Is Firefox OK? (wired.com) 225
At the end of 2008, Firefox was flying high. Twenty percent of the 1.5 billion people online were using Mozilla's browser to navigate the web. In Indonesia, Macedonia, and Slovenia, more than half of everyone going online was using Firefox. "Our market share in the regions above has been growing like crazy," Ken Kovash, Mozilla's data analytics team manager at the time, wrote in a blog post. Almost 15 years later, things aren't so rosy. From a report: Across all devices, the browser has slid to less than 4 percent of the market -- on mobile it's a measly half a percent. "Looking back five years and looking at our market share and our own numbers that we publish, there's no denying the decline," says Selena Deckelmann, senior vice president of Firefox. Mozilla's own statistics show a drop of around 30 million monthly active users from the start of 2019 to the start of 2022. "In the last couple years, what we've seen is actually a pretty substantial flattening," Deckelmann adds.
In the two decades since Firefox launched from the shadows of Netscape, it has been key to shaping the web's privacy and security, with staff pushing for more openness online and better standards. But its market share decline was accompanied by two rounds of layoffs at Mozilla during 2020. Next year, its lucrative search deal with Google -- responsible for the vast majority of its revenue -- is set to expire. A spate of privacy-focused browsers now compete on its turf, while new-feature misfires have threatened to alienate its base. All that has left industry analysts and former employees concerned about Firefox's future. Its fate also has larger implications for the web as a whole. For years, it was the best contender for keeping Google Chrome in check, offering a privacy-forward alternative to the world's most dominant browser.
In the two decades since Firefox launched from the shadows of Netscape, it has been key to shaping the web's privacy and security, with staff pushing for more openness online and better standards. But its market share decline was accompanied by two rounds of layoffs at Mozilla during 2020. Next year, its lucrative search deal with Google -- responsible for the vast majority of its revenue -- is set to expire. A spate of privacy-focused browsers now compete on its turf, while new-feature misfires have threatened to alienate its base. All that has left industry analysts and former employees concerned about Firefox's future. Its fate also has larger implications for the web as a whole. For years, it was the best contender for keeping Google Chrome in check, offering a privacy-forward alternative to the world's most dominant browser.
No. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No. (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree - what I have seen is that the UI has been worse and worse over time, we have lost features that made it unique and nice to use. The mobile version got even worse than the desktop version because now the "about:config" is missing since some generations back and opening links in the speed dial always opens a new tab and doesn't want to open in the tab I'm right now using, so I have now had to resort to manually typing the URL instead of just clicking an icon to get rid of that behavior.
The positive side is that uBlock and some other plugins works fine. On the desktop side the feature that it actually remembers the download directory per site browsed is appreciated, so not everything is dark.
Graphically the UI of Seamonkey looks way better. The current UI of Firefox reminds me of Windows 2.0 or even Windows 1 - not very satisfying from a user perspective.
Re:No. (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree too. The constant messing about with the UI has put me right off it. Worse than that is it trying to continually update itself and force the never ending UI crapification on me. So I'm actually using the last old version that doesn't auto update.
Does this mean it might have security holes ? yes. Do I care ? no.
The machine I use for browsing is reasonably hardened, runs Ubuntu, and is on it's own local network. Firefox runs NoScript, UBLock origin, Self deleting cookies etc. and there's a nice little Pi-Hole on the network. I also don't browse "dodgy" sites and rarely download anything - if I do it goes into a single download folder and is scanned before I do anything with it.
I'm sick to death of programs that think they can just auto update without my consent and change the whole way they work. Autoamatic security updates are acceptable. Wholescale changes to the way things work are not.
So whilst I'm still using FF I'm a very reluctant user these days. Wish I could find something better that wasn't a chrome clone !
Re:No. (Score:5, Insightful)
What is the problem with the UI? Browser UI is minimal - you need tabs and a menu for settings and shortcuts. The rest of the UI is the actual website content you're viewing. I have no clue what problem people have with Firefox's UI.
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Re:No. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:No. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think I'm beginning to understand the problem here. You (and Mozilla devs) think that everyone should think as you do and cannot fathom that others think differently, have different and long-standing traditional preferences and are just as productive.
Also seems like there's a fundamental difference between how you and Mozilla devs think we should use a browser and how many of us complainers do. This is the kind of thinking that made Google search the center of the chrome browser, rather than the url bar, a separate search box, and bookmarks (remember those?). Personally I rarely search for things. I type in the URL bar and just rely on my history to fill it in. A lot of old timers do it this way too. Sending everything off to Google is not something I need or want.
In any event one or two specific UI problems where mentioned by the GP which apparently you did not read. I'll add to his list the removal of the display of http or https in the url bar, and since I'm crotchety, the removal of gopher and ftp support!
One trap Mozilla consistently falls into is the same trap that Gnome and other OSS projects fall into. They are caught up in the quest for mythical new users. Yet in this quest they are bleeding their stalwart, long-time users. "New users" have no interest in Firefox, and I"m hard pressed to sell them on Firefox, especially when it offers little of consequence or improvement over Chrome. This despite the integration of vpn and pocket and other potential money-making features (Mozilla has wasted millions of dollars over the years so they are now finding themselves in a cash crunch).
I'll keep using Firefox as long as I can make it look and act the way I want it to with userChrome, about:config remains, and add-ons remain effective, particularly ublock origin and privacy badger.
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You (and Mozilla devs) think that everyone should think as you do and cannot fathom that others think differently
Sounds like they'd be right at home at the GNOME project!
Re:No. (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the things some developers fail to realize is that, especially from a UI perspective, even if you somehow consider a UI improvement objectively better in every way (and let's face it, it's ALL subjective)... even then, any UI change to a program a person has been using for years, maybe even decades, is HUGELY disruptive. And quite frankly, the older you get, the more of a muscle-memory investment you make in the old system, and the more disruptive any change is, and as such, it's almost guaranteed to be perceived very negatively.
It's why it's very important not to be perceived as shoving a new UI down long-time user's throats. You're pretty much guaranteed to piss off about 95% of your long-time, loyal users. Not a good thing, no matter how much you think you're improving your UI.
So the solution is... what exactly? Step gingerly with UI changes. Leave legacy options in place or create functional equivalents. Yes, it's ongoing maintenance work. The alternative is abandoning your *marketshare* due to unhappy users. But importantly, you can then get actual, real metrics on how many people truly prefer your new UI vs the old, comfortable one.
And most important, stop screwing around with your UI because you think it needs "refreshing", or you can't think of what else to do.
Microsoft could afford to screw up their UI and not substantially lose marketshare. Most others are not in such a strong position. How many UI overhauls can you name that have seen huge backlashes? There are a lot of examples out there of how not to do this.
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--- Let it go. --- And Mozilla wonders why Firefox's market share is plunging. Such a user-antagonistic attitude.
LibreWolf (Score:2)
Well there are various forks out there, Privacy focused? LibreWolf [librewolf.net] for example.
They did things we don't want, such as pushing for a Pulseaudio dependency where Chromium even lets you choose your ALSA device. or them refusing bitcoin donations because the $5 million FUD campaign from Ripple (bank's crypto) told them to. And their unnecessary invasion of privacy, dropping of legacy add-ons, etc.
It was good while it lasted, Lets hope one of the (good) forks prevail.
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Given the recent and predictable complete meltdown of the bitcoin racket these days, I'm thinking Mozilla made the right choice in this case!
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Firefox Focus [mozilla.org] is a straight forward browser configured around privacy. It's quite good but mobile only, which is weird of them because we've been asking for this sort of thing on the desktop for 10+ years.
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why have bookmarks when you can have tabs that are erased when you exit?
Re:No. (Score:5, Insightful)
In order for there to BE a privacy-focused browser (that is actually privacy focused, and not just full of BS doublespeak to sound like they give you control when really they spy on you as much as they please and you can't actually turn it off, like with Windows), there must be a large enough group of people who care enough about their privacy that producing the browser can be profitable.
So far, it appears that the market is in love with "free as in beer" and will not pay a dime for a browser that truly protects their privacy. So, the best, "free as in beer" browser IS the best because it gets funded by privacy-invasion instead. And the very people who insist on using this free stuff will get all angry when they learn about all the evil that is happening because of their choices, but the moment you say "so stop using things that spy on you" they close you right off. Free-and-convenient wins every time.
That truth means that truly privacy-focused options are relegated to hobbyists and volunteers, which in turn means it will never have any kind of marketing clout against the likes of Google or Meta. So you get stuff like DuckDuckGo which tries as hard as it can to be privacy focused but simply MUST sell out at the boundaries in order to stay afloat at all.
So, "we get what they deserve, because they outnumber us." The privacy-focused buying demographic is too small for a direct profit model, and the voting demographic is too small to get meaningful regulation in place. So the totally-predictable result is that the privacy-focused stuff simply isn't as good, so nobody uses it, and it is caught in a spiral of trying to find ways to spur interest which don't violate privacy but also don't cost them a fortune to make.
Good luck with that.
Re:No. (Score:5, Insightful)
They focus on things that don't matter, and they try way too hard to copy Chrome.
It's the copying Chrome that's killing them. The biggest thing was when they got rid of the old addon API and replaced it with a version that was, simply, much worse. It's less capable, and it replaced the ability to create a UI that would integrate with the browser with just webpages. If you noticed that the new WebExtension version of your favorite addons all of a sudden have terrible UI, that's why: they had to completely reimplement their UI in HTML, along with all the other API changes.
But the bottom line is this: if Firefox is just a version of Chrome that's always playing catch-up to the real thing, why bother with Firefox? If it's simply going to be Chrome, minus some features, what's the point? Why not just use Chrome?
The only compelling reason is because you don't trust Google. But if you don't trust Google, there are forks of Chromium that offer the same features that Chrome does, but without the hooks to Google. So the question remains: why bother with Firefox?
Now, sure, you can point out that a browser monoculture is a bad thing. Great. But that's not a reason to use Firefox, that's a reason why Firefox going away is a bad thing.
If all Firefox aspires to be is a Chrome-like, complete with using the same extension API, what's the point? Why bother with Firefox?
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Does Chrome have good privacy plugins now? I only used Chrome for those enterprise apps that will not work whatsoever if you have scripting disabled, requires cross-site scripting, and sometimes even fail if you have ad-block. Ie I use Chrome as the unsecure browser. And when I did use it, it was bland and boring and really I didn't see anything good about it. These days I migrated to Windows and now use Edge as the unsecure browser for those purposes.
Actually, I wish Firefox had the easy mode to have a
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Right, they are losing to chrome because they are too much like chrome. You are missing the point.
I would say what is killing them is that they have no window into the upgrade cycle because the vendors who do control that have purposefully (and borderline illegally) locked them out. MS windows is more aggressive than ever about resetting the default browser. (Seems to do so on every point update. Claiming doing so is "more secure", which should be fraud.) You know, the kind of thing that they were ac
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Windows does this a lot for various things. Right now, I find it amazingly annoying that the PDF viewer is always reset to Adobe on every reboot. And if Adobe is uninstalled, it resets the PDF viewer to Edge instead. So every reboot, I manually set the viewer back to Firefox.
Now for awhile, it was also resetting Edge to the browser also, but eventually after a few reboots it gave up on that, not sure what was going on there. A few weeks there Windows seemed to completely ignore my chosen preferences.
Anot
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And to be clear, the main thing they needed to copy from Chrome was a hard-press marketing scheme from Google.
Re:No. (Score:5, Insightful)
They also keep trying to monetize with trash like Pocket, DNS over HTTPS spying, and their "VPN". Fuck all that shit. I have also used Firefox since it was called Netscape, and I agree, while some things like tabs/memory use have gotten better other things are much MUCH worse.
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Small nitpick. Firefox was not technically called Netscape. The first version of what later became Firefox was called Phoenix. It did fork off parts of the Netscape Navigator/Netscape Communicator codebase, but those lines continued, and Phoenix was not a direct successor.
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The best thing about it, is the other browsers are worse. Even Chrome, which I only use for the "won't work if adblock or noscript is on" sites.
The 4% number means all devices, this includes phones. Chrome and Safari get s massive boost by being preinstalled on Android or iPhone. Firefox is available on devices but it's really a browser for computers. For all the flaws, the other browsers have the same flaws. I laugh when someone says they hate Firefox because it keeps copying Chrome while also saying th
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I understand that you're not interested in making coherent arguments, you're only here to spew nonsense, but since I've commented on this thread I can't mod you down, so I'm replying instead. Don't feel the need to respond, I won't take you seriously
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I realize that your kind have the memory of a goldfish, but Mozilla's decline predates any wokeness by several years.
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Get woke go broke.
If going "woke" (whatever that means) leads to going broke [gawker.com], then we know who is the most woke person [salon.com] out there.
It's on life support (Score:2)
I use Firefox on both desktop and mobile. On the desktop, it's a fine browser. But on mobile, for whatever reason, it's way slower than Chrome. That might be a deliberate move on Google's part to make competing browsers perform worse on Android... I don't know.
I still use it on mobile because it supports the Ghostery plugin, and I don't want to use Google's browser if I can help it. But I do worry about a future without any competitor to Chrome.
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I second that It's fine on the desktop. On mobile I switched to Vivaldi a couple of years ago - Firefox mobile is just so much slower, even after the improvements of the Quantum engine.
But just as it was important to have Firefox during the reign on IE, it's important to have it now, as it's the only browser not based on KHTML or Chromium. The iOS browser monoculture is a good (bad, really) example of what happens without competition - very little innovation, and way behind many features taken for granted e
Its fine to use (Score:2)
I've used it as a primary browser for years and it works great. There are some features like tab grouping that chrome has that it needs. The addons can get you any functionality you need. My biggest beef with firefox is when they alienated the dev community when they did the "upgrade" to addons and left a lot of apps in the dust. I won't use chrome because of privacy concerns, google slurps your data if you use chrome. I hope they stick around. People should use firefox more. But what is really killing fire
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My biggest beef with firefox is when they alienated the dev community when they did the "upgrade" to addons and left a lot of apps in the dust.
What other practical choice did they have?
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They could have implemented the functionality they destroyed, at least.
They broke Scrapbook+ and I've tried lots of alternatives and none of them do what it did. Some claim to but they don't actually work when I follow the installation instructions, which involve external helpers and such.
Their answer is "use Pocket" but I don't want anyone else involved in my saving content. I want what is displayed in my browser right now, no more and no less, including stuff I might have removed from the page with anothe
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I also use Firefox, always have, always will. The corporate overlords have enough power as is, and Firefox does what it's supposed to do. It's a frigging browser to browse the web. Seriously, how many features and fancy UI do people need in a web browser?
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It's diseased... (Score:4)
On my desktop, I use Waterfox. It's only marginally better but still...
Where I still use Firefox is on Android, but I installed an old version as an APK and forbade it from updating so I still have access to about:config and can force desktop mode.
It's incomprehensible that browsers don't allow me to force desktop mode with a switch in the settings menu but here we are.
Re: It's diseased... (Score:2)
I have the current Firefox mobile and it has a "Desktop site" switch.
The problem with Firefox mobile is that they blocked all but a handful of add-ons. I don't think this is like the add-ons upgrade on desktop. All current desktop add-ons should work on mobile; they just blocked most of them. Maybe it's about avoiding malicious add-ons. Maybe it's about app stores forbidding stuff you can program with. Whatever the reason it's very annoying. But I haven't seen any other mobile browsers that can use add-ons.
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Yes, and you have to set it for every individual page, don't you? I want the browser to never even show me an https://m./ [m.] NEVER.
And I can use uBlock Origin no problem.
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Just install User Agent Switcher and set it to the desktop version of Firefox.
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Even if you ask for "Desktop site", it still sends android useragent. Some sites will till be the mobile versions, but formatted badly and missing features (facebook, for example), and many sites will still nag you to "get the app!"
LibreWolf (Score:2)
Waterfox was sold to an advertising company, so you should switch to LibreWolf [librewolf.net] or something else...
As throwaway browser (Score:2)
You can also use PaleMoon. That is my default browser. I mainly use firefox as a throwaway browser with the following bash script:
#!/bin/bash
if [ "$1" = '-CP' ];then
PROFDIR="$2"
shift 2
else
PROFDIR="$(mktemp -d)"
fi
if [ "$1" = '-UP' ];then
cp -r "$2"/* "$PROFDIR"/
shift 2
fi
firefox -no-remote -private -profile "$PROFDIR" "$@"
If you start the script with -CP directory, you can create a profile. In this profile you can set your default settings and install the extensions you want. If y
Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
Firefox is still the best browser out there. It works on both my PC and my phone, with ad-blocking support and password/history sync (two critical features).
That it loads some web page 0.002 ms slower than Edge or Chrome doesn't matter much, and the fact that it is free software, not owned by Google, Apple or Microsoft is a big plus.
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Sorry, Mozilla. (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:Sorry, Mozilla. (Score:5, Interesting)
I've studied China's "Cultural Revolution" period and the "woke left" (and the "Trump right") are now in the same spiral of self-righteous, absolutist, vicious, unforgiving, self-destruction. The parallels are stark.
The problem for the ultra-woke is that nobody is ever going to be pure enough, perfect enough, so they'll never support anyone and tear down anyone proposed by another "faction". This will be the Left's undoing. They're doing the work of the Right for them and destroying their own candidates, their own leaders. No "winnable" candidates run, only those who meet the "perfection" criteria - who mostly lose come election day.
Kinda like Mozilla's slow decline...
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Thank you for both understanding the problem, and explaining it in such a way that anyone not 110% committed to "woke" ideology should be able to understand.
I say this as a conservative evangelical Christian (sort of).
We will have our differences, but nonetheless, I appreciate your openness to freedom, even when it is exercised by someone with whom you may strongly disagree.
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Yes, for a very good reason [wikipedia.org].
You are conflating what's legal with what's ethical. The two are often not the same.
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He made a political donation as was his democratic right.
And others refused to work with him, and talked to each other about it as is their democratic right.
while not willing to entertain any other view than their own
Weirdly, many people are not willing to entertain "other views" on whether they should be oppressed under law.
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Brendan Eich had every right to pay money to attempt to hurt a bunch of Firefox employees, their friends and family. The firefox employees had every right to say they'd quit if he didn't step down.
Interesting that you don't support various firefox employees doing something they had every right to do.
And Mozilla didn't "get rid of" him, he resigned. Turns out if you have a record of paying money to hurt your own employees en masse, that can make your position as untenable as a CEO. Who knew?
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You're missing the point. He actually sacrificed himself to keep the Mozilla community intact. Let's check out the facts of the case. He donated $1000 in 2008 in support of proposition 8 (anti-gay marriage), which initially passed (most people wanted to ban gay marriage), but CA supreme court overturned that in 2013. In 2014, after he was appointed to the board, the board, employees, and the public began an outcry against the decision to put him on the board. The site OkCupid went so far as to block Fi
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He actually sacrificed himself to keep the Mozilla community intact.
Well he fucked up badly enough that staying on would have sunk the company. Rather generous to call stepping down "sacrificing himself", but these days who knows.
Let's check out the facts of the case. He donated $1000 in 2008 in support of proposition 8 (anti-gay marriage), which initially passed (most people wanted to ban gay marriage), but CA supreme court overturned that in 2013.
Democracy isn't meant to be tyranny of the majority: 51% do
The competition is better maybe? (Score:2)
I'm still a regular Firefox user, out of habit as much as anything else. But even in my workplace, I've had to fight with our Infrastructure people to keep it as an "allowed" application people can load on their PCs via "Company Portal" (published apps from InTune).
I think they dislike the fact they can't apply network-wide rules to it that are enforced for MS Edge or Chrome, and always have to handle it separately. (EG. Firefox maintains its own store of SSL certificates vs using the default set of them m
Safari needs to be on windows / linux befor the EU (Score:2)
Safari needs to be on windows / Linux before the EU kills it lock in on IOS.
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Why can't everyone make their own browser the way they want to make it and we all conform to the open industry specification?
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https://support.mozilla.org/en... [mozilla.org]
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search Firefox Enterprise InTune
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But they can. Firefox has a whole set of Group Policies on Windows (and other mechanisms to do the same on Linux and Mac) to set all sorts of options. In fact, one of the options is "ImportEnterpriseRoots" which tells Firefox to use the OS's cert store. (Why that isn't the default is a mystery to me...) There are also many other enterprise-type options.
I've found it's a convenient excuse for one of the following actual reasons:
1. We're busy and that's another thing we have to maintain. (Which... yeah. I can
Half a percent of 3 billion users (Score:2)
On a side note Firefox issue is not hiding the toolbar or breaking a bunch of extensions. If you're
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On a side note Firefox issue is not hiding the toolbar or breaking a bunch of extensions. If you're advanced enough to care about the toolbar you can Google the two seconds it takes to figure out how to turn it back on. As for extensions that was necessary to make extensions more secure and prevent people from hijacking them. Chrome did the same thing you just didn't notice because they had already implemented a lot of those features and Firefox had to play a bit of catch up.
This isn't an excuse for them to forbid non-"recommended" extensions to be installed outside android nightly, nor the ban of about:config outside android beta and nightly.
Maybe the Firefox dev team received a large amount of support tickets with problem rooted in buggy extensions in the past. But throwing users away is not a proper solution.
I used to use it all the time... (Score:2)
...but they shook my off by continually messing around with the UI, breaking plug-ins, and generally focusing development only on whatever would annoy me as a user.
Now I use it only for sites I'm a bit leery of or that have annoying ads. The Firefox UBlock Origin extension is still blocking ads/popups like a champ (making "totally legal sports streaming" sites usable), and it's nice to have a browser completely disconnected from my Google stored passwords and what not (something that is less clear with Edg
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I'm sure Firefox's next step will be to change how extensions work such that ad-blockers are broken, and then I'll uninstall it forever.
No. Google is the one trying to break ad-blockers. Mozilla has stated their intent to keep them working. [theverge.com]
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Yeah, certainly my experience is that Firefox UBlock Origin works much better than anything I can find on Chrome - though I haven't investigated that in any depth. I don't mind my current setup where I allow ads on most sites I use regularly (via Chrome), but bring out Firefox as an option if a site is abusive somehow.
Anyway, that's good news - I'm glad to hear Mozilla intends to preserve this advantage. Hopefully they aren't forced to "sell out" on this.
Chrome Tabs Drive Me Insane. (Score:2)
My main reason for using Firefox still (for the last 2 decades at least), is that the Chrome tab management just makes my head hurts.
"But you can manage tabs, Splutty". I don't WANT to manage tabs, I just want to see them ALL at a glance.
I am 'managing' tabs in Firefox by putting them in different windows, and still have ALL of them readable at a glance.
I still use Firefox but it's getting harder (Score:3)
Still using Firefox as my primary browser on the desktop here on Fedora 35. But it is getting a little less usable for me with every release. Fortunately I can still tweak it with CSS to be closer to the way I want it. I want my tabs below the toolbar (like any other traditional desktop app), I still use real menus, and of course I have some essential plugins that still work. At some point Mozilla decided to ditch real scroll bars and use phone-style tiny scrollbars that are difficult to use with a mouse. Yes I still use scroll bars because they are very fast and convenient when using a mouse. Also Mozilla decided for some inexplicable reason to make the scrollbars have no contrast so it's difficult to even see for me sometimes, which defeats the whole purpose of a scroll bar. Fortunately CSS can darken it up so I can see it and my relative position in a page (although stupid endlessly-loading pages destroy that functionality), but I cannot change the width or style of the thing. I much preferred the older days when Firefox actually tried to fit in with my desktop environment (Mate Desktop). Now it just looks out of place on any of my preferred desktop environments. At least Mozilla doesn't force client-side window decorations yet.
Very soon Chrome will be eliminating effective support for ad blocking addons. Hopefully Firefox does not. uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger are essential addons for any browser. I hope this is not the only reason Firefox has left to use it over Chrome!
I used to use Firefox on mobile but around version 70 Mozilla did dumb things like removing the about:config interface, and removing support for a bunch of addons, including a couple I use, such as one to reflow a paragraph to fit the screen by double touching it. Why mobile browsers don't reflow text I don't know. This is something Safari mobile did over a decade ago but also stopped doing it at some point. Yes there are mobile versions of web sites, but sometimes I just prefer or need to use the desktop site and zooming and reflowing works a treat. I never had any problems with Firefox speed on Android but perhaps it has gone downhill since I lasted regularly used it at version 68.
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Displacement by phones and fewer privacy concerns (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't the Internet from 15 years ago, much less the Internet from 25 years ago.
Web pages aren't built by Internet people to be viewed by Internet people using devices and software that have been carefully optimized by Internet people. Websites run on prefab templates used as value-extraction tools to harvest either consumer dollars or consumer data which can be turned into dollars.
Most web browsing is done on phones.
Most people are "on the Internet" in some way pretty much every minute of the day, whether they think of it that way or not.
When the average person says they care about "privacy", what they really mean is they don't want their information stolen to make purchases or open lines of credit in their name. They don't actually mean "I want to keep my life, and communications, and activities private". So privacy features really are not the motivator tech people believe them to be.
Most people have been rewired into pure convenience-seeking consumer drones. Whatever browser opens the quickest and easiest, with the least amount of setup and the highest integration into other apps/OSes, and feels the most familiar, that's the browser they will use. I wager that a significant percentage of, say, iPhone users, wouldn't even know "Safari" is the name of a web browser. They just know the method to get to a website -- go tap on that blue circle compass thing in a specific spot on their home screen. Or people use their phone's app-switching shortcut to move among apps without launching a fresh browser instance.
What does Firefox have that would pierce the fog of convenience strongly enough to grab a modern person's attention and hold it long enough for them to be bothered to take several minutes minutes and half a dozen taps/clicks to install an "alternative browser" and switch their integration to use it instead? I don't mean Firefox the program with a set of features which can be compared to other programs in a Wikipedia chart. I mean "Firefox" as a integrated way to do things in modern life the way "Google" is.
Face it, the future belongs to a small handful of monopolists leveraging their products and their partner products.
The monetization of the Internet has won. The fringe power-users have lost. Have a nice day.
Probably not (Score:2)
Mismanagement tends to do that to things. A pity. But big egos wanna be big.
Firefox: Can't complain. (Score:2)
I don't want much from a Browser. I want it to work and not spy on me. So far Firefox works on all the sites. I use it on both pc and android.
And Firefox Focus on my de-googled android by default ( unless I have to log into something )
The new UI killed it (Score:2)
Forcing the new Proton UI onto the users was the last nail in the coffin. It's completely borked and unusable.
Re: (Score:2)
Spot on. Every day, when I launch it and use it for all my browsing, I marvel at the infinitesimal odds at play when something so borked and unusable just works for me every time I ask it to do something. I should buy a lottery ticket!
Profitable-for-staff nonprofit doesn't care (Score:2)
If the browser were important that would be the focus and other projects not the browser have their priorities adjusted.
It's natural for projects to stagnate like Netscape then be reborn as Phoenix then become FF when it was good then decline.
Firefox belongs the coders not the users like all software. If it becomes sufficiently important to enough coders a replacement will arise but today Firefox is a barrier to improvements and Chrome is good enough for normals and for most of the nerds who once promoted F
No, it's not (Score:5, Insightful)
I was using Firefox back when it was still called Phoenix, and while it definitely has the best privacy features of any browser, as others have mentioned, they spent way too much time and effort trying to be just another Chrome-alike. I'm someone who generally likes change, but most of the UI changes haven't really improved anything from a UX standpoint. Best case scenario they've been a wash, not improving, but not making things worse either.
I get there may have been technical reasons why they got rid of the old XUL add-ons, but I still consider that to be the moment when Firefox's current fate was sealed. The flexibility of the XUL addons was what really set Firefox apart from other browsers. Adblock could prevent the browser from ever downloading the ad, not just hiding it after the fact. Addons like NoScript are just pale shadows of what they once where.
Some of Firefox's downfall was inevitable the moment Chrome was introduced to the world and Google started promoting it on their homepage and other popular services. That, to me, marked the point at which Google abandoned its "don't be evil" motto. It was inevitable that most people who see a message about how the site will work better with Chrome will believe it, and switch to Chrome from Firefox.
I still keep an eye on Firefox development, but my daily driver these days is Vivaldi. It reminds me of what Firefox used to be. Not a huge fan of it using the Chromium engine, but at least they disarm the Google spyware before releasing.
Re: (Score:2)
My perspective on UX is that if you're a 1% market share browser trying to attract users currently using the 95% market share browser, you probably need to make it as familiar as possible to them while differentiating on things other than UX.
All the Chrome users out there aren't disgruntled ex-Firefox users for whom the end of XUL or whatever was the final straw, they're normals who just used whatever browser came by default or they heard was best or whatever.
So sadly I think unless Mozilla is happy quietly
Re: (Score:2)
If you're 1% of the market, then alienating your existing user base to attract a few more people from the 95% market share is a fool's errand. Back in the day when we saw full page ads for Firefox in the New York Times, they did manage to attract a lot of new users, especially on the recommendation of many of us with our friends and families. And they did this without casting off their existing, long-time users.
Anyway, the browser is just a tool. Be informed, use whatever you want. Personally I use firef
Re:No, it's not (Score:4, Insightful)
The abandoning of XUL meant that Firefox voluntarily gave up its biggest competitive advantage/differentiating feature, over other browsers. If they want to be a privacy oriented browser, they gave up HUGE amounts of potential when they dumped XUL. As mentioned, ad blockers could literally prevent the browser from downloading the ad, not just render the page twice and hide it on the second go around. NoScript could literally prevent scripts from ever executing, now it's practically useless and Google looks to be set to take it around back of the shed and put it out of its misery. TabMix Plus still remains unparalleled to this day.
Mozilla had this amazing functionality that no one else had, which set them apart from the crowd in a big way, and they walked away from it. That meant they were effectively just another Chrome-alike to most users.
I also forgot to add in my earlier post that even as someone who likes change, and will sometimes deliberately try to break things when I'm bored, I got update fatigue from Mozilla trying to match Google's release cadence. ESR releases were too much like the old Firefox release cycle. They went from one extreme to the other.
it wasn't tech reasons that made them ditch Xul (Score:4, Informative)
When the old plugins were kicked out and the new framework made it basically impossible to leak memory the haters switched to complaining about the lack of plugins.
Wnen Firefox won't load a page. (Score:2)
Firefox won't sometimes load a page and I have no idea why, When this happens I resort to chrome for that page.
Desktop Firefox is usable with heavy configuration (Score:5, Informative)
Firefox can still be brought back mostly under user control with heavy configuration [github.com] (this link is more for functionality-related configuration; for UI-related changes, you'd have to dig into userChrome.css instead I believe). It takes a while to set up (and some settings can break things or introduce more annoyances), but it does the job. It's just annoying that you have to resort to out-of-browser configuration when the options page, maybe about:config, and a few extensions used to be sufficient back in the day. Mozilla is dead-set on making Firefox as miserable as possible to use.
If you want something that "just works" and is privacy-friendly, I can recommend "ungoogled" Chromium (Windows build available here [woolyss.com]). Just don't expect to do much configuration in a Chrome-derivative, obviously; it's even worse than Firefox in that respect, you'd have to make changes at compile time. Wish there were better options available, I hate the state browsers are in right now.
Google (Score:3)
Google made it popular (Firefox was offered via google.com), Google effectively killed it (Google started heavily promoting Chrome), that's what happened.
Firefox was once popular among geeks but those got older and stopped caring. It didn't help that the features that made it stand apart have been removed (XUL addons) while its appearance started copying Chrome almost verbatim.
Let's be honest here: most people don't understand and care about privacy. "Tracking [cookies]? What's that?"
I've no idea how to make Firefox popular again. Chrome just works, it's rock solid, stable and fast enough, and in the end of the end that's what people want.
I'm saying all of that as a person who's almost never used IE, Chrome or any other web browser. I started with Netscape Navigator, then it was Mozilla, and then Phoenix/Firefox.
Sluggishly slow (Score:2)
Four of five years ago I had a look around because Firefox had become too slow to even be usable anymore on the smallest of my Windows/Linux machines. The browser that felt the most responsive back at the time was Vivaldi, and I gave it a chance, adopting it on every Windows/Linux machine. Turned out it was good, and I never looked back, as much as I was sorry to let Firefox go after so many years. Then again, I don't miss Mozilla's frequent forcing of unwanted functionality or UI changes on me even just a
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, I loved Firefox and it broke my heart to switch to Chrome but it was crashing about once per day about 6-7 years ago and I needed better dependability than that.
Get woke, go broke. (Score:2, Flamebait)
How few users even notice? (Score:2)
There used to be some important user facing differences that were easily observed on pages I used regularly. Now I don't notice them. The experience is mostly the same even between different OSes, which arguably was supposed to be one of the aims of the world wide web as I recall.
My personal lapto
I use it (Score:2)
I use "it" every single day. What is "it"? Some really really old versions of firefox that have not yet broken the add-ons that I need for certain websites, namely about 5 different websites that I use daily or frequently. For everything else I use Chrome or Palemoon or Icedragon or Vivaldi or Dragon or Brave.
Usually, at least 3 or 4 of those simultaneously. The best way to sandbox is to use a different browser. Also, ever tried to login in to a bank with two different accounts at the same time? Right
Yes, no corporate linking to it (Score:2)
Firefox is my only desktop browser for internet use. It has the add-ons I need, and is not tied to Google, Microsoft or Apple.
I recommend Firefox with UBlock Origin to everyone, all PCs I support are required to use Firefox as the default browser, or I stop supporting them.
Yes Firefox has some small issues (Tabs on bottom, Pocket, Suggested Sites) but in general it does the job well, and is moving toward better privacy (Global Privacy Control, Total Cookie Protection) much faster than any of the other brow
Yes. (Score:2)
I use Waterfox actually, but they don't make any changes that would be relevant to this discussion.
I use it, with a few addons (some for privacy, some for functionality like session managers), and have the config setup with some of the privacy settings from tor browser (which double as performance tweaks due to not writing to disk as much), then I copy and run the whole thing from a ramdrive.
It is without a doubt the *best* browsing experience I have ever had. Running it from a ramdrive doesn't use any extr
FireFox filled a niche when it was new. (Score:4, Insightful)
Back in 2003, Microsoft looked like they had won the browser wars, with Internet explorer having some ridiculously high share (IIRC, something like 95%). Part of the high share was due to the fact that IE came pre-installed on just about every version of Windows, and many people just didn't seem to find the need to change web-browser. This caused Microsoft to stagnate development on IE at around version 6. Not only did some features remain so buggy that they became unusable (CSS-implementation, I'm looking at you), but certain web-standards had to be modified just to avoid IE's bugs (IIRC, this is how CSS 2.1 developed from 2.0). For a web-developer, working around the quirks of IE 6.0 was the most stressful part of their job. Meanwhile, Netscape had been in decline for a while, and the new Mozilla browser just came across as too bloated. And then, along came Phoenix/FireBird/FireFox as a lightweight fork of Mozilla (Mozilla later morphed into SeaMonkey). Firefox was getting momentum just at the precise moment when IE was becoming notorious for it's security bugs. FireFox somehow managed to ride this momentum and capture a huge share of the market - even before FF 1.0 was released back in late 2004. Web-developers felt more confident in using things that broke on IE, and even more people moved to FF to see the web with a working web-browser. Fast forward a few years ... FireFox was becoming slower with each new release and was leaking memory like an incontinent toddler with their finger in a bucket of hot water. Meanwhile, Google started to push their Chrome browser as shovelware meaning that it ended up on a lot of people's machines as their default browser. At first, Chrome was behind FF and IE, but it quickly caught up, and around 2010 or thereabouts, became faster and more responsive than FF ... and so, the decline began.
AFAIK, there are no major security bugs in Chrome (unless you count it's data-harvesting as a 'bug'), and Chrome can render just about every website flawlessly and keeps up with the latest web-standards, and EDGE is probably the same nowadays, so the niche that FireFox had in the days of IE's stagnation in the mid 00's just doesn't exist anymore. There is still the niche of power-users who want a hyper-configurable browser or users who prefer old-skool UIs, but FF has been turning it's back on these users for many years, so they've moved to FF-forks such as Pale Moon, WaterFox, etc.
So basically, FireFox only became as popular as it did back in the day because it filled the gap left by the stagnation of IE. Now, CHrome and the other major browsers are not stagnation, so the wave that FF originally rode does not exist anymore.
To the FireFox devs, I'll say this. What made your browser great was it's configurability and the fact you could extend it to do just about everything you wanted. You took this away from us and messed around with the UI just because you could (just because you could doesn't mean you should), and in doing so, either took things away from us or made us jump through all sorts of hoops to get them back. Also, please don't add things (eg. Hot Pocket) as a default feature that is not part of the main browsing experience (if someone really wants it, it should be an extension and not part of the main browser). These days, I now use Pale Moon - "Your browser, your way".
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Great! Now I can mark off "woke" on my alt-right buzzword bingo card. I just need "socialist" and "liberal media" to win!
Re: Started with the ousting of Brendan Eich (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Why go for something that is 99.9% of Chrome?
Re: (Score:3)
I didn't like how Eich was kicked out due to his social views either, but let's be blunt here. Most of the early decline of Firefox, and more importantly, the root causes of the decline, happened on his watch.
The Firefox codebase turned into a technical nightmare, such that it couldn't be untangled without losing a lot of the original functionality. Chrome was introduced during his leadership, and Firefox did nothing substantial to respond, and ended up getting it's ass whooped due to the overwhelming tec
Re: (Score:2)
Firefox has a lot of problems, but no Chromium-based browser can compare
Subjective much?
Re: (Score:3)
I get that you're just making up lies that fit your political narrative, but just to add some reality to this thread - Brave is based on Chromium, and is way behind Firefox. Firefox has a lot of problems, but no Chromium-based browser can compare
What's he lying about and what's his political narrative? Brandan Eich was a co-founder of Mozilla, he was the creator of Javascript, and he was forced out due to his supporting the California Proposition to ban gay marriage. Whether you like it or not, that is factually accurate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Your subjective statement that "no Chromium-based browser" is, on the other hand, entirely subjective, and I would argue, utterly indefensible.