Are Firefox fork users not considered firefox users? Without Firefox, the forks cease to exist. LibreWolf, etc users should be considered Firefox users.
this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2026
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We don't need ai for browsing
I personally think the report of bleeding users is exaggerated, Most people I know(yes its a biased sample group) have left chrome, and its 50-49 split between brave and firefox, with the 1% being on safari(this metrics includes mobile users) and most of these people have turned on some kind of do not track/do not send analytics checkmark, plus people who are miffed about firefox switch to something based on firefox, which imo are just more users of firefox.
Really hoping for the best for this browser. They absolutely need to drop ai as well as reassess their budget distribution. They are vastly overpaying their ceo.
My biggest issue with Firefox is that they don’t spend enough on UX design. They need to make an actual Safari competitor and use native code with fluid animations.
Every month there are new webpages breaking on FF, if this trend doesn't stop, then it's curtains. (people increasingly don't test their crappy JS code on FF)
I'm bought in. Whatever Firefox is doing is better than Chrome in every way. The VPN feature is useless though. I can't get any website that I actually care about to work with it turned on. Same with the email and phone number masks (Mozilla features not Firefox specific). Can't use any Mozilla email/phone mask to work with 90% of the services I use. Amazing ideas in theory, but in practice they're mostly useless.
I love zenbrowser, just try it and you'll see why, I've left too many comments in the past detailing it, if you like swapping workspaces and having them organized without pausing all of your tabs everytime, and having essential tabs that stick around no matter what for easy access, like im jut rambling idk, it made me enjoy browsing the web again since I don't lose tabs anymore, everything is organized in folders, pinned tabs, or essential tabs
Easily the best browser for widescreens too, vertical tabs take like a day or so to get used to, can't go back now tho
Not too fond of it on multiple screen setups though. Perhaps that has changed? Also last time I tried it, videos played horribly (especially live like Twitch/YouTube Live)
Do you have hardware acceleration enabled?
I wish it was easier to export and import configs and bookmarks. Main reason I stopped using it.
The Firefox forks are just so damned good. Zen, Librewolf, and Waterfox are just great.
The problem is that they take their sweet time incorporating security updates.
This assumes a broad misunderstanding I keep seeing here on Lemmy.
These forks rely heavily on Firefox core engineering and development, which, if Firefox dies off, they will no longer have access to, thus relegating them to history as well.
These are not hard forks. These are forks that maintain release parity with Firefox itself, absorbing the grand majority of all engineering efforts into Firefox into their own projects, meaning they are strongly tied to Firefox's success or demise. And "strongly" is an understatement. We're talking 95 to 99% of Firefox engineering efforts are consumed by these forks.
So somewhere from 1 to 5% of the engineering effort these forks rely on to continue to stay relevant, secure, performant, and up to modern web standards is provided by their contributors.
Keeping Firefox up-to-date with web standards and security is an engineering nightmare. I mean, just look at Safari.
Having forks is awesome, but sitting back on our haunches, believing that they are safe, independent browser developments is absurd.
I understand the relationship between Firefox and the forks. What I meant by my comment is that I suspect that a lot of their loss in users might be because of people going to the forks rather than the main product.
I totally agree and thought about going back to plain Firefox multiple times, but I would like to argue that if you can do it better than Mozilla at basically 0 budget, that is kind of on Mozilla.
Take Librewolf and Ironfox. They have clearly shown that there is an audience for hardened/privacy first Firefox. Mozilla can capture this audience very easily: Offer it yourself.
I really don't feel like researching all the settings I need to change to arrive at a Librewolf-ish level of privacy. I also think Librewolf could still do better. And I think Mozilla should do it better than them.
Could everything these forks do be done as an extension?
No, the changes are made at compile time and extensions don’t have access to modify many of the features being stripped out by forks.
I don't think that's what they implied, but you're right. And it sucks.
Downstream. WaterFox et. al. are downstream of Firefox. "Soft" and "hard" forks are not a thing.
A hard fork means that a project forks and then doesn’t take upstream patches any longer. That absolutely happens all the time. Not for the Firefox downstreams, which are all soft forks, but those concepts are a thing.
Stop cramming AI into the browser and you might get some people back.
Was on FF for years and then they announced AI so i went to WaterFox and have LibreWolf ready just in case WF starts fucking around.
I hope you know that Waterfox and LibreWolf have their fate tied to Firefox, right?
These aren't hard forks. They consume the engineering efforts of Firefox itself in order to stay relevant. They aren't developing their own solutions to web standards and CVE patches, except in extreme circumstances.
If Mozilla loses funding for their engineering organization, which is the grand majority of their entire budget, Firefox stops keeping up to date with web standards and security patches and rapidly falls behind. Leaving just Chrome as the only option, or Safari, but I know none of us want to choose Safari.
All the soft forks go with it.
Now, if all the soft forks abandoned their own projects in order to pool their efforts together to maintain a single fork in this scenario, then they might make some success in staving off irrelevancy, which, instead of becoming irrelevant in the course of a couple of years, might take half a decade instead. Which does leave enough time to cobble together enough contributors and a large enough project to keep it afloat.
But I highly doubt that all these various forks will pool their engineering efforts into a single project, at least not immediately and at least not willingly.
If Mozilla loses funding for their engineering organization....
It's pretty safe to assume they won't.
Mozilla's funding is provided by Google. It's not going to dry up while Google needs to maintain the appearance of a non-monopoly. It's also the reason Mozilla is so careless with their spending.
On the off-chance you have some experience with of, what's your take on Vivaldi, currently?
not as great as Brave but stilla good browser
They're about to get a BIG bump in usership, when Manivest V2 goes dark.
I'd like to think so, but I doubt it. For the average user Manifest V2 has been gone for about a year. Sure there were commands or preferences hidden away to re-enable it, but nothing user friendly.
Maybe we'll see a tiny bump, but I expect everyone who was going to switch has already switched.
Dont believe the article at all. Everyone I talk to is switching back to Firefox. I never left.
Mozilla's own numbers tells the same story. https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
Didn't know they have those data. Some c/dataisbeautiful material here!
Some things are really interesting. I'd expect more people with extensions, but the majority don't use. I'd also expect more linux users, but it seems the popularity among linux users is about same level as the general users. It's also interesting to see a reasonable amount of 32 bit systems
I'd say it's not clear if those numbers include FF forks that still use Firefox auth and sync or not.
By default it does as they send baseline telemetry to Mozilla servers, unless fork or individual user disables it. That said, many privacy oriented forks do disable it by default so they wouldn't be counted.
Those look like the numbers of the telemetry endpoints, and that's the first thing most forks remove.
Both are true
Usage has been slowly dropping year on year since 2022 but also this year usage is up
Looks basically the same to me in absolute numbers (although good luck getting a clear picture here), lower percentage of relative users.
In the same 12 months, Brave reported a 33% increase in monthly active users.
screenshots
(That small rise in the previous screenshot is 2.33%)
Brave
88100000 to 117600000
I was with Netscape 1.0. Never left.
Mosaic.
Never left.
(btw)
Same, and I personally know two people who I would describe as college educated white-collar folks, but definitely not into "tech", who recently told me they switched to Firefox.
Leaving where? There is no safe harbor. You are using WebKit, Gecko, or Chromium and thats final.
I've started using canada post.
Falkon will be viable aaaaany day now!
Sarcasm aside, I do hope it picks up steam. It's a nice browser.
The latest round of widgets they threw into the browser was annoying.