
Firefox desktop market share now below 9% - ngokevin
https://netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?options=%7B%22filter%22%3A%7B%22%24and%22%3A%5B%7B%22deviceType%22%3A%7B%22%24in%22%3A%5B%22Desktop%2Flaptop%22%5D%7D%7D%5D%7D%2C%22dateLabel%22%3A%22Trend%22%2C%22attributes%22%3A%22share%22%2C%22group%22%3A%22browser%22%2C%22sort%22%3A%7B%22share%22%3A-1%7D%2C%22id%22%3A%22browsersDesktop%22%2C%22dateInterval%22%3A%22Monthly%22%2C%22dateStart%22%3A%222017-12%22%2C%22dateEnd%22%3A%222018-11%22%2C%22segments%22%3A%22-1000%22%7D
======
kansi
Reading this breaks my heart. I have been a Firefox user for almost a decade
now and I have good and bad memories with it. Since Quantum release my
experience with FF has been nothing but exceptional. On a general day I have
around ~15 pinned tabs and more than 50 other tabs open and FF handles it like
a breeze. The memory usage is good given the fact that my workload is heavy.
On a dual-core machine, I am able to restart FF under ~3 seconds.

I have read comments in this thread suggesting that FF's performance is not
that snappy but I cannot seem to notice any difference. Maybe my dev senses
are not that strong ... maybe the benchmarks do show a difference but I have
never felt FF to be any less performant than Chrome.

I am tired of listening to people screaming their lungs out about privacy when
their actions don't reflect their opinions.

~~~
bad_user
> “ _I am tired of listening to people screaming their lungs out about privacy
> when their actions don 't reflect their opinions._”

Those screaming for privacy, like myself, are in fact a small minority.

Also regardless of the topic, double standards are rampant in this community.

You’ll often see people screaming against Google but still using @gmail.com
because paying for a domain and the price of one coffee per month is too
expensive. Or people claiming that they need ad-blockers for privacy, but then
screaming against paywalls.

~~~
moccachino
To be fair it does take much more than $20 worth of effort to migrate all your
stuff from gmail. How much more I don't know since I've yet to do it, even
though I've been paying for another email service for more than a year.

~~~
realradicalwash
I finally did it this year! All the scandals (dragonfly, drone programme, auto
sign-in in chrome, grabbing data through auto translate, etc.) were just too
much.

Getting away from the convinient variant, for which I paid with my user data,
to privacy oriented choices felt empowering.

I went with Posteo for email and calendar (EUR12/pa), went from mostly FF to
all-in FFk (donated to Mozilla), from Google search to DDG and Qwant.

It's somewhat more effort. But it is worth it imv.

I am still on Android though. But I installed netguard, which reigns in
Android somewhat. The only thing I struggle to find: A good alternative to the
Google maps app (open street maps is decent for desktop).

~~~
mikekchar
I use OpenAnd for maps/navigation installed from fdroid (although I've paid
for it previously on Play). I find it does everything I want.

~~~
kuroguro
Did you mean OsmAnd? I couldn't find anything named "OpenAnd".

~~~
mikekchar
Yes. Sorry. When I was typing it I was thinking, "That doesn't seem right!",
but I couldn't get my brain in gear.

------
bjz_
Been really enjoying Firefox, especially after Quantum. More devs should
support and use it, lest we be beholden to Chrome for the rest of time.

~~~
eksemplar
I use Firefox for development, but I use safari (privately) and edge
(professionally) for browsing, and see no real advantages to using either
Firefox or Chrome for that.

I think modern Firefox is a much better browser than Chrome though, but
Mozilla certainly lost the PR war and to no fault but their own, because
Firefox sure sucked for a long while.

~~~
11235813213455
What I like in chrome is search shortcuts, example I start typing "thes" then
press TAB, then I'm brought directly to
[https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/hello](https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/hello)
(possibly with little configuration). I don't think Firefox has similar
things, last time I checked we have to use bookmarks or something

~~~
Dunedan
In Firefox you can add a bookmark and set a keyword for that bookmark. If the
URL of the bookmark contains "%s", it'll get replaced by everything you type
in the URL bar after the keyword. For example I have a bookmark for Wikipedia
with the keyword "wp". So when I type "wp Y Combinator" I end up on the
Wikipedia page about Y Combinator.

I really enjoy this feature and even catch myself regularly trying to use it
on other computers, which obviously don't have such keywords defined.

~~~
lorenzhs
Yeah, but the indicator that you’re using such a bookmark when typing “wp Foo”
in the address bar is really poor. When you use the OpenSearch search engine
integration you can also set a keyword but it’s highlighted properly. Downside
is that you need to enable the separate search bar to get the option to add a
site’s OpenSearch provider when visiting it because the small looking glass
gets a tiny plus you need to click.

I recently switched from chrome to Firefox but the search engine situation is
something I’m not really happy about.

~~~
yorwba
> Downside is that you need to enable the separate search bar to get the
> option to add a site’s OpenSearch provider when visiting it because the
> small looking glass gets a tiny plus you need to click.

Nope, you can just right-click the site's own search bar, which is how I've
been doing it forever.

~~~
QasimK
I think that adds it as a bookmark which is not the same thing as an
OpenSearch provider because it doesn’t give you the blue highlight when
searching with it.

Actually this is exactly what lorenzhs said, and it is my experience too. I
know this because I spent half an hour trying to get a “blue search” for BBFC.

~~~
lorenzhs
Yup that’s what I meant. The right click -> add as search engine creates a
bookmark which doesn’t get the blue highlight when using it. That distinction
just doesn’t make sense to me.

------
swozey
I switched last week to Firefox after trying to go back to it over and over
again, maybe once a year, for 5+ years. I absolutely love the Container system
it has. I was fumbling around between Chrome profiles for GCP and back to my
personal for gdrive/docs/etc. It just got cumbersome. I didn't really
understand what the Containers were until I installed the extension and
started to split up domains by Work and Personal containers. It's fantastic.
Now I have a ton of work-only domains that as soon as I go to them it opens
them automatically in my "Work" container. If I pop over to reddit or hn it
automatically uses a "Personal" container. The UX could be better, I'd like to
dump a list of sites in and bulk select their containers but you can't do that
AFAIK. I'd also like to open a URL and just hit a checkbox that says "Always
open this in Work/Personal" instead I need to open a Personal container and
then "always open in this container."

Haven't really paid attention to resource usage vs chrome. I don't immediately
feel like it's incredibly lower, if lower at all, but that's just taking a
cursory glance that having a decent amount of static tabs and a video player
running (not 1080p) is using 2gb of ram. I feel like chrome would be right
there, maybe higher, like 3gb.

edit: Also, I found this which turns the entire thing into a dark mode (I use
Dark reader as well)
[https://github.com/overdodactyl/ShadowFox](https://github.com/overdodactyl/ShadowFox)

It's got some quirks that bug me. On Windows (I use OSX mostly) it seems to
have issues with dragging links out but nothing to get me running away from
it.

~~~
nunodonato
OMG THANK YOU SO MUCH! I was unaware of this. Been keeping chrome and chromium
to use on specific cases for work accounts (email, banking, social media,
etc). And now I can just consolidate everything with firefox, love it!! I can
finally get rid of google's browsers :D

~~~
bootloop
Don't really know what to say because I use 3 flavors of chrome + incognito
mode to make sure my sessions are well separated. I didn't know about this.
Guess I have to give it a try now.

------
Brakenshire
Quantum I think was too incremental and conservative, trying to integrate
Servo into Gecko. They’ve ended up making a desktop browser which is as good
as Chrome, but not good enough to demand attention. Mobile, where parallelism
should be most beneficial, has lagged behind, and parallel layout, which is
where the real prize is, has disappeared over the horizon. Servo has been
relegated to WebVR experiments which are speculative at best, at a point when
VR is only available to a truly tiny percentage of the population, and should
it be successful will probably be dictated by market share anyway. Do Quantum
by all means, but follow five other paths to make Servo a success. Servo was
designed to be embeddable, why for instance not attempt competition for
Electron. Even if it only implemented a subset of the spec it could be a big
success. This is Mozilla’s lifeblood, and it just seems attention is
elsewhere.

~~~
pcwalton
If you've been following #servo lately, you'll see that we're starting a
reboot of parallel layout right now (which I'm leading, more or less).

It just so happens that I'm also juggling a million other things
simultaneously. For example, I'm working on power usage improvements on macOS
that should help address some of the complaints upthread. Also there's the
entirely new GPU font and SVG renderer (which is a novel technique). Also
there's making sure WebRender ships. Etc.

~~~
Eridrus
Is any of this work coming to Mobile? I agree with the GP that this is where
Firefox has the biggest opening, but it seems like there's very little
investment in Firefox on Android.

~~~
pcwalton
I'm not responsible for or in control of product plans, but we are testing and
tuning much of the work for mobile, yes.

------
atombender
I'd _like_ to use Firefox. I've tried it out several times the last year. It's
okay. Unfortunately, I always end up going back to Safari. Despite the
performance improvements, Safari still feels like a faster, smoother browser.

Firefox is still pretty ugly, too. On macOS, it feels chunkier and less
natively integrated.

Safari's "omnibar" is superior to Firefox's. Safari actually suggests web
sites, which I use all the time. Wikipedia is a major one. Start typing
"Richard Fey", for example, and the first hit will be the Wikipedia page for
Richard Feynman, complete with a short summary and photo. Firefox forces me
through a Google search.

I also tried out Firefox on iOS some time ago, and it wasn't as nice as
Safari. For there to be a point to this, I'd need the same browser in both
places, with perfect syncing of bookmarks, cookies, tabs, etc., just like
Safari.

Lastly, migrating is a pain. There's apparently no way to import my current
Safari session (I have probably 60-70 tabs) or history (I keep everything I
visit, going back years), which means I'd lose stuff by migrating and would
have to migrate tabs over incrementally. Hard to try out a browser in any
significant way this way.

~~~
bhauer
> _Safari 's "omnibar" is superior to Firefox's. Safari actually suggests web
> sites, which I use all the time. Wikipedia is a major one. Start typing
> "Richard Fey", for example, and the first hit will be the Wikipedia page for
> Richard Feynman, complete with a short summary and photo. Firefox forces me
> through a Google search._

I don't use a Mac, so I am not sure if there are other features of the Safari
omnibar which are appealing. But the example you provided is especially
concerning to me since it suggests that Safari is sending user input in the
location bar to some external service for analysis. This is what allows the
browser to find and render a snippet of a Wikipedia article that best matches
what you've typed in the location bar. If I were using Safari, I would
definitely be looking for a way to turn that off. I can't tell you how many
times I've (accidentally) pasted something into the location bar that I would
never voluntarily send to any third parties.

On Firefox, I have a Wikipedia bookmark that uses the 'w' keyword and uses the
URL

    
    
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s
    

So I would type "w Richard Feynman" to reach the same destination. Maybe not
quite as elegant, but I have another that does a Wikipedia _search_ if I don't
feel like typing the whole name of an article.

For whatever it's worth, I find the Firefox omnibar superb for many reasons,
one being that it prioritizes my bookmarks and my history higher than
directing me to a third-party search engine.

~~~
yorwba
> but I have another that does a Wikipedia search if I don't feel like typing
> the whole name of an article.

You don't really need two bookmarks for that. Wikipedia will redirect to the
article if the search string happens to be exactly the same.

~~~
bhauer
Nice, thank you!

------
rocky1138
I didn't see any indication as to their methodology for how they're
calculating these stats. It's probably been said a zillion times before, but
if it's JavaScript-based you can safely assume that they are incorrect as it's
likely there is a large intersection between people browsing with an ad-
blocker, private browsing, or with content blocker and those people using
Firefox.

~~~
jopsen
Does it matter?

Even if the measure is somewhat flawed it's hard to argue that drop isn't
related to a drop in the underlying number of users.

Mozilla is awesome, but growing Firefox is an uphill struggle.

~~~
godelski
Probably. Mozilla getting funding would depend on these numbers. And one of
the most common addons is user agent switcher. For awhile Netflix allowed
Chrome on linux and not Firefox (even though they assured me that wasn't the
issue). But I could get around it by doing a user agent switch.

People do this for fingerprinting too. I'm sure there are plenty of people
that always have it on and set to Chrome.

Also, Mozilla higher ups might be using these statistics to see how worthwhile
the new features and work they have done.

~~~
pas
> plenty of people

that's probably a drop in the bucket. really at best a few tens of thousands
of people.

------
Puer
Just my personal $0.02:

1\. The biggest thing keeping me tied to Chrome over any other browser is the
extension support. Extensions are second class citizens in any other browser.
This is partly because other browsers keep overhauling their systems and
deprecating old software which discourages extension developers, and mainly
because (as an extension developer) why would you code for browser X when you
can get more users on browser Y?

2\. Anecdotal evidence, but every time an update of Firefox (and most notably
Quantum) is released people laud how fast it is. On my 2015 Macbook running
Mac OS Firefox has _never_ been faster. Maybe there are things behind the
scenes such as caching playing a role, but web pages load slower, scrolling
feels sluggish, videos drop frames and freeze or get out of sync. It isn't an
enjoyable experience compared to Chrome or Safari.

~~~
baby
I'm not sure I understand, there is no side-tab plugin like Tree Style Tab
plugin on Chrome. How do you handle more than 10 tabs?

~~~
mkl
Session Buddy and The Great Suspender. I have ~800 tabs open in Chrome right
now on this PC. I haven't used Tree Style Tab, but Chrome's tab-shrinking is
actually better for lots of tabs (up to a point) than Firefox's tab-scrolling.
I have yet to try tab suspension extensions in Firefox, so there may be a
workflow that works for me there (Chrome is not ideal).

~~~
pmoriarty
I am envious, Firefox 60.3.0 performs like a snail for me on Linux with just
20 tabs.

~~~
vthriller
My experience is exactly the opposite. Each time I'm past 200 tabs or
something (i.e. all the time), Chrome's UI starts occasionally lagging and
glitching, and I'm not even talking about memory usage (overall or even just
parent process alone) and how it's affecting the operating system. Even with
pre-Quantum Firefox I was always pushing limits much, much further.

However I'm avoiding media- and script-heavy websites as much as possible, and
block a couple of ad networks solely because of the stress that rich media ads
(videos flying all over iframes and whatnot) causes for the hardware I'm
running the browser on. (I don't mind ads if they don't take 8 CPU cores to
render, but they seem to be disappearing from the internet.)

------
jeswin
I have switched to Firefox on mobile as well. There are some occasional
hiccups (rare), but the speedup and battery life you gain from ad-blocking
makes it totally worth it.

For those who are evaluating, please install AdBlock before you take a call -
and do try it for a few days.

~~~
jabl
I'm also using firefox, on both mobile and desktop. With ublock origin,
decentraleyes, privacy badger, and https everywhere add-ons.

~~~
richjdsmith
That's my exact config on all my devices as well!

Whenever I'm roped into fixing some family member's computer, I always install
all of those except privacy badger.

------
mherrmann
Chrome lost me when it started to force-login me to Chrome when signing into
Gmail, thus sharing all my website visits with Google. I switched to FF two
months ago and haven't looked back. FF is like Linux: less polished, but
works, and you are in control. A fair tradeoff for me.

~~~
fyfy18
I switched over summer and the only thing I really miss is the translation
built into Chrome. S3.Translator seems to be the recommended alternative, but
compared to Chrome it's next to useless. I find it very slow, constantly
nagging and often it breaks websites. in Chrome the translation 'just works'.

~~~
Markoff
it's even worse on android, only alternative to Chrome if you need translation
it's Edge for android, which it's still using inferior translation, tried it
for few minutes and saw completely opposite transmission than was meaning on
the page

------
kristopolous
Being visually nearly indistinguishable from chrome hasn't really worked in
its favor. (quick, which is which: [http://9ol.es/double-
browser.png](http://9ol.es/double-browser.png)). Probably north of 95% don't
know about or understand licensing differences or differences in rendering
engines or core architecture. Interfaces and obvious features with compelling
narratives are what matter because that's how the user engages with the
product.

Asking users to go out of their way to install and use something that looks
and feels identical to what they already have for reasons most people don't
know, understand, or deeply care about and do not get surfaced in any
meaningful way is not a winning strategy. A case has to be made in the battle
of perception and the decreasingly small visual differentiation hasn't helped
build it.

Al Ries's laws of marketing and branding and Donald Norman's models of
differentiation apply equally to all products regardless of the economic and
institutional structure that builds them.

~~~
saagarjha
> Transforming itself to be visually nearly indistinguishable from chrome
> hasn't really worked in its favor.

Chrome changed its style more recently and ended up being more similar to
Firefox.

~~~
kristopolous
Is that the timeline here? In that case it was Chrome using its market
position cleverly and Firefox not responding adequately. I can only speak for
linux interfaces btw.

Small "bullshit" interface changes can have dramatic user and marketshare
impact. We can all sit around and wish the world didn't work this way but it's
not going to change.

~~~
Groxx
Firefox has alternatively had closer-to-curved-rects or boxy tabs for
practically its whole lifetime. Chrome went heavy on diagonal-edged tabs early
on, and relatively recently they've been undoing that.

they're even mimicking Firefox's scrollable tab-bar since it's such an obvious
win over a million super-narrow tabs that you can't possibly identify.

~~~
Semaphor
> they're even mimicking Firefox's scrollable tab-bar since it's such an
> obvious win over a million super-narrow tabs that you can't possibly
> identify.

The non-scrollable tabs are what I miss most about Chrome. I know I'm not in a
majority there, but I wouldn't call it an obvious win.

~~~
Groxx
about:config has `browser.tabs.tabMinWidth` :) just set it to 0.

Though I firmly believe that about:config is in no way a user-viable option
(as useful as it can be, for dev purposes), so I don't intend to imply that
means "firefox has that too". It doesn't, it just has a workaround.

~~~
Semaphor
Thanks, but I know about the about:config string. Especially with very low
values, it had some weird behavior last time I tried it.

~~~
Groxx
yea, doesn't really surprise me. most about:config is pretty hit or miss. out
of curiosity tho: was that before the UI overhaul (i.e. have you done it since
it became HTML+CSS instead of XUL)?

personally I'm loving Tree Style Tab, so I don't really pay attention to the
tabbar any more.

~~~
Semaphor
I only started using FF after some bigger release this year, it was too slow
for me before.

And good point about Tree Tabs. I've been wanting to try it for a while, might
as well do it now :)

------
baroffoos
All of the other browsers have some other vector to push their browser.
Safari, Edge and Chrome are all preinstalled on OSs and chrome is advertised
on the biggest website in the world.

Even if firefox is slightly better than the rest it doesn't matter. Chrome
only exists because IE was so bad people went out of their way not to use it.

~~~
_wmd
Chrome only exists because Google were afraid of lacking control over the
stack they use to deliver their content. Firefox was already 'good enough'
long before it ever appeared, and Google could easily have dedicated
engineering resources if the problem with Firefox was purely technical, much
as they do with Linux.

FWIW a lot of Google behavior can be cast as an analogy to a paranoid control
freak. Net neutrality is an obvious one, the incredible lack of any
demarcating information useful for traffic shaping in QUIC is another. But of
course both of these are really about citizen rights and privacy :)

~~~
acqq
> Firefox was already 'good enough' long before

Only if you as "good enough" define "with Javascript even slower than IE."
I've personally never used Chrome, because since even the first days it
already had more "protected" installation than some malware, and that never
made me confident in their intentions (and I've never liked Chrome UI) but
Firefox has always had performance problems. As Chrome appeared it had
extremely fast JS, and only then others "woke up."

~~~
jcranmer
Mozilla was working on a tracing JIT for JS before Google announced V8,
although I believe V8 was released before the first version of Firefox with
TraceMonkey was.

------
StillBored
The problem is that firefox is only getting faster if you happen to have a
half dozen 4+Ghz cores to burn. If you run it on low end hardware all these
rewrites in rust/etc to improve parallelism seem to actually be slowing it
down and apparently increasing its overall resource consumption. Older
versions would run up against a gig and a half or so, and start garbage
collecting. Now, its not unusual for me to see 5+GB pinned across assorted
firefox processes.

I've been meaning to play the high speed video capture game with a couple of
versions running on the same hardware to see if my feeling that the GUI is
actually getting laggier despite posting better benchmark numbers.

More and more I find myself spinning up falkon, or other browsers because I
want to actually be able to play streaming radio in the background with my
browser without having it skip if I open amazon.com, or some other JS heavy
site. Worse, I'm still running 56 on a couple of my machines because I can't
stand how laggy the newer versions are on those machines.

~~~
TangoTrotFox
I've been having the exact same issue. I tend to leave a relatively large
number of windows/tabs open and Firefox is starting to edge towards
unusability on a 4x3.2ghz + 16GB RAM system simply because its performance and
memory consumption is interfering with other applications.

Though I really think most major browsers are somehow all simultaneously
losing the thread. Websites are fundamentally just formatted text and
extremely basic graphics, for the most part. It's not like I have 50 high end
webgl demos running. Rendering text and basic graphics is not something that
should be consuming anywhere remotely near the resources that have become
typical. If javascript is the problem, then that should be dealt with and not
simply accepted as the price of doing business. In many ways I feel like the
mantra that 'premature optimization is the root of all evil' has gradually
turned into ' _any form of optimization short of making sure you don 't run
O(n) in O(n^2) is not a priority._' But like anybody who's worked on a project
knows those placeholders that 'you'll get to later' end up being exactly what
goes live. And when optimization is disregarded, you get text/graphics
rendering struggling to perform on systems millions of times stronger than
what sent us to the moon.

------
kerng
How sad... I have switched to Firefox about 8 months ago and have been really
enjoying the browser. It's just difficult to compete against the giants of
Google and Microsoft. I mean anywhere you go there will be messages like "Try
a faster browser- Download Chrome" on any Google site, or the extremely
difficult user interface to switch default browser on Windows. I really wish
for Firefox to succeed in the long run, just dont know how it could be
possible.

~~~
EpicEng
>or the extremely difficult user interface to switch default browser on
Windows.

I agree that it's annoying and user hostile, but "extremely difficult"? It's
one button in settings.

~~~
kerng
It's not really a button, they convert the button to switch to a weird link
and clicking the actual button means to keep Edge. Its misleading, and most
people thought they switched because the clicked the button but actually that
didnt do the switch. But agree it's not necessarily difficult, just
misleading.

~~~
EpicEng
Wow I completely forgot about that, you're right.

------
karmakaze
There's a very interesting pattern in the data if you look back from 2016-05
to 2018-04 (chart has 24 month limit). Each April and October shows an
appreciable drop in Firefox market share. This tells me that the Firefox
desktop/laptop we are losing are on Linux and decide to switch to another
browser when they upgrade their (probably Ubuntu based) disto.

I myself run Firefox on Xubuntu but stick to the LTS releaaes. The biggest
impediment from switching from Chrome to Firefox was being familiar with the
Dev Tools. One day I just did it and the change wasn't as big a deal as I
thought it to be.

We really need to keep Firefox alive, it's our best, free-est option. With
Microsoft replacing Edge with a Chrome-based browser this is as important as
ever.

~~~
botverse
> One day I just did it and the change wasn't as big a deal as I thought it to
> be.

This is so true, if everybody here thinks that should change but worried about
this. It takes just a few hours, almos all features have an equivalent if not
exactly the same and in the same place.

~~~
krageon
Except FF's tools are slower and the experience is overall worse. A lot has
improved about firefox (including my old main complaint, that the renderer was
slow) but saying the dev tools are at all acceptable when you're used to
Chrome's is sadly still a stretch.

~~~
karmakaze
Which dev features do you find unacceptable? I still do switch back and forth,
mostly at work when pairing. The other times I use Chrome and Safari is for
web dev on mobile devices.

Beyond that I don't find much difference and there are as many times I find
that the Firefox dev tools can do things that I can't in Chrome.

------
Illniyar
To me Firefox is just blundering with it's marketing. It should be touting
it's amazing features and showing how it eats chrome's lunch until chrome has
no choice but to implement those features.

They should showcase containers, tree style tabs and other things that chrome
can't do and are massive productivity and quality of life changes. Instead
they market privacy and performance features and change their brand, which
let's be frank barely interest even 9% of the people.

Any time I explain to people who see my browser about tree style tabs or
containers, at least 30% switch, usually within days.

------
nichos
Sad news. Firefox is my favorite browser, and I like their Dev tools the best.

All the important stuff done in a browser should not be trusted to one that is
closed source. (I know chromium is open source, but almost no one is using
it).

A good balance of browsers is important, I've already seen "you must use
chrome to view this site."

~~~
godelski
User agent switcher will get you around that. It worked when Netflix was
blocking FF and hasn't failed me yet.

~~~
craftyguy
> User agent switcher will get you around that

I wonder how many FF users roll with a user agent that identifies as chrome or
some other browser, and how much (if even significantly) it affects surveys
like the one in this article.

~~~
godelski
I wonder that too. I used to have it always on and set to Chrome when Netflix
was blocking DRM enabled FF. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people just
always have it on, especially considering how popular of an add on it is.

------
kgwxd
If you don't want it on desktop for some crazy reason, at least replace Chrome
with Firefox if you're on Android. uBlock Origin support alone is worth
leaving behind any benefit you get with Chrome.

~~~
chipperyman573
Seconded. Plus, you can install HTTPS everywhere.

One thing I would mention, though, is that using google services will all
downgrade themselves if you use firefox for android. For example, this is the
exact same search in chrome:
[https://i.imgur.com/uK8Tr9I.png](https://i.imgur.com/uK8Tr9I.png) and in
firefox: [https://i.imgur.com/pEBphaQ.png](https://i.imgur.com/pEBphaQ.png)
(both using the same android phone). It's even worse if you're trying to use a
"near me" search. I don't want to put an image for privacy reasons but major
functionality is removed, such as the ability to view the business's hours(!)
Also, google maps doesn't seem to work in firefox. And when it does, it's very
slow.

However, there's a really easy solution to this! Install a user-agent switcher
and have firefox identify as chrome. These problems will all immediately go
away.

~~~
kam
Or search from the Google widget on the home screen instead of the browser.
Results are displayed in the native app but web links open in Firefox.

------
pvinis
Honestly, I haven't cared about the speed of Firefox for a long time now. I
use it everyday, and I want to keep using it in the future, not because of
it's speed, but because of the features and options.

For example: there is a way to completely hide the 'X' from the tabs. I love
that. It's weird for some people but I like it that way. Chrome cannot do
that. There is a feature request, but it was marked as won't fix for a long
time now. Who decided that, I don't know and I don't care.

I want my options like that and many others that Firefox has and Chrome
hasn't. And with the danger of being misunderstood here, I would consider
switching, if Chrome had a few features/options I want. But the fact that
Mozilla people care and spent 10 min to add the option for me or an add-on,
makes them stand much higher in my mind.

------
w3news
This isnt good for the users, because Firefox respects the user. Firefox is
build for the users, and all features are made with the idea that the user has
control. Many privacy features are started at Firefox. Chrome isnt a bad
browser, but isnt made for the user, it is made for commercial
websites/webapps.

An example is that Firefox has a good tracking protection system.

~~~
btgis
Firefox didn't respect me when they sent my data to Cliqz, when they installed
Pocket without my permission, when they started showing me ads on my home
page, when they remotelly installed a Mr. Robot addon without my permission,
and so on. The "Mozilla sides with the user" argument needs to die and be
buried already. Mozilla is at best sloppy and at worst as evil as Google is.

------
jbarham
I use Google Docs and noticed that one apparent dark pattern Google uses with
Chrome is that you can print directly to a printer from Google Docs in Chrome
whereas with Firefox (and presumably any other non-Google browser) you're
forced to download a PDF first. It's confusing enough that my wife, who prints
periodically from Google Docs, asked to switch back to Chrome.

------
NelsonMinar
I switched to desktop with Quantum and love it. But the huge win for me was
switching to Firefox Mobile on my iPhone. It may just be a wrapper for WebKit.
But it integrates with Firefox Sync.

The killer feature is "send this tab to your iPhone". Great when you're
looking at a recipe / restaurant address / funny picture on your computer and
want to have it on your phone.

~~~
tqkxzugoaupvwqr
> The killer feature is "send this tab to your iPhone".

You can do the same in Safari with AirDrop and Handoff.

If you enable iCloud for Safari, you can see all your Safari tabs from other
devices.

~~~
UnrealIncident
Not everyone with an iPhone uses all Apple devices.

------
SwellJoe
This is pretty disastrous for the world. I don't know how much it effects
Mozilla, but it's terrible for people's privacy and a web that is at least a
little independent of a small number of giant companies who have a history of
being bad actors.

Also, how the heck is Internet Explorer more popular than Firefox? Even
Microsoft doesn't want people using it.

------
javitury
What an irony. I've been using firefox for 10+ years and now it is faster,
uses less resourses and doesn't crash. As a user, this is the browser I have
been waiting for.

Yes, dev tools features could be expanded as well as the plugin
franework(vimperator!).But these are non-issues for regular users.

~~~
snaky
> now it is faster, uses less resourses and doesn't crash

XUL extensions removed, power users are angry and leaving. And the power users
were the main driving force for Firefox adoption - mostly not by themselves,
but as influencers for people around them.

What an irony indeed.

~~~
johnny22
so they switched to browers that have less powerful extensions? No current
popular browser matches firefox's extension power, even after the change.

~~~
snaky
They switched to browser with the same powerless extensions indeed. Because
the difference is no more. An attitude of Mozilla Firefox team is against
power users clearly for so long, and that's an only logical outcome.

~~~
johnny22
that is nonsense. Mozilla offers more than Chrome even via web extensions.

------
wycy
I switched from Firefox to Chrome around 2009. I switched back to Firefox this
year with the release of Quantum. Its performance has seemed fine to me even
on my late 2012 iMac.

I think the switch back to Firefox was worth it if only for the privacy and to
claw back some control from Google.

------
baby
And yet, it is one of the only usable browser for most users thanks to the
Tree Style Tabs extension. I still don't understand how people can browse the
web with Chrome :|

~~~
saagarjha
> And yet, it is one of the only usable browser for most users thanks to the
> Tree Style Tabs extension.

You mean, it's the only usable browser for users like you. I assure you, most
users don't use this and don't really care for it.

~~~
baroffoos
You can't care about something you don't know exists. Most users do things in
inefficient ways and don't know the better options.

------
netcan
It's hard, being FF.

Before chrome, FF outcompeted IE & safari on features. FF's features against
OS makers moats like making their browser default and unlimited finances.

Once mobile got added to the mix, default, preinstalled browsers had even more
advantage.

The feature/quality gap just isn't enough anymore. When FF gained all that
market share 10-15 yrs ago, it had tabs years before the competition. It had
add-ons before the competition. You could have IE6 or you could have FF with
firebug, "tabbed browsing," as blocking, and cool web 2.0 stuff like social
bookmarks and whatnot.

It was a _massive_ feature gap. That's no longer the case. Hard times.

------
Causality1
Dropping support for legacy extensions absolutely gutted what made Firefox
different from every other browser. I'll use Firefox 56 and NoScript until the
end of time before I use a browser with tabs above the address bar.

~~~
yoavm
Dropping support for these extensions made it possible to create Firefox
Quantum. Also, I'm using Firefox with tabs on the side with Tree Style Tab and
a simple userChrome.css hack. No need to stay with an outdated version just
for that.

~~~
acemarke
Yeah, I resisted the upgrade to FF Quantum for a while, but ultimately made
the move and it's worked out well. The biggest things I needed were a
WebExtension version of Tree Style Tabs, plus the restyling options from
[https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx](https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx)
.

------
romwell
Just providing my piece of anecdata that me, and everyone in my family, have
switched to Firefox Quantum on all our desktop machines, and aren't looking
back.

(My wife has never used anything but FF, but she begrudgingly updated, and is
now a happy user. I switched from Chrome; I can get way more tabs open on my
cheap Asus 2-in-1 with FF.)

------
whymauri
Quantum would make my work laptop (Macbook pro, 13 inch touchbar 2017)
overheat constantly. It just always had performance issues and I
troubleshooted every way I could. I never figured out what exactly was causing
it. I tried to switch to Firefox for 2 solid months, but I just couldn't do it
:(

~~~
crawrey
There is an outstanding bug:
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522)
that I became aware of due to a Firefox related topic a few months ago[1].

You can improve the performance by setting "gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque"
to true in the about:config settings. This will disable the transparency of
the window, but it will reduce the overall resource consumption. The reduction
is significant, approximately several extra hours of Firefox use, and your lap
will thank you.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17934764](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17934764)

------
xte
I came back to Firefox after years on Chrom{e,ium} because of their bad
evolution. FF is far for being good IMO but far less obscene than actual
Chrome.

Anyway, brace yourself: an era of "proprietary web" is coming, with a worst
lock-in than Windows era in the '90s.

------
pippy
netmarketshare collect data from their slim clientele base. A few years they
had to modify their data using weighting to get inline with other websites.
Other sites have more accurate data which will reflect browser usage more
accurately. I recommend using wikimedia's data. It's one of the biggest sites
that open up their usage to the public:

[https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#all-
sit...](https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#all-sites-by-
browser/browser-family-timeseries)

If you select all the browsers, you can see Firefox numbers are even more
dire. going from 10% to 5% in the last 5 years.

~~~
ngokevin
There's also [https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-
activity](https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity) showing similar
declines in the US market.

------
Ycros
I give Firefox a chance every few months, and even after all their work I
still feel like it has occasional performance issues and I end up right back
in Chrome.

------
threatofrain
For me Firefox desktop differentiates itself from all other major browsers for
their built-in content blocker and support for other privacy-oriented
features.

------
lunchables
I've been using Firefox for a couple of years now. It is genuinely very good
and I encourage people to give it a shot if you haven't. You might have been
like me and swapped to Chrome when it got stable and Firefox was in bad shape.
Let me tell you, Firefox has made ENORMOUS improvements in every area. It
really is worth trying again.

Remember how crucially important it is that we have more than one web browser.

------
foolfoolz
if there was a warning that said “all activity on this browser will be sent to
google and sold to advertisers” chrome would still have 60% market share

------
jhcl
The internet Moloch has thrown its weight around and now most of us sheep are
using its browser to get tracked daily. I'll hang on to Firefox as long as I
can and might move to Chromium (i.e. NOT Chrome) if necessary.

------
qwerty456127
Now as Microsoft has given up and switched to Google's Blink engine, given
importance of the web and scary perspectives of it becoming owned by a single
corporation Google competitors (as well as its industrial customers - it's
never good to rely on a single vendor that can always do just whatever it
wants), NGOs and GOs should start funding and promoting Mozilla now IMHO...

~~~
ngokevin
It’s unfortunately already been the case. Mozilla’s money comes directly from
Google and Google has had the heavy hand over all web standards decisions for
years now.

------
muxator
In the same timespan, firefox mobile has a share of 1.2%.

Market dominance has almost nothing to do with technical merits.

~~~
freehunter
But technical merits don't keep a company in business. Market dominance does.

~~~
kodablah
I don't believe either of those are necessarily true. They would be if you
changed "in business" to "growing".

------
thomasknowles
Firefox on Linux appears to adopt the GTK themes (in my case Dark Themes) for
web elements (Forms, message poxes, etc) and I have great difficulty removing
the customisation. Chrome based browsers do not do that and it's one of the
primary reasons I still use Chrome.

------
whalesalad
I flip flop between Firefox and Chrome often. Lately I am on Firefox because I
was trying to isolate a fatal crash I kept having on my brand new Macbook Pro
(it would lock up completely, but cursor would still move and audio would
still work and then it would inevitably shut itself off)

Since ditching Chrome the issue has not come up again ... but not sure if it's
correlation or causation.

There are a few things I do not like about Firefox but the web inspect or is
definitely miles ahead of Webkit.

Chrome is faster based on the butt-dyno:
[https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=butt-
dyno](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=butt-dyno)

------
demarq
> On a general day I have around ~15 pinned tabs and more than 50 other tabs
> open and FF handles it like a breeze.

I just commented about this somewhere else but basically no. Something here is
wrong.

Firefox fans say it's fast, Marketing materials say fast, even benchmarks say
it's fast

...but it just feels slower than the rest to the average joe.

There is something somewhere that isn't translating to speed somewhere. In a
previous comment I've highlighted my experience with youtube and amazon as
places where Firefox feels slower/clunkier compared to chrome. I really like
Firefox, even love Rust but there is a problem somewhere that the firefox devs
and hardcore fans just keep denying exists.

------
burtonator
We just shipped a chrome extension for Polar...

I did a big analysis of the distribution of extensions on Firefox vs Chrome.

You could expect Firefox to be maybe 1/3rd that of Chrome.

Nope... it's 1/40th.... So 40x more people use the same extension on Chrome vs
Firefox.

I'm not sure why this is... it might be that Chrome users adopt extensions
more readily than Firefox users?

I think there's a lesson here on long term user growth but it's somewhat
complicated.

Link to our chrome extension btw.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/save-to-
polar/jkfd...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/save-to-
polar/jkfdkjomocoaljglgddnmhcbolldcafd)

~~~
gpm
Thanks for sharing your data!

I just installed polar.

Immediately after install, it prompts you to install a chrome extension, it
has a big google chrome icon that takes up 1/16th of my screen. It has no
mention of how to do the same in firefox.

Naturally, I responded by searching both "polar firefox addon" and "Save to
polar firefox addon" on both DuckDuckGo and Google. All return a long list of
results that don't include a save to polar addon.

I go to addons.mozilla.org and search "Save to Polar", I don't find your
extension.

At this point I would typically have given up and assumed you just don't have
a firefox version of the extension... but since you've just told me that there
exists a firefox extension and I'm curious I'll keep going.

Your website mentions it nowhere.

The chrome store doesn't let me install it in firefox.

The GitHub readme doesn't mention it.

No GitHub issues mention it.

The subreddit linked from the website has no sidebar. Searching on it finds no
mention of firefox.

Checking the other github repos under the same account as the polar repo I see
a "Polar Chrome Extension" and not a "Polar Firefox Extension", but maybe
those are the same things these days since both support web extensions. Nope,
that repo is a placeholder with nothing in it.

Going back to addons.mozilla.org and just searching "polar", filtering for
extensions, and scrolling through the results (only 5 thankfully) reveals
nothing.

I search "Save to Polar" github' on both duckduckgo and google, hoping to at
least find the source of the addon. Neither return any relevant results.

At this point I'm astonished there are any firefox users of that addon... as
far as I can tell it doesn't exist for firefox.

Edit:

It occurs to me that maybe you meant looking at other people's addons. So I
looked at the most popular addon I know of, ublock origin. Chrome says
"10,000,000+", Firefox says "4,794,583"... which is 40%!

~~~
burtonator
Sorry.. didn't see your comment. I never said we had a Polar FF extension.. We
don't have one yet but should soon. I think since ours is reasonably small it
won't take time to get on FF.

~~~
gpm
No problem, and yeah, I realized about 15 minutes after I posted that that I
probably misread your comment, hence the edit at the end.

Out of curiosity, are you going to open source the chrome one?

------
mnl
There are deprecated extensions that can't be ported to Quantum and were
actually useful to many users. And then Quantum is a memory hog, jumping from
ESR 52.9 to the current version it needs a couple GB more for my workflow.
It's faster and looks nice, but my computers are powerful enough to make that
pretty much irrelevant.

For this small speed gain and unless I switch to Waterfox or some other
community effort that tries somewhat hopelessly to keep alive what many users
want, I have to buy more memory and stop using FireFTP and Session Manager. I
just needed Firefox, not a Chrome competitor.

------
brador
When you stop listening to your users they stop using your product.

Remove pocket. Respect user privacy again. Maybe they’ll return.

~~~
Groxx
Probably worth pointing out that they now _own_ pocket. So it's a bit
different than sending data to a 3rd party:
[https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-
po...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-pocket/)

But I completely agree with how it was initially integrated, it was a terrible
decision.

------
shmerl
I've never jumped on the whole Chrome hype train, and while Firefox for a
while was slower, it didn't bother me that much. A pity many jumped and never
returned, even when Firefox caught up.

Now three major milestones I'm personally waiting for (for the Linux version)
are Firefox using Webrender (efficiently) with Vulkan on Wayland.

Another one that's still missing is fully functional Servo, that can run in
browser.html on some mobile Linux UX like Plasma Mobile.

~~~
qwerty456127
> I've never jumped on the whole Chrome hype train, and while Firefox for a
> while was slower,

Firefox has always been slower than Chrome. I was resisting Chrome very hard
and long yet at some point Firefox's slowness became intolerable and I was
forced to go Chrome.

With the introduction of the Quantum engine Firefox has became reasonably fast
again and I switched back but as soon as I've installed all the extensions I
want it became extremely slow again so again I have switched back to Chrome
(which runs all the extensions I want without a noticeable slow-down).

I will switch to Firefox as soon as it becomes as fast as Chrome is (and I
only have 5-8-years-old built-in Intel Graphics in my laptops, not fancy GPUs
so GPU-accelerated rendering won't help).

------
cjpb
I've recently moved back to FF (from Chrome) for performance reasons, however
I'm still forced back to Chrome to debug anything websockets related.

------
jillesvangurp
Basically chrome seems to continue to be popular. MS is struggling to get
people to use Edge and Firefox is doing way better than Edge and is just
barely out-competed by Internet Explorer (what's up with that?). I'm guessing
a lot of old devices are stuck on some old version of windows.

But bottom line is it holding up nicely against MS. A lot of people seem to
default to installing Chrome/Firefox instead of whatever MS/Apple is
pretending is the browser of choice. To the point that these are not even the
default choice on their own OS and struggling to remain in second/third
position.

So not that bad for Firefox. I'm back to being a full-time Firefox user since
about one and a half year. Really liking the post quantum performance and also
really enjoy having fine grained control over trackers, ads, and other crap.
As other people point out, their mobile browsers on Android are worth using as
well. Unless you like being tracked and blasted with ads of course.

------
mark_l_watson
Time to make another contribution to Mozilla. I have not been using Firefox on
my MacBook or iPad, but I recently bought a Linux laptop and as an experiment
I am only using Firefox. Nice experience. I might install Chrome just for
accessing Google properties because I like to isolate interactions with
Google, but that is in no way in criticism of Firefox.

~~~
bad_user
You don't need to install Chrome to isolate Google's properties.

Firefox can do that automatically:

1\. [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-
account...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-
containers/)

2\. [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-
contai...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-container/)

3\. [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-
cont...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-container/)

~~~
mark_l_watson
Thanks, I appreciate the links.

------
fwef64
One thing keeping me from using Firefox full-time is that when using heavier
web applications like Google Cloud Console or Stackdriver it always hangs,
shows a warning that the webapp is taking too long and asks me if I want to
wait or stop it. This happens every time I try to load something. I looked for
a way to disable this behavior but with no luck.

------
newscracker
I'll never give up on Firefox (been using it since the Phoenix days). Mozilla
has the right intents for its users, and Apple probably comes a distant second
if you consider both privacy and the open web. I believe we would all lose if
we don't evangelize Firefox and improve its numbers, since its marketing
budget may not be as big as the others'. More people need to know that Firefox
is good (or good enough).

As others have said, I also find Safari on macOS to be faster, smoother, and
consuming lesser power. But it just doesn't have the extensibility of Firefox
(the extensions that I depend on regularly), and no Container-like system. The
only other browser I use occasionally is Brave, having boycotted Chrome
permanently a little while ago (with the user profile/cookie fiasco that the
team backed out of later on).

P.S.: Of course this comment was written from Firefox. And donating to Firefox
(in addition to regular donations to Thunderbird).

~~~
superkuh
I used it since the Phoenix days too. But I stopped at version 37 because they
no longer had the right intent for it's users. In fact, they no longer target
the same users at all.

Now it's all about making sure DRM protected video plays, making sure Facebook
works, and making sure ignorant users doesn't accidentally break their config
or install malware. No longer can the user determine what add-ons they can use
without switching to a buggy beta build. And lets not forget the removal of
all of the customization code and the add-on holocaust right before this. Most
new add-ons _still_ have only a fraction of their former functionality. And
they'll never get it back because Mozilla isn't about that any more.

Mozilla has abandoned their long time users in an attempt to become Chrome.
And it has, just like all the other browsers. And that's why it's losing
market share. It's the same crap but without a monopoly position to promote
itself like Google or Apple.

I used to install it for my family and friends that needed help in building or
setting up their computers. Now I do not because Firefox has the same anti-
user policies as Chrome or Safari.

------
shams93
Still has more market share than desktop Safari and is still #2 behind chrome
on the desktop. Probably its market share is being eaten by chromeos devices.
Ultimately it would be really bad for the internet to have Google effectively
own it, regardless of whether they have made mistakes or not firefox as a
project is too important to allow to fail.

------
mehdix
It's now close to one year that I have completely switched back to Firefox.
For performance reasons and also fear. Fear of Google having full control over
browser market and pushing forward their own agenda. Their revenue is mostly
ad-driven. What if they decide to change technology in such a way that prevent
people like me from using add-blockers and privacy-protection measures against
their sophisticated tracking techniques? This fear above all other fears,
drove me toward alternatives, including Firefox. Not only I use it and promote
it, but I help with development, however limited. I report bugs and invest my
free time fixing them. That's what I can do as an indie developer.

Web technology in general and DOM to be specific gives us freedom. They took
parts of it away with DRM and pushing it into browsers and standardizing it. I
don't want to see this happen for the rest of the web that is remaining.

------
sunstone
Sure but 9% is still a _lot_ of people and the browser is now on the rebound
after a few missteps by Chrome.

[https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/15/17239548/firefox-
chrome-s...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/15/17239548/firefox-chrome-
safari-competition)

~~~
ngokevin
Not sure where the rebound is, the trending numbers show a strong decline even
since the article. It’s even more bleak when you factor in mobile.

------
linuxhansl
That is a true shame. I've been happily using Firefox and will continue to do
so.

How people trust Google's Chrome (with many closed bits) is beyond me - but of
course we're all free to do whatever we want to do.

Also last time I benchmarked Firefox and Chrome (on Linux) Firefox turned out
to be faster at least for the sites that I frequent.

------
warpspin
I switched back to Firefox after Quantum (where its speed on my MBP became
finally tolerable again, even if still slower than Safari) after a brief
intermezzo with Safari (where the extension "eco system" plainly sucks) after
being a long time Chrome user.

The problem is, I still have to actually force myself to actually like
Firefox. Chrome IS, all-in-all, the better the browser - except that annoying
privacy thing which caused me to switch in the first place...

A major source of pain are still the development tools in Firefox. They work
flawlessly in Chrome, hardly work at all in Safari after their dev tools
rewrite a couple of years ago, and show annoying quirks in Firefox (like the
Debugger, which sometimes simply loses a source file, making it impossible to
place breakpoints there) and have, in general, a slower UI than Chrome's.

------
V-2
I switched away from Firefox years ago, because it felt very bloated, plus
they'd break backwards compatibility pretty often, and every other update
meant one or more extensions would stop working. Over time I grew tired of the
"eeny, meeny, which one this time" routine.

------
InclinedPlane
I use Firefox nearly every day and it's pretty good. If it was the only
browser in existence it would be hard to complain. However, when switching
between chrome and firefox I'm always much happier when I switch to chrome
than I am when I switch to firefox. And it's not because of site rendering or
anything like that, it's always a matter of UI, speed, and resource usage. The
firefox UI is pretty clean but it has just too many weird clunky edges. For
example, there are many situations where chrome just "does the right thing"
while firefox does not (and it's more common for chrome to be easily
configured to do something different if you want it to), this is especially
true with handling tabs and the new tab page. Updates are another example
though, chrome's updates are fast and nearly painless, firefox is a lot better
than it used to be but updates are slow and it's far too common to launch the
browser and for some reason see that it's not updated.

There are also many cases where doing "ordinary things" while browsing will
lead to firefox slowing to a crawl or using crazy amounts of resources. Chrome
is a notorious memory hog and yet somehow it manages to behave better than
firefox in most situations, at least for my browsing habits. I also really
like chrome's search integrations, if I want to search wikipedia all I need to
do is hit ctrl-t then type "wiki <tab> search string" and boom I'm there. Same
thing for youtube, amazon, etc. It's a small thing, but it's the addition of
all the small things which make for an overall superior experience.

For reference Mosaic was my first browser and I've always been open to
switching over to whatever browser had the best experience. I was using
phoenix project builds before they renamed them, I was using Chrome back when
it was in beta (speed, process isolation, minimalism, better acid2/3 scores,
what wasn't to like?), and I keep checking on other browsers to see if they're
worth switching to. The Mozilla org is great and firefox is a solid browser
but it needs to up its game if it wants to be seen as a state of the art
browser.

------
sureaboutthis
I started my web dev company in early 2003. My son, a big gamer, pushed me to
not use IE as our primary development browser and to use this new thing called
Firefox which I think was version 0.9. To appease him, I would test our web
pages in Firefox and started noticing differences with IE. So I started asking
questions.

"Why does the HTML standard say things are supposed to work one way, and it
does in Firefox, but not in IE?"

I would be laughed off any forum I visited. I would still be laughed off a lot
of forums until 2012 or so. With this announcement, you will still find people
who think there was nothing wrong with IE and will even think "Edge is
great!".

Well, like I used to tell people years ago, if Edge is so great, why is
Microsoft dumping it?

------
zzzcpan
Mozilla can do a lot to help users that other browsers don't do, like block
ads by default, ship with a bigger collection of fonts and block external
fonts by default, make all animations click to play, disable annoying
featuring by default, CSS features that are used primarily to break UX or
render things too slowly, like "position: fixed", etc. But Mozilla chooses not
to do any of that. It chooses advertising corporations and publishers over its
own users, just like Google, but tries to offset that with controversial
"privacy" PR.

What is the point in having a separate browser engine if you don't leverage
any features to make it more attractive to users? You can't beat Google by
just chasing it.

------
childintime
Coincidence or not, I got a request from the Microsoft Feedback Hub just
yesterday, asking me about my experience with Firefox. I found it very
strange, Microsoft asking about a non-Microsoft product. Today I read that MS
is replacing Edge with Chromium. Or maybe not?

------
2T1Qka0rEiPr
I begrudgingly left the FF community when it became far, far easier to debug
and develop on Chrome. At that time Chrome was competing with Firebug, and it
was clear that the Chrome team had far more resources to be able to make
continual improvements to the development experience than Firebug made. So I
switched for development, and for practical reasons all other usage followed.

I wonder if my story is similar to others. From what I've seen Firefox now
looks as though it has much better tools in-built and so I could consider the
switch back, but I'd love some input on that.

Also, things I develop obviously _have_ to work on Chrome, so that's another
impediment to me switching over entirely, which is a shame.

------
pedro2
I think Firefox still needs performance improvement on the graphical side on
Windows.

Chrome somehow bypasses compositing [it is a white window on OBS screen
recorder].

Firefox seems to only get fast when I disable Windows animations; otherwise
gets sluggish as soon as more than 4 tabs open.

------
interesthrow2
Personal reasons why I'm using Chrome right now instead of Firefox: Chrome is
faster, or feel faster, why I don't know, but it seems to perform better on
low end gear. It starts fast and most pages don't seem to "block" while
loading. Second, I despise Firefox dev tools, period. I hate the console input
being stuck in on a single line, this isn't how most CLI UI work, so why does
it make sense for Firefox to do that? it doesn't.

Obviously since Google started pulling that "logged in Gmail == logged in
Chrome" stupid stunt, I want to move away from Chrome, but Firefox will seldom
be my first choice as an alternative.

~~~
qmarchi
Have you made any attempts to try out the new Firefox Developer Edition?
They've done some revamping recently of the Dev tools (to the point that, yes,
multi line is supported in the console)

------
latexr
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the reason I don’t switch to
Firefox is their lack of AppleScript support, and I’m certain several other
automators share that feeling. Without AppleScript support, Firefox is
unusable as the day-to-day browser for many of us.

And that’s just one of its problems on macOS. Every time there’s a Firefox
thread on HN, I see people complaining about performance or lackluster support
for a macOS feature, such as Keychain.

Firefox isn’t losing because people don’t care about privacy; it’s losing
because it sucks so much in certain areas, many of us who want to use it just
can’t bear to.

------
__erik
I've been using firefox on my personal computers and phone as my main browser
for ~18 months. Honestly at this point I prefer it to chrome. On mobile the
ability to use native extensions like ublock origin is amazing.

------
beizhia
I use Firefox as my main browser (but I'm a Linux user, so I'm already away
from mainstream). (edit: tree-style-tabs is the killer feature/extension, and
I can never go back)

I do still pop open chrome for the devtools when I'm working on web stuff. I
wish I didn't have to, but there's one thing that FF doesnt have that I _need_
at work: goto line in the sources browser.

Lots of our files at work are several thousand lines (I know...), and its a
huge missing feature to me.

I might see if I can code it up myself and submit a patch, but that's not
exactly trivial.

------
judge2020
Based on GlobalStats statscounter [0], the data source for caniuse.com, FF is
at 5%.

[0] [http://gs.statcounter.com/](http://gs.statcounter.com/)

------
metalliqaz
I use both. I mostly use Chrome for Google apps and for video streaming. I use
Firefox as my main browser. I've been using Firefox since before it was called
Firefox. One thing I've noticed is that Firefox's plugins don't work as well
anymore. Lastpass on Chrome just works. Lastpass on Firefox is always fighting
with me. Downthemall disappeared. Using UBO breaks sites on Firefox much more
often than on Chrome. That makes me sad.

------
ssvss
One thing I love about firefox is, it has a top bar which shows the title of
the webpage in full, when have multiple tabs open, the title in the tab-bar is
invisible.

------
wyqydsyq
The main thing stopping me from using FF is it's poor profile support.

There is a profile manager but it sucks. You have to launch it directly (can't
open from a FF window) and you can only have one profile active at a time.

Compared to Chrome where I can seamlessly have my work and personal profiles
active at once, allowing me to do all of my work in a segregated profile while
still having access to all my personal stuff like music playing in another
window.

------
satysin
I like Firefox but I don't use it as my main browser anymore as it just feels
too out of place. I use macOS and it doesn't zoom with pinch to zoom, it
doesn't scroll like everything else on the system, etc.

I know these are pretty small things in the grand scheme of things but they
make it feel awkward to me. Chrome isn't perfect but it feels _a lot_ more 'at
home' on macOS than Firefox does.

------
MattyRad
I use Firefox as my desktop browser and love it, but I generally use Chrome in
Android for mobile browsing; seeing this stat was discouraging, so I just now
switched to Firefox for Android.

The [-] collapse buttons for these threads are weirdly a lot more difficult to
click (specifically, register a press with your finger) than in Chrome...
Anyway, I think committing to FireFox is more important so I can deal with it.

------
elken
I switched back to Firefox a few months ago and haven't looked back. I've also
noticed that people are increasingly distancing themselves from the Google
ecosystem. I have even had less technical friends looking at alternatives such
as Brave.

Looking at the numbers, Perhaps the non-ie/Safari/Chrome crowd is being
fractured by the alternatives available but to me it certainly seems to be
growing.

------
pessimizer
Firefox solely exists at this point to protect Google from antitrust action.
Becoming a Chrome clone was an intentional destruction of the product.

------
Animats
I've been on Firefox all the way back to when I had to pay for Netscape. Still
happy with it. Haven't used Chrome in years.

------
ac130kz
I left Chrome after it started to overload my dual-core cpu (it simply can't
properly handle more than 15 tabs), lag, stutter and delete my tabs around
version 56. There were also horrible font rendering issues, which were fixed I
think by the 68th (unbelievable) release. Firefox Beta is my browser of choice
now, both on Windows and Linux based OSs

------
yial
I still use Firefox on my work computers and personal. The reason simply being
that I feel the performance is better than chrome most times. I used Firefox /
Mozilla for many years, then went to chrome when it was new and shiny, but I’m
back to Firefox as I believe it truly is the better product. They just need to
somehow market it better to people.

~~~
techntoke
I have not shared the same experience, with Firefox often being much slower
than Chromium. Especially on Linux.

~~~
lostmsu
AFAIK, Linux is a second-class target for Firefox. On Windows its quite
snappy.

------
z3t4
Firefox keeps getting faster and faster. (Firefox dev tools are however
terrible slow, so I use Chromium for the dev tools). I'm afraid that if
Chromium get 99+ market share the community will become lazy and it will get
slower and slower as new features are bolted on and we will get "designed by
committee" issues.

------
mrfusion
It’s the smallest feature but I’ve never been able to switch to chrome because
of it.

The ability to highlight text, right click search and have it open in a new
tab in the background.

Chrome insisted on opening in the foreground and I found it really disruptive.
They have extensions that change this because but they never worked well for
me.

------
agumonkey
So Quantum didn't do any good in terms of market share... so much effective
efforts. I hope they keep going.

------
eli
On our business news sites, Firefox is 5% of desktop traffic. Which isn't too
crazy; lots of our readers probably can't install their own browsers. The
crazy part is Chrome is at 65%. Chrome ate all the marketshare that IE/Edge
lost in the enterprise over the past few years.

------
perfunctory
Some corporations seem to do adopt Chrome as an official workplace browser
(next to IE). I am wondering what would it take to lobby them to adopt
Firefox. Does anybody have any experience pitching Firefox inside their own
company? Is Mozilla doing anything to get into the enterprise?

------
TrainedMonkey
Is there a way to see the raw numbers? Eyeballing last few months it seems
that Chrome grew significantly mostly at the expense of internet explorer, but
also other browsers.

This trend could be explained by a large number of new chromium users. Or
maybe Google figured out how to push Chrome better.

~~~
43920
The absolute number of users seems to be declining as well, although I'm not
sure why that is: [https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-
activity](https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity)

~~~
ngokevin
Oh, interesting. 50 million to 40 million MAUs in the US since Mar 17, seems
to match up.

------
taf2
I like this [http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-
share#monthly-20090...](http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-
share#monthly-200901-201811)

I just wish it went back further so you could see just how much marketshare
IE6 held

------
s9w
Still puzzling to me. Chrome with its non-native, childish looks, questionable
google integrations; and on the other hand the non-optional vertical tabs for
firefox. I've never seen a tech-savy chrome user in the wild. Neither among
colleagues, nor among friends.

------
smcg
I switched to FF from Chrome when I got a new computer for work and it has
been great. I was a FF user back in the day when it was a massive improvement
over IE. Now it feels "fine enough" in terms of feature richness, and it has
great performance.

------
nathan_f77
I just switched back to Chrome last night, after about 10 months on Firefox
(on Mac). The only reason I switched to Firefox is because Chrome started
showing these little blue notification dots on pinned tabs, and these were
really distracting. Firefox had them too, but I figured out how to hack them
away with CSS. I found out that these dots disappeared after Chrome redesigned
their tabs, so I switched back.

Chrome feels much faster and nicer to use. Firefox would often get really slow
and start freezing. The Firefox dev tools were often really slow and
unresponsive. If I was working on a big React app the devtools UI would often
just disappear and freeze for 10-15 seconds. I think it was known issue
related to source maps. My workaround was to close the developer tools before
I refreshed the page, and then reopen them. So I'm glad I don't have to do
that anymore.

I really missed Chromecast support. If I ever wanted to watch a video on my
TV, I would have to pick up my phone and open the YouTube app, or just open
Chrome and paste in the URL.

I had to open Chrome every time I had a Google Meet call. Clearbit only
provides a Chrome extension and doesn't support Firefox (but that's a problem
with Clearbit. They really need to add support for Firefox.)

I liked Firefox's "Multi-Account Containers". It was nice that I could sign
into multiple accounts at the same time, and have all the tabs in the same
window. Chrome has profiles but they can only open in a new window. (But that
works fine.)

One other advantage of Firefox: It kind of lags behind Chrome in some ways, so
if your website works in Firefox, it almost always works in Chrome. When I was
only developing and testing in Chrome, I would occasionally get an error
report from a Firefox user. That never happened while I was using Firefox. Now
that I'm back on Chrome, I'll need to be more careful about cross-browser
testing.

------
caycep
Is their vision "big standards player" or "niche, boutique" browser? If the
former, I guess this is bad. If the latter, as long as they execute well and
have a critical mass of users/contributors then they should be ok

------
vmchale
Pretty shitty that that's going to Chrome tbh. Especially with the new
developments.

------
tunap
I wonder what the numbers would be if FF forks were included. I see Seamonkey
in the list, but no Waterfox or Pale Moon, etc. Surely wouldn't be any great
number, but is curious the forks are not listed.

------
nerdbaggy
Looking at the results for November it looks like it’s at 9.11% not below 9%

------
LondonAppDev
I recently switched to FF with DuckDuckGo for privacy purposes. I do find the
dev-tools to be noticably less user-friendly than Chromes, however I think
it's a small price to pay for the priacy.

------
jnurmine
Is it really...? are they measuring the right things?

You get what you measure. So what do they measure?

Do they ask for User-Agent logs from various sites around the net? Or do they
rely on third party cookies or how does it work...?

------
moron4hire
That's less than proportion of the population with color blindness, yet I bet
more developers test their sites for Firefox compatibility than making them
usable by differently-abled people.

------
cafebabbe
Firefox died to me when they rewrote their plugin system and i had to give up
on vimperator. Yeah, yeah, quantum is snappy, but so is Chrome. The plugin
ecosystem was an actual differentiator.

------
taurath
It still makes my battery on my 3 different MacBooks die 10x as faster than
chrome and and safari. Literally the only reason I don’t use it, but it’s
apparently not a problem for anyone else.

------
tyteen4a03
When you can make Quantum feel like Safari (or at least Chrome) on my Mac,
then I'll switch. Right now it drains my battery faster than I can say the
word "battery drain".

------
amitkapit
You want to support Firefox? Donate to Mozilla!
[https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/](https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/)

------
codejeff
I've been using Firefox on mobile almost all the time for a year now. Also on
Chromebook side I have been trying to use it but it still has its display
issues with Chromebook.

------
stratosmacker
I wish I the vim like plugins for Firefox were as good as Qutebrowser. I'm
considering switching, but I love the workflow I get with my keybindings...

Someone please tell me why I'm wrong

------
graycat
A Web browser can put video on the screen and audio on the speakers. So, any
such browser should also be able to put video also into a file, say, file type
MP4.

Know of any browser that can do this?

------
city41
I’ve tried to switch to Firefox many times, primarily on Ubuntu 16 and 18. But
Firefox crashes about once a day for me. I can’t remember the last time Chrome
crashed :-/

------
pdimitar
Firefox is still slow on a very beefy Win10 PC and a MacBook Pro 2015, if you
have more than 7-8 tabs open.

I keep giving Firefox a chance but not much is changing.

Not sure if the rewrite in Rust was worth it.

~~~
FridgeSeal
I had close to ~220 tabs open in 3 windows open on a windows machine that's
not especially powerful and didn't have any performance issues. It wasn't even
using that much memory...

~~~
shittyadmin
Yeah, I'd say it performs better than Chrome at load times and extreme levels
of tabs generally speaking.

------
anechoe
This sucks :( I'm using firefox now, after 55 it's faster than Chrome for me.
I hope they regain market share. We need an option not tied to a massive
company.

------
jbergstroem
Dear lazyweb: How can I make my favorite browser - Firefox - use MacOS's
native full-screen when clicking "full screen" in a video? Thanks for your
reply.

------
exodust
Why trust this as a source of data?

Sounds unimpressive where they get the stats from. Unspecified "Social
bookmarking sites". Probably something I've never visited.

------
k__
I switched back to Firefox this year, but recently the performance on Google
sites went really bad, especially on macOS.

Now I'm thinking about switching to Brave.

------
maverick74
I'm loosing faith in mankind!

People ARE DEFINITELY DUMB!!!

There is no other choice than Firefox if you value privacy, features and a
"company" that does not trick you!

------
swoorup
I find quantum quiet fast for user-operation. But the initial page loading and
data transfers appears to be so slower than all browsers.

------
jorblumesea
Firefox is super fast and most importantly, isn't supported by a company who
has a vested interest in tracking you.

Unfortunate to see these results.

~~~
ngokevin
It is pretty fast for me.

Although there is some vested interest, although indirectly. Decisions are
still tied to money, which is why Google has traditionally been the default
search engine in Firefox.

~~~
qwerty456127
> Google has traditionally been the default search engine in Firefox.

There is little if anything wrong in tracking people who don't care about
being tracked, those who do can easily switch the search engine to
startpage.com, duckduckgo.com, Searx, Seeks or whatever.

~~~
ngokevin
Agree. Though default options hold great power, Chrome users could also
navigate to DDG. Also hard to advertise themselves as the user champion of
privacy going up against Google, and then route everyone to Google, while
pocketing their money. I think it's okay to take their money but seems
hypocritical.

------
skc
People should just admit that they don't really mind a Google Chrome
monoculture.

Because that's where we're headed and nobody cares.

------
thrower123
They have been trying really hard to squander any advantage that they might
have had. Shipping an inferior product has costs.

------
ssvss
Their mobile market share is 1.2%. I tried to use Firefox in android, their
scrolling behaviour doesn’t feel native.

------
mk89
Quite sad to see Firefox going down like that, after having seen it as a top
ranked browser for quite a few years.

------
Semaphor
While I regularly get annoyed that our users (Germany) use IE so much, at
least we have a bit over 20% FF users.

------
jdlyga
I just switched to Firefox at work, and I'm surprised. It's so much better now
than even Firefox 57.

------
dgzl
As a lifelong FF user, I simply hope they manage to stay in the game long
enough to earn back market share.

------
huxflux
Return from years with Chrome to after the release of Quantum and I really
happy with FF once again.

------
bfrog
We've come full circle on monopolistic companies deciding how the web should
work, again.

------
bluescrn
Firefox has always tended to have the best ad blocking add-ons. Have other
browsers caught up?

------
im3w1l
This makes me sad. Of the big browsers, firefox is the one that respects the
user the most.

------
bad_user
Why am I seeing 10% for Firefox while the title says " _below 9%_ "?

Is it an incorrect title?

------
slyrus
Alternative headline: Firefox market share greater than Edge, Safari, and
Opera combined.

~~~
ngokevin
Or smaller than IE :0

Also remove the desktop filter and watch Safari jump up to like 20% and FF
down to 4.5%. Usage of the Web on mobile is huge, and it's even bleaker for FF
there.

------
tscolari
I tried Firefox for the last few months as my default browser, I just switched
back to chrome. The amount of lag it caused to the system was beyond bearable.
It's a shame because I really like the features, like containers,
unfortunately, it's just not good enough for my heavy use.

------
_pmf_
Maybe concentrating on inclusiveness and social justice is not the best route.

------
varjag
but now it has own programming language

[https://twitter.com/varjag/status/1069890007597506560](https://twitter.com/varjag/status/1069890007597506560)

------
ojosilva
A few months back I've started a journey to move to FF.

1\. First installed it on my Android phone so I could use uBlock Origin. Then
found 2 other amazing extensions, Cookie Autodelete (less tracking, more
privacy and no newspaper paywalls) and I Don't Care About Cookies (no more
annoying Agree to Cookies popups). I couldn't be happier!

2\. Despite some reports about FF issues on MacOS, I went ahead and installed
it. Memory usage having many open tabs dropped considerably, maybe 30% to 40%
compared to Chrome. Everything works great, speedy and solid.

3\. I've installed FF on my home Windows 7 media center. Strange, but that's
where FF is noticeably slower than Chrome and seems to have memory swapping
issues, where some tabs will be swapped out of memory and take a while to
load. The machine has only 4GB RAM though and is not very performant.

4\. I've discovered Pocket and I'm really liking it. Although the
recommendation engine is a total waste of time, the text extraction is great.

5\. I love Firefox Focus, which I use sporadically, and I wish that was the
default engine everywhere. I'm not sure if the next generation FF will be
based on Servo or Blink. Whatever it may be, I hope it's as snappy as Focus.

Some issues or quirks I had with Firefox:

\- Bookmarks with search keywords. Chrome OpenSearch integration was much
nicer. I had to define several bookmarks on FF to have at least the searches I
use the most.

\- YouTube videos in Windows feel sluggish and I had to install a Windows
Media extension to be able to see them. Chrome has video support out of the
box.

\- PDF viewing feels less responsive, but the FF viewer interface is fine.

\- Downloading UX is better on Chrome. The FF down arrow on the top bar is
very hidden, I tend to forget I was downloading something.

------
ajobforme
i use chrome because firefox mobile is so slow on my iphone 5s and i like to
sync tabs between mobile and desktop, so chrome on mobile means i have to use
it on desktop too

------
justfor1comment
I always wanted to be the 1%. Looks like I made it to 9%.

------
wopwops
Can I get my beloved Firefox addons to work again?

(No.)

------
pie_hacker
I use Firefox - Chrome is too slow/buggy. Also, who knows what code Chrome is
executing when you start it up on your computer?

------
snek
chrome also decreased this month, perhaps there is something larger here?

------
mosselman
Firefox is still too slow for my liking. I use Brave instead, but I'd rather
use firefox.

------
LiterallyDoge
It's the UI style.

------
wiz21c
Obligatory (and useful) FSF quote :

"... And because our computers control much of our personal information and
daily activities, proprietary software represents an unacceptable danger to a
free society."

------
maverick74
I'm loosing faith in mankind!

People ARE DEFINITELY DUMB!!!

------
red023
Mozilla is way better then the others but still not great.

The numbers are so low because people do not care about any privacy
whatsoever. I hope the pay the price one day and regret it.

To name just one reason FFX sync is prate and secure by default unless all the
others who use your bookmarks to sell them. You by default (you can disable
it) share all you bookmarks with Google. Hell yeah hi Google I have torrent
sites or whatever PRIVATE stuff bookmarked. Here have it all and store it
instill I am dead. And when I find out about it and disable it you already
have what I need from my initial sync. Thanks yeah you are so nice to me
Google.

I know a few year(s)? ago FFX was still the most user in Germany (where people
generally do care more about privacy and things like that). But when I look at
the stats now it seems Google has managed to even Brainwash the Germans.

Mozilla is not even very good on the claims they have. They may be working
closely with the Tor browser team but I think Firefox should essentially
become something like the Tor browser. Their Addons have become a walled
garden as the recent cause about that paywall prevention Addon that got kicked
of the "store" showed. If I got that right people can not even install it in
stable versions of FFX.

Also that "Profile" Generator showed here on HN as well shows they have
several deeps flaws in the browsers that need addons for fixing like canvar
tracking and stuff I did not even know about. The Tor brower does all this
things by default. Why does Firefox do not even have UI to some of those
settings and others even need extra addons ...

I could go on. Here I am criticizing Mozilla when I actually thing there are
the best browser Vendor ever. They are an non-profit. They have done so many
great things for the web and there was only as extreme short tiem where I was
about to switch to Chromium because the devtools or Firebox where really
really slow and clunky. I am a Forefox user from the very start and I am
really disgusted how Google pushed their Browser in their searches to the
point that even Linux users who have if they really want to install Chromium.
They should just use FFX. But what are they doing? They install Chrome. Google
has even brianwashed Linux users into thinking they need Chrome. Chrome is 99%
chromium with 1% proprietary Google crap on top of it. If really baffles me
how stupid people are.

I lost could on how many Linux tutorials and "First things to do after
installing ..." I read that had Chrome in there. Just yesterday I read a top
answer on AskUbuntu about how to enabled unattended installs for PPAs and
Chrome was yet again there in the example. Chromimum is right there in the
sources you Idiots. Why would you infest your almost entirely open source OS
with this Google crap?

Firefox is a good browser and Quantum made is faster and less resource hungry.
Mozilla works on this new Browser engine with Samsung that speeds things up by
a lot. Many parts are already in FFX today but I think the main parallel GPU
rendering stuff is not yet. Not up to speed with that. Anyway Chrome may be
"faster" in benchmarks or "feel faster" but believe me this few milliseconds
are really really not worth it.

Mozilla also (until now) allows Adnauseam that clicks every ads it finds,
based on uBlock origin. Chrome forbids this Addon lol but you inlike in FFX
just can sideload it. I love that concept and its the Adblocker I use. It may
help them with tracking me but I just love the fact that I might cause them
pay per click losses.

Mozilla is not as good and as anti advertising as I would like them to. I mean
Google payed 40% of their income at a time how independent can they be? They
redirect search tos the this evil data snake for money to this day. I heared
their CEO talk about how she likes some ads but she does not like the tracking
lol. So she wants ads that do not relate to her so why not just no ads at all?

Oh the other hand where would they be without Google money? I am wondering if
they would be able to make it crowd funded with Wikipedia style "annoy beg to
donate ads" across half the screen.

Ok </rant>

~~~
triangleman
Red, you're dead. It looks like you were banned some time in 2017.

~~~
triangleman
I can read you because I went to my settings and turned on "showdead". But you
are shadowbanned, so you don't know you're banned. It sucks and it's really
mean; it's a big thing I don't like about this website.

------
ancorevard
Why is it that not more people use Safari?

On a MacBook Pro it is not only faster but your battery life lasts noticeable
longer.

Not to mention the Safari engineers' stand on privacy as compared to Google
Chrome...

~~~
kevindqc
I doubt the engineers make the privacy decisions?

~~~
saagarjha
Since they write the software, I'm sure they have more than a little sway.

~~~
kevindqc
Damn I've been working wrong all this time! I didn't know because I write some
of the code I get to make the product decisions!

~~~
saagarjha
I don't want to attack a strawman here, but your comment makes it seem like
you think that programmers simply write code that they're told to write,
providing no input on the project at all. This isn't true at all: just because
you're not a product manager doesn't mean that you don't have a chance to
influence the final product; in the extreme case that you're told to
essentially "shut up and code", you can exercise your control by walking away
from the project if you don't like where it's going.

