Firefox dying at just 10% marketshare

[sinetheo]

What was once unbelievable and would cause a storm of anger just 5 years ago has happened. The once unbeatable Firefox which freed us from the stranglehold of IE 6 is about to the point of being irrelevant to webmasters.

 

Firefox is now at 10% where it is safe it ignore for many webmasters. What changed was IE finally being mediocre and of course the rise of Chrome and webkit browsers and applications through mobile platforms which has exploded growth in the past 5 years as well.

 

What is not helping is Firefox losing many users each release over the year starting with 4.0, constant updates which break addons, removal of features, and copying Chrome and adding social media and webcam functions, while Chrome kept adding more HTML 5 and CSS 3 features at the same time.

 

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2893514/an-incredibly-shrinking-firefox-faces-endangered-species-status.html

 

 

[gohpep]

I already responded to you in the Firefox Next thread.

 

How has Firefox copied Chrome, though?

[Praetor]

i love firefox because it consumes much less memory then Chrome, more safer and even more snappier to use.

[Ironman273]

I already responded to you in the Firefox Next thread.

 

How has Firefox copied Chrome, though?

I'm not a Firefox user but I do remember an uproar during some upgrade that Firefox became a carbon copy of Chrome (in looks).

[Psion7]

I prefer Firefox over Chrome or IE but I won't deny that a lot of the things Mozilla seem to be doing with Firefox is pointless. Things like Firefox Hello should have been an extension. I use the English-British build and it doesn't even come with an en-gb dictionary out of the box yet includes crap like Hello.

 

The only reason I use it over IE is better adblocking extensions. If Spartan has an extension as good as uBlock or Adblock Plus then I will most likely switch to that.

[+Warwagon MVC]

Well if Firefox started bundling itself with everything and after installing, set itself as the default browser im sure it would have higher market share too.

[sinetheo]

I prefer Firefox over Chrome or IE but I won't deny that a lot of the things Mozilla seem to be doing with Firefox is pointless. Things like Firefox Hello should have been an extension. I use the English-British build and it doesn't even come with an en-gb dictionary out of the box yet includes crap like Hello.

The only reason I use it over IE is better adblocking extensions. If Spartan has an extension as good as uBlock or Adblock Plus then I will most likely switch to that.

Adblock plus is available for IE

[gohpep]

Adblock plus is available for IE

but it is so bad

[JustGeorge]

Adblock plus is available for IE

Its crap on IE. Less options and causes pages to hang.

[gohpep]

I'm not a Firefox user but I do remember an uproar during some upgrade that Firefox became a carbon copy of Chrome (in looks).

I wouldn't say that. The only thing that is the same is that the tabs are in the title bar.

[Psion7]

Adblock plus is available for IE

 

Yeah but it is truly awful when compared to what is available for Firefox and Chrome.

[philcruicks]

Yeh FF has gotten too bloated over the years, I think one of its other main issues is the lack of mobile support, I've been using Chrome for ages now and one of the reasons is that i can sync everything between iphone ipad and PC, just makes the experience smoother.

 

I will say chrome does seem to use a lot more memory these days than it used to, I'd like to see them get that back under control.

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

I wouldn't say that. The only thing that is the same is that the tabs are in the title bar.

And don't forget the hamburger menu, those 2 things make it a carbon copy of Chrome, even if everything else is different.

Edit: Also it's bloated because it's adding too much stuff, and bad because it's removing too much stuff.

[spaceelf]

Last I tried it the latest Firefox is actually much better than I expected.  Maybe they can turn things around yet.

[Thomas the Tank Engine]

Adblock plus is available for IE

 

That it is, but every few days it crashes on Win7 IE11 and to restart it I have to close IE, kill any processes of IE that are still running and restart IE.

[Circaflex]

FF has been dying to me because of the lackluster performance. Flash seems to cause pages to slow to a crawl or crash, 1 tab opened is using 400MB of ram, having multiple open for a few hours results in a dinosaur of a computer. FF used to be lean and mean, now its the opposite.

[HawkMan]

Well if Firefox started bundling itself with everything and after installing, set itself as the default browser im sure it would have higher market share too.

 

That's what it did. it's what caused it's install to trigger UAC warnings back in Vista because the installer set itself as default automatically for ALL users accounts...

[+thexfile Subscriber²]

Mozilla Firefox still has the WebRTC leak issue. Pale Moon doesn't have the leak.

[SharpGreen]

And don't forget the hamburger menu, those 2 things make it a carbon copy of Chrome, even if everything else is different.

Edit: Also it's bloated because it's adding too much stuff, and bad because it's removing too much stuff.

Carbon copy implies they both look exactly the same. Which they don't.

[Dinggus]

I was a fan of Firefox, but for some reason I made the switch a few years ago to Chrome. It was probably due to being able to sync my browsers via phone, computer, tablet and the fact I use Gmail.

[Boo Berry]

Yeah, Firefox's sync is pretty terrible. When I sync bookmarks to my phone for example, it messes up the order on my desktop and vice versa, ugh. Chrome's in comparison is perfect. It'll sync all the bookmarks to Chrome on Windows, Mac, Ubuntu and Android without messing anything up. Plus, I can even use it on Chrome Canary and/or Chromium without issue whereas with Firefox if I try to sync Firefox on Windows alongside Nightly on Windows, the bookmark order easily gets messed up.

[Circaflex]

Mozilla Firefox still has the WebRTC leak issue. Pale Moon doesn't have the leak.

my only gripe with palemoon was the use of the outdated, old, sync system

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

That's what it did. it's what caused it's install to trigger UAC warnings back in Vista because the installer set itself as default automatically for ALL users accounts...

Any program install triggered UAC back under Vista, that's one of the reasons they toned it down with 7 (And also why Chrome installs itself into the user profile)

 

 

Carbon copy implies they both look exactly the same. Which they don't.

Yeah that was my point There were the same complaints back in the early days with people saying they were copying IE with the notification bar (Which they kinda were, but it was a great UI idea so most browsers do it these days, but now they're all moving away from it because they're easy to spoof)

Edit: About the WebRTC thing, while it's bad for a browser to leak things about the LAN to untrusted web pages, the info it does leak is so useless that it's not actually worth complaining about. My internal IPv4 address is 192.168.120.191, and that means absolutely nothing to anybody but me.

[Osiris]

I will deny it if anyone asks but for a while there I was using firefox.  Like most software though over time just felt like it was getting more and more bloated.  Doing a lot of web surfing on my surface devices and metro IE I ended up going back to the king but surprised FF market share has dropped so low.

[Boo Berry]

Australis surely didn't help its market share. And being the last to support MSE, EME, etc. Instead they're working on Firefox OS (pointless, IMO, the market is flooded with too many potential mobile OSes) and other useless features like Hello whereas they should have been focused more on getting other important features like Electrolysis (e10s) out quicker.

 

Oh, and they need people dedicated to fixing Windows OMTC issues. Those are the main reason the Firefox UI glitches out/goes black sometimes.