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?
- 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)
- It's just not as fast as Chrome or Brave. I can't deny this, but despite of this, I find it's worthy.
- It's not the default.
- Many features which are Google specific aren't supported.
- 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
It's fast enough on any remotely modern hardware.
Personally I love the ability to still pimp it out with style sheets.
And yeah, Mozilla has so many, many problems. In many ways they have become Google's pet, IMO. But most importantly they are not Google.
I think when Chrome came out Google was still a cool, hip company and Chrome fixed a lot of issues Firefox had. I used it for years. So they managed to become the normie cultural default. These people are hard to change habit-wise.
I could be wrong though. Just sort of thinking out loud.
My path was the same - there was a time when FF was messing up badly trying to keep up with Chrome, and that's when I switched to Chrome. FF then cleaned up their act, but the damage was done. Or it might simply have been that Chrome was so much slicker (and not evil) at the time. I went back to FF around the time Google merged all accounts with Chrome accounts, and I much prefer it to Chrome now. I'm sad to see it not being able to regain its past glory and serious traction. I blame it mostly on convenience, inertia and "normies" generally not carrying about the same things as some "techies".
yeah have to disagree with you there. I bought a laptop very recently (a few months ago) and it was a new release equipped with everything one might think as "modern" firefox still can't beat brave or chrome.
What were you doing on it if you don't mind me asking.
I use it on a 5 year old low powered laptop and have no issues.
it's "fast enough" alright, just not fast as brave or chrome. You know I have been using firefox for so long that I gave a search query on brave and it felt like it was lightning fast. I mean, I just pressed and enter and suddenly something unexpected happened, it loaded fast af and I was surprised. Firefox does load pages fast enough, but brave was lightning fast and that surprised me.
Honestly I use brave from time to time as my backup browser and I have never noticed the difference.
I think the performance issue would not be related to loading simple pages. It seems like it would be more noticeable when running load-demanding web apps.