[filoeleven]

Firefox was in its prime when it was the main competitor to IE. It was just a no-brainer for users: it was faster and it had tabs!

Now Chrome has become dominant. I don’t know all the reasons, though I’m sure marketing is a big one. Firefox can’t compete with Google’s marketing budget, and as a user and a web dev, I haven’t found any other compelling reasons to make FF my primary browser. Their dev tools weren’t as nice as Chrome’s the last time I checked, and it seems like common (for tech folks) Chrome plugins make up the privacy differences.

We do need a healthy multi-browser ecosystem in order to prune web tech to follow a user-centric direction. I want FF to convert me. I just haven’t seen the substantial arguments yet.

It’s kind of telling that Microsoft didn’t either, so they switched Edge over to Chromium, a tool from one of their main competitors. It’s possible that this puts FF into the same position of being “the outsider” that it was in before. I hope that stress makes them do something radical to sway more users. If they do, it will likely be related to browsing privacy (especially if it’s a default) and will upset the status quo again.

[nerdponx]

Firefox had kind of stagnated in terms of innovation and design when Chrome rolled around. Not to mention performance: we are spoiled today with recent versions of Firefox, but I remember a lot of people I know who switched to Chrome did so because of crash-resistance, performance, and the ability to run relatively large numbers of tabs. People like to complain about Firefox chasing Chrome in terms of feature set and design, but I think at least some of that chasing led to a better Firefox.

That at least explains how Chrome gained dominance. Sites that don't fully support Firefox + the "outsider" effect you identified are contributing to FF's continued decline. Safari will probably keep going for years and years solely because of users who don't care or know how to change their default browser (and some people do actually like it more than other browsers).

[pessimizer]

> a lot of people I know who switched to Chrome did so because of crash-resistance, performance, and the ability to run relatively large numbers of tabs.

Firefox was stable with a lot more tabs open than Chrome, because it didn't have a thread per tab. Chasing Chrome brought down the number of tabs you could comfortably have open in Firefox.

[nerdponx]

But if one tab crashed or hung up, the whole browser crashed or hung up.