[orbital223]

> Getting new blood thus may entail getting rid of the Old School interface and going with whatever is 'current'.

Reminds me of the arguments for Firefox getting rid of the "Old School" interface and copying Chrome to bring in new users. Didn't exactly work out very well...

[emodendroket]

Isn't Thunderbird still using XUL stuff that has been retired from Firefox? It doesn't seem that wise to keep working on that to be honest.

[account42]

It is if the alternative is breaking all extensions.

[chefandy]

You think Firefox would have more users if they hadn't updated their interface?

[Amezarak]

Yes.

That wouldn't have gained them appreciable new users, but it would have slowed losses. Almost all my browsing is done in Chrome and Brave now. There's not really any reason to use Firefox besides habit now, and I don't, except on my desktop.

Mozilla somehow failed to recognize their entire core userbase was power users and Firefox fans, which relentlessly evangelized the product to other people, going around installing it on grandma's computer.

Then they failed to recognize that while Chrome was a comparable technical product, maybe even slightly better in some ways, the reason for its success it because it was relentlessly shilled by a huge megacorporation that pushed it in advertising, on the world's biggest web properties, and even had it packaged in installers for other products.

Mozilla was never going to be able to compete with Chrome by assuming that "if we were just more like Chrome, people would use us", or "we need to make a browser for grandma." Grandma doesn't download browsers. That is, unless a big banner comes up on YouTube telling her she needs to download Chrome for the best experience. By alienating its core "fanbase" or whatever you want to call it, by alienating its power users, Firefox alienated the only demographic it ever had an actual shot with. Unless you count the even-smaller real-open-source-only-we-need-web-freedom demographic.

[account42]

A common sentiment (which I share) is that Firefox has less and less to distiguish itself from Chrome(ium). Along with compatibility issues (even if they are rare and not Firefox's fault) there is less and less reason to choose it. Being as good as Chrome is not good enough to maintain users when Google is agressively pushing their browser in ways that Mozilla simply can't.

So why would anyone use Firefox over chrome?

Because it is open source? Sure, but so is Chromium. But both seem to have mostly cathedral-style development and someone outside of Mozilla is unlikely to be able to influence the direction of the project in any meaningful way. It's open source software but not an open source project. User feedback is continuously ignored, often with the only argument being developer convenience.

Because of a focus on privacy? While they do like to push that angle in their marketing and in some ways do more to prevent websites from tracking you they show little concern for making the browser itself respect your privacy with opt out telemetry, eperiments, in-browser advertising and more. Again, any user pushback is summarily dismissed.

The only remaining advantage are some niche features here and there. And those are often provided by extension whose API Mozilla limits more and more.

So I still use Firefox but its only because it is the lesser evil, and the differrence is shrinking. I certainly don't trust Mozilla's autoupdates and won't use upstream builds. Thankfully Linux distros still provide a last defense layer - but that we need that layer at all for something that is supposed to be an open browser is ridiculous. I don't fault anyone who says fuck it and just uses Chrome so that ALL sites work out of the box.

[powerpin9]

I use firefox on Linux for a pragmatic reason actually: it has a better font rendering than Chrom(ium). On my 4K screen I've started to notice that, with all the fixes for it to work right on Wayland, the fonts are still somewhat blurry. I googled and apparently some experts say that Chrome breaks some font rendering rules, on linux. On Windows I guess it isn't an issue since people wound surely notice.

[ilyt]

If they focused instead on speed, and somehow managed to keep old plugins compatible, yes.

People moved to Chrome coz it was plainly faster and those who stayed did it for the various plugins they got used to. When new version of FF blows up your workflow might as well go try Chrome. Hell, I'd be using Chrome already if it had sensible vertical tabs implementation... the FF ones after the apocalypse are worse than XUL ones but still better than I've seen on Chrome.

[jeltz]

No, but I think they would have if they have continued to develop their own interface iteratively without just blindly copying Chrome. Right now there is for many no reason to pick Firefox over Chrome because they are so similar.

[6510]

I'm still on ff but other browsers became very usable when I lost 100+ extensions.

[6510]

correction: After the IE disabling update Edge is the only application with internet access. I'm on the Edge now.

[ttctciyf]

Hard to quantify because you'd have to take account of what actual improvements they might have made instead of spending dev hours on UI, settings and defaults tweaks that mostly served to alienate their core users (IMO).