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If Firefox keeps being relevant for software developers, by continuing to improve their dev tools and providing an API that yields more potent extensions (like the Tree Style Tabs), then I believe Firefox will continue to be very relevant, because its market share will continue to be made of users with the ability to influence policies, in corporations, public institutions and inside their own family, not to mention compatibility with Firefox will be preserved. Firefox has nearly lost developers to Chrome, because (1) Chrome was designed for web apps and you can see this in their process per tab model and isolation, features which took a loooong time to be implemented by their competition, (2) Chrome's dev tools have been for a while superior and still are in some areas, (3) Chrome is popular, it makes sense to target the browser that's most popular, so might as well use it as a default and (4) Chrome really had better performance than Firefox, or at least perceived performance, especially when it comes to Google's own apps. Nowadays Firefox has finally moved to having a permissions system for its add-ons and to using multiple processes for its tabs, while still being better in terms of memory usage, especially with a lot of tabs open, a use-case that was and is still viable on top of the latest Firefox. I'm now more familiar with its dev tools and they've gotten better. Performance is sometimes on par with Chrome, sometimes better, sometimes worse ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ... people complain about the performance of Gmail, but truth be told the performance of Gmail is now crap on top of Chrome too and I'd rather use native clients. And I'm super pleased with many of the privacy changes they've been doing — built-in blocking of trackers, DoH (yes, I think DoH is great), multi-account containers which also allows for sandboxing Facebook or Google, plus I'm pretty sure they'll continue to support uBlock Origin, which isn't something we can say about Google and their deprecations in manifest v3. They still have a lot to work on — better dev tools, battery life on MacOS could be better, a customizable interface that doesn't rely on "legacy stylesheets" (primarily thinking of hiding main tab bar while using the Tree Style Tabs add-on), etc, but I'm sure they'll get there and I'm happy with how it is right now. I used to use Firefox because I wanted to keep them relevant, but nowadays I feel like Firefox is simply the better browser and it will continue to be relevant for as long as software developers such as myself keep using it. |