this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
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Firefox

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Why is firefox losing market share? Why don't more people use Firefox? (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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edited the heading of the question. I think most of us here are reasoning why more people are not using firefox (because it was the initial question), but none of that explains why it's actively losing marketshare.

I don't agree ideologically with Firefox management and am somewhat of a semi-conservative (and my previous posts might testify to that), I think Firefox browser is absolutely amazing! It's beautiful and it just feels good. It has awesome features like containers. It's better for privacy than any mainstream browser out there (even counting Brave here) and it has great integration between PC and Phone. It's open-source (unlike Chrome) and it supports a good chunk of extensions you would need.

This was about PC, but I believe even for Mobiles it looks great and it allows features like extensions (and I hear desktop extensions are coming to firefox android?), it's just a great ecosystem and it's available everywhere unlike most FOSS softwares.

So why is Firefox's market share dying?

I mean, I have a few ideas why it might be, maybe correct me I guess?

  1. Most people don't know how to use extensions well and how to use Firefox well. (Most of my friends in their 30's still live without ad blockers, so I don't think many are educated here)
  2. It's just not as fast as Chrome or Brave. I can't deny this, but despite of this, I find it's worthy.
  3. It's not the default.
  4. Many features which are Google specific aren't supported.
  5. Many websites are just not supporting firefox anymore (looking at you snapchat), but you would be right in saying this is the effect of Firefox losing it's market share not the cause (at least for now) and you would be right.

But what else?

I might take time (a lot of it) to get back at you, thanks for understanding.

occasionally I’ll find websites that don’t work 100% because they were coded primarily for chromium based browsers. FU Google

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Photoshop Web (Beta) only supports Chromium-based browsers, Descript only supports Chromium-based browsers (well, Firefox still seems to work but you're on your own), and many new webapps are only supporting Chromium-based browsers. Now, these are beta products, so that might change, but it seems unlikely. So I've been switching to Chromium-based browsers to use some of these apps, but I'd really rather not. It's the way everything is going, unfortunately.

A lot of developers target the web because it means they can have one codebase that is supported on multiple operating systems. Imagine how much harder it would be to develop a macOS, ChromeOS and GNU/Linux version in concert with the Windows version. In reality, some browser engines support more web features than others, and Google has by far the most resources to keep up with those standards. So Firefox is an afterthought. Google Chrome is on every operating system worth supporting anyway, so why bother supporting another browser? It's a lot less work and testing.

MDN is the best place to read about those standards, though.

I like Firefox:

  • userChrome.css lets me make Firefox look like a GNOME program
  • I much prefer the developer tools. Everything is a lot easier. I always use Firefox when doing web development.
  • I can easily customize the browser. For me, this means having a separate dedicated URL bar and search engine bar.
    • The search engine bar lets me swap between search engines very quickly and keep my previous search terms for new tabs. Switching search engines is really annoying in Chromium-based browsers because you need to use shortcuts, and there's no autocomplete for shortcuts. It also doesn't tell you whether you typed the shortcut correctly, so you're guessing every time! It's really under-developed. The Android Chromium-based browsers are even worse. You can't change search engines at all when searching; you need to change your default engine. Firefox lets you search any search engine easily on iOS, and slightly less easily on Android.
  • I can...turn off history? Apparently this is an amazingly complex feature that Chromium-based browsers just can't handle. The best you can do is clear it when exiting, but you can't just turn history off.

Okay, it's mostly the search engine thing, to be honest.

But Firefox still doesn't use the new GNOME thumbnail view when you're uploading files, for example...