[trts]

It makes me sad that FF browser share has continued to decline steadily. The past couple years of releases have been some its the best in terms of my own UX, since perhaps the Phoenix era.

It's pretty fast these days, the UI is good, has a lot of great extensions and privacy features.

I use Brave at work to have a better chrome-based experience with gsuite. It's also a fast, excellent browser with good privacy features, built-in ad/tracker blocking and for the time being seems to be user-not-revenue-first.

But using a non-free browser feels like a trap to me. Just as what happened with Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Netscape before, being the middle man between the user and the rest of the internet is just too tempting for any company not to try to leverage for their own advantage.

FF hasn't been always perfect, but for 20 years now they have made a browser that didn't have a shady corporate agenda. It feels like the writing is on the wall though. Even people I know who care about FLOSS are using Chrome as their daily driver these days.

Mozilla is great and I hope they continue to focus on building a best-in-class browser.

[dont__panic]

I still ask myself: has FF browser share actually dropped that much, or has FF's privacy focus caused browser share estimates to mostly miss FF users in their counts? Most of these stats come from the exact kind of skeevy companies that I (and many other FireFox users) are using FireFox to avoid.

[jakub_g]

My take on FF "decline" is that FF user share (%) dropped because the pie started expanding (especially on mobile). New internet users are likely to be Safari or Chrome users for whom the browser they have is good enough. And Firefox on mobile is simply not as fast as alternatives (the bar set by Chromium Android is very high), kinda painful to use unless you have a highend device, esp. JS heavy sites like Twitter work much better on Chromium.

This doesn't fully describe situation, but over last 3 years, mobile users went from 50% to 75% users in my prev company's data. And Firefox is nowhere in those mobile stats.

[gilrain]

Number of Firefox users is dropping, not just Firefox market share.

[indymike]

Firefox has less users than desktop Safari. It shouldn't be that way, but it is. When you factor in mobile it gets worse because Chrome (the Android default) and Safari (the only real choice on iOS) are so dominant.

Also, the market share numbers reported by client side trackers like StatsCounter are very close to log file collection and analysis by companies like Kinsta.

[jamie_ca]

iOS Firefox is actually quite nice, I've been using it as my default for a year now. Biggest win for me is tab sync, so it's pretty easy to open a tab I had loaded on my phone in my desktop browser.

Sure, it's using Safari as a renderer, but these days that's hardly where the differentiating value is.

[eric_cc]

How are you so sure? You really didn’t address OP’s point about content blocking and privacy tools.

[indymike]

Content blocking does not change requests to the originating server. Firefox would have much better market share in log file analysis method studies than it does in client side tracker based studies if the OP was correct.

[ksec]

> FF's privacy focus caused

Even before the whole privacy focused thing FF was already in decline to sub 10% market on Desktop.

If you think about it the other way around, it is still hanging on to 5-10% of Desktop market after all is actually quite good. At its peak, Firefox was closing to 40% in some European countries. If you consider IE in Business Cooperate usage and Firefox are not available in those settings, 40% is a really big deal.

[gilrain]

Do you trust Mozilla? They share the numbers.

https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

I’ve watched the decline for years, straight from the source. These usage numbers are not affected by privacy settings.

[boomboomsubban]

Firefox users avoiding those tracking sites would result in an always low user share, it would not really explain the user share dropping. Maybe an increase in privacy minded users could explain a percent or two, but not most of the drop.

[doomrobo]

Unfortunately that's not a likely explanation. If you do even the simplest possible measurement, which is just recording user agent strings and IPs, you won't end up undercounting Firefox clients

[boomboomsubban]

Either uBlock Origin or Matrix comes with user agent spoofing, it's not like the practice is that rare.

[unityByFreedom]

Matrix used to do this but doesn't anymore [1] and uBlock never had that feature. Please don't make stuff up.

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/issues/927

[boomboomsubban]

I don't think it's fair to call not knowing that a feature was removed from a discontinued app "making stuff up."

I was clearly wrong, though it is easy to change your user agent it's unlikely that many Firefox users have done it.

[unityByFreedom]

You're right, I misunderstood your comment. I interpreted what you said as in, you can get this feature via either Matrix or uBlock. I see now you meant one of those has the feature and you weren't sure which one had it. Sorry about that. In my defense I think it can be read both ways.

I'd add there is a large gap in usage between uBlock and Matrix. uBlock has over 10 million users whereas Matrix is somewhere over 100,000.

[unityByFreedom]

Does uBlock Origin turn that on by default? That's the only way I could imagine such stats being wrong by a wide margin.

[executesorder66]

By mozilla's own metrics only 30% of their users use any addon at all.

[eric__cartman]

I would love to continue using FF, but on my machine with an Nvidia card (sigh) the scrolling in Firefox gets very choppy when using two different browser windows open on the dual monitors. And for some reason this bothers me more than it should. Maybe one of these days I should try using it again. It's been over a year since I last tried it. It's odd because the Firefox on the desktop machine with the Nvidia card and a six core AMD CPU is way choppier than on my 7 year old Thinkpad with a dual core i5 and integrated graphics.

[kvark]

We see issues with NV multi-monitor configurations, and are still trying to figure them out. Also, the whole story of multi-windows should improve in the future: there is a good opportunity to share WebRender context between them, but we aren't doing this yet.

[moralestapia]

>but we aren't doing this yet

Or anything at all it seems ...

[xnyanta]

Damn, I have this exact same problem and never suspected it was NVIDIA related :/

[raven108]

The problem is not the browser, but a lazy mgmt. Selling user privacy to Google for easy money instead of asking users to either pay for ensuring their privacy. But that will take real work instead of easy “royalty” payments from Google.

Between telemetry, safe browsing, sqlite database with all sites you visited & gvfs they siphon off some serious data. So bad for privacy but snappy otherwise, particularly the new versions. MDN is pretty good too, but they chopped off their tech team to “save money” for a top heavy mgmt team.

[dralley]

I can think of few worse business plans than a paid browser, in 2021.

I would bet money that even the majority of HN readers wouldn't pay money for something so heavily commoditized.

[tigroferoce]

Maybe you are right, but if you present yourself like a privacy-first browser, the paladin of the free internet, and then you end up taking money from Google, your position and credibility don't look great.

[kaba0]

Why exactly? It is just as much a positive for Google paying some (to them) small money to avoid lawsuits as it is for firefox to be able to stay afloat.

Do you have any reference to issues where firefox lost credibility?

[starik36]

> FF browser share has continued to decline steadily

Is that really a fact though? I read somewhere that >80% FF users have Ad Blocker installed. Wouldn't that keep it hidden to Google Analytics and similar outfits that come up with browser usage stats?

[nerdponx]

HTTP servers can still see the clients' user agent strings.

[gilrain]

Yes.

Do you trust Mozilla? They share the numbers.

https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

[sorry_outta_gas]

whatsmybrowser.org returns firefox for me with some privacy plugins and ublock origin installed

[kennywinker]

it even knows the exact version of firefox I'm running (92.0)

[executesorder66]

It's actually about 30% that have any kind of addon :

https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/usage-behavior

[46756e]

Just out of curiosity, what are some of Chrome's shady dealings?

I'm not too informed on the subject.

[skinkestek]

> Just out of curiosity, what are some of Chrome's shady dealings?

A parent company that could and would literally put ads for it on the front page of Google? (i.e. before a sesrch term has been entered)

This is a place where I'm not aware that anyone else has been allowed to put anything, so if this isn't abuse of market power then I don't know what.

Same with other Google web properties that magically work better in Firefox if you change the request headers..!

[techrat]

A company putting an ad for its own product on its own website is not an example of a shady tactic.

"Allowed?" Next you'll tell me that Microsoft should be forced to exclusively advertise other browsers other than their own on Bing before search...

> so if this isn't abuse of market power then I don't know what.

Abuse of market power would be preventing the mention of any other browser when using search and Google has never done that.

Or how about a better example: Apple actively preventing any third party web browsers on iOS, then later only allowing third party web browsers to use the Safari Engine. THAT is anticompetitive.

Google simply has the better product in this case.

[skinkestek]

Thanks for explaining your position. I'll try to explain in some more detail why this is a problem and how governments has stepped in before:

> Abuse of market power would be preventing the mention of any other browser when using search and Google has never done that.

Another way to abuse market power is to use ones dominance in one maket to crush competition in another market.

Microsoft was punished for this after they bundled IE with Windows back in the day. Google has gone extremely much further down the road of abusing market dominance in one market (search, ads) to crush competition in browsers.

Also: did you forget my point about how Google web properties work better if you fake the headers and pretend to be Chrome?

> Or how about a better example: Apple actively preventing any third party web browsers on iOS, then later only allowing third party web browsers to use the Safari Engine. THAT is anticompetitive.

The value is not in the engine. The engine is something you make to get an advantage in customers mind. Many browsers, both historic and present are just skins on top of other browser engines.

> Google simply has the better product in this case.

So you say Tree Style Tabs work in Chrome now and it doesn't eat memory for breakfast, lunch and dinner? That's news to me ;-)

[tentacleuno]

I tried one of the Tree Style Tabs extensions. It acted like it was embedding the tab sidebar into the actual page. That's one of the things I actually like about Firefox: sidebars have an API.

[techrat]

The point with my reply is that you have enough to point out about the Chrome situation without having to resort to tenuous claims or outright falsehoods.

Google had to have had the better product otherwise you wouldn't have been introduced to Chrome by using their search engine.

[skinkestek]

> without having to resort to tenuous claims or outright falsehoods.

Do you mean that tree style tabs now works on Chrome or that everyone agrees that Chromes memory issues have been sorted? Or something else?

> Google had to have had the better product otherwise you wouldn't have been introduced to Chrome by using their search engine.

Maybe ten or fifteen years ago this was true.

These days it is so broken you can search for a literal term and get all spam and no ham.

Also ads are exempt from that anyway and these ads in particular were probably hard coded since no other ads has ever been shown in that spot.

Edit, some more details:

The reason Chrome leads is kind of the same as why IE dominated the marked for years:

- a generally good browser (IE was best for a long time)

- strategic incompatibility on core web assets: MSDN for Microsoft (worked nicely if you changes request headers in Opera to simulate IE), various web properties for Google

- enough non standard hacks that people who just slap together code and only test in IE/Chrome might easily include some IE/Chrome-specific hack

- carpet bombing of the market: In Microsofts case by bundling it with all new PCs, in Googles case by massive ad campaigns, including smothering the otherwise always clean and minimal front page(!) with Chrome ads.

- Also by adding it to shareware/freeware installers

- In Microsofts case also by shadyd deals with others about not including competing browsers. (Not confirmed in Googles case, yet ;-)

There is a reason why we old timers say "Chrome is the new IE".

[FranklinMaillot]

Chrome prioritizes search suggestions over your history when you type in keywords in the address bar. I find this behavior very annoying since most of the time I perfectly know what website I want to visit. Obviously, Google will always have an incentive to take you to its search results page.

Firefox on the other hand prioritizes your browsing history by default (you can still change that in settings) which makes finding anything much faster and the whole experience much smoother. Plus you can easily limit the search to your history by preceding the keywords with ^, or to your bookmarks with *.

[Liquid_Fire]

Bundling Chrome with Flash and other software, such that it would install by default unless you uncheck the right checkbox (and make itself the default browser).

Making Google web applications (YouTube) use technologies only available in Chrome with much slower fallback used in other browsers.

Bundling Chrome with Android.

Ads pushing it aggressively on Google/YouTube. Ads IRL.

[tentacleuno]

What else do you reasonably expect them to bundle with Android, though? Safari?

[Liquid_Fire]

I agree that it's probably too far to call that one a dirty tactic.

However, Microsoft was once forced to offer a choice of browsers to EU users of Windows, which included all major competitors and even a number of minor browsers. Google doesn't have quite as strong of a monopoly as Windows did, but it wouldn't be too unreasonable to offer the user a choice.

Additionally, while I see a small number of Android apps that actually embed the default browser when they want to show some web content, I see many more that embed what is clearly a Chrome-based web view. I'm not familiar with what the relevant underlying APIs are, but I would prefer it if more apps respected my choice, and Google are probably in a position to make that the easy/default choice, but they don't.

[tentacleuno]

> However, Microsoft was once forced to offer a choice of browsers to EU users of Windows, which included all major competitors and even a number of minor browsers. Google doesn't have quite as strong of a monopoly as Windows did, but it wouldn't be too unreasonable to offer the user a choice.

I mean technically apps on Android can bundle whatever web rendering engine they want. The majority of them either use Android's WebView components (see: DuckDuckGo, and a LOT of others), or are just a hard fork of Chromium (see: Kiwi Browser, Bromite, Brave, etc.)

On that note, I remember trying to find a non-Chromium browser on Android (bar Gecko / Firefox, of course). It was practically impossible. I think there was some sort of WebKit thing, but it was like 10 years out of date.

The only practical alternative is Gecko, but IMO it has a lot of catching up to do with performance, battery life, etc. etc. Personally I don't like the redesign, but I'm not sure what the public sentiment is aside from vocal Firefox users.

It's the same with desktop mostly IMO: either Firefox or Chromium. I'd love to be proven wrong here, though.

It'd be interesting to see if Servo would change things on both mobile and desktop, though. Again, it has a lot of catching up to do in comparison to Chromium.

[ipaddr]

After 15+ years of use it has become so slow I had to move away for day to day browsing. I'm on windows 7 on that machine. My copy on windows 10 works almost on par with chrome in terms of speed.

After the rewrite things were super fast but it has gotten slower each release.

[dralley]

Have you tried refreshing your profile?

[lenkite]

Mozilla keeps firing developers and keeps increasing their CEO salary. No doubt, there will be another top-exec pay-hike soon to improve the numbers, along with another layoff.

[sverhagen]

I'm sad too. I wonder if it demonstrates how rare it is to get a second chance.

[AniseAbyss]

I just don't trust Google, they make almost all their money from tracking users for advertising purposes. So the cynic/realist in me believes that they are fundamentally opposed to privacy.

[mdoms]

Every time I use Firefox I find some other stupid issue that just doesn't fly in 2021.

Today it might be a top 50 website that doesn't work properly, yesterday maybe it's excessive cpu usage, day before maybe pinch to zoom doesn't work. Who knows what dumb crap is happening tomorrow.

Life is too short to muck around with half baked software.

[techrat]

Firefox is a dumpster fire half the time. I use Firefox still for exactly ONE website: Facebook. To keep it sandboxed.

I still have to restart Firefox at least once every other day because it leaks and becomes a runaway process.

No plugins/addons. As stock as it gets. One single website only... and it still pukes all over itself.

[kaba0]

Are you even using an updated version?

Because I have firefox instances running for months with tremendous amounts of tabs open on 8GB of RAM laptop and has absolutely zero problem with it.

[techrat]

64GB Desktop.

Apt runs weekly.

Firefox still blows.

[dralley]

Something is F'ed with your system. I have 10 extensions installed, nearly 900 tabs (most of which aren't actually cached) and my Firefox stays open for weeks and it still never uses more than a few GB of RAM.

[techrat]

Or maybe you have rose colored glasses on from using Firefox in isolation.

It's a memory leaking hog on every system I use it on. Windows, Ubuntu, even Android.

Even back to the days of Phoenix, it always had issues with not eventually turning into a leaking process.