weighed them and made a decision. It was
not about copying Chrome.

> It also prevents valid use-cases such as modifying the UI, download
> management, implementing novel network protocols (think ipfs) and
> integrating it with the internal network request APIs.

Not necessarily, webextension APIs that provide better scoped hooks to this
can be added. Except perhaps the novel network protocols one. But it depends.

~~~
the8472
> Not necessarily, webextension APIs that provide better scoped hooks to this
> can be added.

That mere possibility does not alter the fact that upon release of FF57 a
long-tail set of features will unavailable at that given point, in other words
there will be a decline and mozilla _might_ work over time to win back some
fraction of that decline.

The net effect compared to today is still a decline in features, which is what
will be perceived.

Without escape hatches this system will always be inferior in its versatility.
Which is why most runtimes do have escape hatches, they admit that any
provided APIs will never be sufficient for all valid uses.

~~~
yoasif_
Escape hatches are provided by WebExtensions Experiments.

[https://webextensions-
experiments.readthedocs.io/en/latest/](https://webextensions-
experiments.readthedocs.io/en/latest/)

~~~
the8472
You can't bundle those with an extension and get it published on release.

They only function for prototyping things and hoping mozilla will bless them
eventually.

------
badpenny
Now and again I'll try switching to Firefox but it's just incredibly sluggish
compared to Chrome so I end up switching back.

------
tschellenbach
Chrome is just a (much) better product. Combination of building a better
product and a lot of advertising.

------
bahjoite
Not included in these numbers are installs of Trisquel's Abrowser and The Tor
Project's TorBrowser. Both are rebadged Firefox and neither one is downloaded
from or phones home to Mozilla. I don't suggest that this would make much
difference to the numbers.

~~~
netule
Are Chromium installs counted in the Chrome count as well?

------
MichaelMoser123
I would be glad to use firefox on Windows, but there are installation
problems, after install the browser crashes on any attempt to use it (on my
Linux VM it works just fine).

The firefox people should take care of such details when they deal with the
most widely used desktop OS.

~~~
cmiles74
I'm not sure that it's reasonable to blame Firefox for this issue. I use
Firefox on Windows 7, 8 and 10 without issue; the installation went without a
hitch.

~~~
MichaelMoser123
O wonder, just tried again with firefox 54.0.1 and install worked fine on
windows. Thanks.

------
sriram_iyengar
I'm a firefox user for a very very long time - i do not remember using IE or
Chrome for any serious time - i'm using mac for a decade now and not even
safari ! Have never found firefox disturbing my dev work anyday. Will continue
to use firefox.

------
fimdomeio
I want to use firefox, I really do. But I can distinguish when it's running
and when it's not by my macbook fan noise. And yes I've tried all kinds of
clean ups. but it just sits there on the background consuming 40% of a cpu
while doing nothing.

~~~
bqe
For an opposing anecdote, I do not have this problem at all. Firefox is always
snappy and uses less memory than Chrome on my Macbook.

~~~
spiderfarmer
Is it a retina macbook? Because I think that's one of the problems.

Also: connecting a 4k monitor to your Macbook to run Firefox on and things
will get hot real fast.

Shame really, I love Firefox but keep coming back to Safari because of the CPU
usage.

------
tonmoy
Forefox installation numbers maybe declining, but how does it compare with any
browser install? Maybe desktop growth has stagnated, maybe with always
updating OS and Firefox itself, people just don't need to "install" Firefox
anymore?

~~~
lucb1e
Not sure why you're downvoted. This is a question I feel stupid for not
thinking of myself.

------
kevin_thibedeau
It couldn't possibly have anything to do with breaking extensions once again.

------
satysin
I can only speak for myself but I didn't leave Firefox for Chrome because of
advertising. I left because a year ago Firefox was painful to use. Sync was
(might still be?) incomplete, setting up quick searches was annoying, font
rendering was poor, HiDPI support was crap, overall performance was noticeably
slower than Chrome and they announced killing off advanced XPCOM based
extensions so I figured I would just change over now rather than later.

------
baybal2
Firefox looses marketshare because they hired talentless GUI designers who
made thing not better, but actually worse

------
rocky1138
> Mozilla publishes aggregated Firefox usage data in form of Active Daily
> Installs (ADIs) here (Update: looks like the site requires a login now. It
> used to be available publicly for years and was public until a few days
> ago). The site is a bit clumsy and you can look at individual days only so I
> wrote some code to fetch the data for the last 3 years so its easier to
> analyze (link).

These two things are probably related :)

------
spiderfarmer
I love you Firefox, but you're horrible on retina screens. Just scrolling
takes 2 times as many CPU cycles when compared to Safari. It's troubling
because I'm the biggest Firefox supporter I know and even I switch to Safari
when I hear the CPU fan spinning.

------
maxharris
I don't use Firefox because it's a power hog compared to Safari.

------
zimbatm
One thing the author didn't touch upon is the amount of manpower available on
both sides. I am under the impression that Google has much less people
involved in the construction of their browsers.

------
self_awareness
I didn't switch from Firefox to Chromium because Google puts the "Chrome" name
all over the place. I did the switch because Chrome is 2x faster than Firefox.

------
faragon
Firefox: please lower the priority of the religious stuff (Rust, etc.), and
increase the priority for actual work involving better user experience.

------
smegel
Prevent Javascript from running HTML5 videos and I will switch in a heartbeat.

But I guess Mozilla is just as corrupt as Google...

------
baalimago
firefox is important.

don't let it fall

------
oconnor663
> monopoly position in Internet services such as Google Mail, Google Calendar
> and YouTube

Seriously?

~~~
smacktoward
Name one video site that has anywhere near the usage level of YouTube.

~~~
nerdshoe
Twitch. Not for hours viewed but because they seemingly have a lock on their
corner of the market. That Youtube has spent so much on game streaming, and
still failing, is a sign that competition exists.

~~~
eterm
For live video, yes, but even a many twitch highlight reels still end up back
on youtube.

------
cocktailpeanuts
I have both Chrome and Firefox installed but try very hard to stay away from
using FF unless I'm testing cross-platform stuff or if I want to sign into
multiple accounts of a same service (one on chrome and one on firefox)

And this has nothing to do with monopoly. That's just a rationalization for
their fuckup. I don't even know where to start, let me just list a couple:

1\. The "Yahoo.com" by default is the worst: I know users can switch to
google, etc. but if a developer like me doesn't even want to go through
trouble, why would any ordinary person go through all the trouble when they
can just use chrome? And we all know Yahoo doesn't provide customer-centric
search results but ad-optimized results to squeeze out revenue.

2\. Bad performance: YES IT IS ALL ABOUT ENGINEERING. As someone who keeps a
lot of tabs open I can't use firefox because the cpu level reaches the
stratosphere if i keep opening tabs and leave them around. The firefox browser
performance sucks. Period.

But I think the main reason FF is failing is because the developers are out of
touch with the reality, just like in this article where one of the developers
complain it's because Google is pushing chrome through monopoly. He's
forgetting that before Chrome, it was Firefox who won despite MS pushing IE
through monopoly.

If the developers were more self-aware, they wouldn't have let all this
happen.

