A shrinking Firefox faces endangered species status (opens in new tab)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edit: Latest FF mobile on Android is awesome too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

edit: read that in reverse

This is a shame - Browser Wars II...

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

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

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

So let's actually read the article:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If Firefox dies I will go with him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are not people afraid of Chrome being backed by Google?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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