Firefox dying at just 10% marketshare

[seta-san]

I quit using Firefox after the Brendon eich thing. I also moved everyone I had sway over

[TAZMINATOR]

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.

 

I don't use sync for bookmarks.

 

I use import/export html instead.

[Boo Berry]

That's a pain in the ass to do on multiple OSes and mobile devices - sync is a must for me and third-party services like Xmarks don't cut it either.

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

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.

I think Firefox OS is important (to them), mainly because the desktop market is fine (Even if they have 10% share, the other 90% is still browsers with good standards support, performance, etc.) The mobile space on the other hand is a WebKit monopoly, it's awful and they need competition (Even Google is hitting these problems where if they change anything they break WebKit sites), Microsoft too. Lack of a good MSE implementation is annoying (Even if it did arrive in 37, for YouTube only), but considering the state of MSE support in other browsers it's not actually that odd (I'd say the MSE implementation in Safari is actually buggier than Firefox), not having EME is a plus IMO, but that's a lost battle.

Hello is just a web page, so the people working on that aren't going to be the same ones working on things like e10s (Which is progressing well in the nightly builds, using it right now). OMTC issues are (For the most part) down to hardware and driver issues, I've never hit a single one with my Nvidia GPUs, yet I know somebody with an Intel GPU who hits them constantly. The amount of buggy drivers out there really is amazing, Google/Mozilla are sharing blocklists of driver/hardware just so simple things like video decoding doesn't break (The GPU in my Mothers laptop has an issue where it'll corrupt the address space of Firefox, and only Firefox, so that's blocked from use).

[TAZMINATOR]

That's a pain in the ass to do on multiple OSes and mobile devices - sync is a must for me and third-party services like Xmarks don't cut it either.

 

Fine on my end.

 

Only windows systems.

 

I don't care about bookmarks on mobile devices such as phones/tablets. I don't use them on mobile devices these days. All I do is view then close.

[beanboy89]

I've been using Firefox (or one if it's Gecko-based cousins) for 12 years now. Switched from IE to Firefox (still called Firebird at this point) just because it offered a ton of features IE didnt have at that time. I still love using Firefox to this day. I don't care about resource usage, and I don't feel like I should have to. I have enough RAM that it doesn't matter. I don't worry about sync between comuters and mobile devices. I use Firefox on Android, but I don't use my browser the same way on the desktop that I do on mobile, so I don't care about this feature. I've tried to switch over to Chrome on a few different occasions, and I just couldn't fet used to it.

[techbeck]

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.

 

Pretty much.  Seems everything you install these days installs Chrome, Bing search (yes i have seen this a couple times recently) or another piece of software that is either selected by default or you have to chose a custom install not to install it.  Annoying as hell.

[cork1958]

I never used to be able to stand Firefox at all when it first came out although I kept trying it with every update. Ever since about version 27, or so though, I've been using it quite regularly and really liking it!

 

Now, compared to chrome, which I've NEVER liked and still can't tolerate, it is WAY better and faster on all of my machines.

 

I've always liked using the under dog browser and it always seems the more people dislike the browser I'm using, the better it seems to be!

 

Used to be the same with Opera until they got ignorant and switched to that crappy chrome engine. Used to like Seamonkey a lot also, but that one just went weird or something!

 

Only browsers I have installed on my Windows machines now a days are IE11 and Firefox. Split those about 50-50. I do have a couple machines setup so I can play with IE12 also.

[Raa]

Where it belongs IMO.

[Defcon]

Anyone who says Chrome is faster hasn't used it. Chrome is total garbage compared to FF, esp with >5 tabs open, and its extensions are a total joke, its UI is a nightmare, too bad Google shoves it down everyone's throat.

[+Warwagon MVC]

Anyone who says Chrome is faster hasn't used it. Chrome is total garbage compared to FF, esp with >5 tabs open, and its extensions are a total joke, its UI is a nightmare, too bad Google shoves it down everyone's throat.

 

Ya only reason I even have it installed is to Chromecast.

[COKid]

All good things must come to an end. Mozilla's has a great run, but like everything in tech, people move on to other things quickly. Have a peaceful retirement, my dear Fox. You've served your purpose well.

 

[thomastmc]

Another story of what once was good is now s**t. Firefox was too slow to adapt. It got eaten once the lions awoke. Now, its another blip in the history of the internet; like Netscape, AOL, MySpace, and the sound of a modem's handshake.

[sinetheo]

Another story of what once was good is now s**t. Firefox was too slow to adapt. It got eaten once the lions awoke. Now, its another blip in the history of the internet; like Netscape, AOL, MySpace, and the sound of a modem's handshake.

 

Not only this!

 

They have ignored their users similiar to Windows 8 and now Windows 10 who do not want the flat cell phone look. Firefox kept dumbing down their gui and taking away features. Meanwhile Chrome and IE have stepped up their game. Mozilla then bloated the hell out of their releases right when IE and Chrome started going trim. Infact, Mozilla was rejected pre Firefox because of bloat. People forgot Firefox was a renegade project of stripped rewritten use :-)

 

Firefox kept adding social media apis, webrtc functionality, chat, whatever it could while Chrome kept adding more HTML 5 and CSS 3 to do just that. Firefox injects ads on its users too. Doing pretty much everything but improving it's browser.

 

Last, Mozilla is laughably introducing electrolysis for threads per tab! IE 8 and Chrome 1.0 had this in 2009! It is outdated and obsolete as a result. This means if you have +30 tabs open it uses one core while the rest of your 3 cores are idle. It means if you go to a porn site your yahoo tab can send spam as javascript can communicate to your other tabs and use invisible iframes?! No seriously there is no security or sandboxing that is real as a result. With Chrome and IE you have per thread/process tabs which means the operating system can use all cores and provide security. Electrolysis is trying to mimick this and wont be ready until 2016 or 2017.

 

Forget it. They lost and I agree in the tech world it can be unforgivable to become obsolete. The mindshare is gone too and mostly old people (same who used IE 6 last decade) are the only ones left using it. There maybe a few techie loyalist who swear by some extension but that is it.

[gohpep]

 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.

Firefox Sync exists, and Firefox is on Android?

 

 

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.

The hamburger menu in Firefox is way different than Chrome's. Just because they both have menus doesn't mean they are the same. Menus are a fundamental part of any application.

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.

Firefox is faster on my system, and it is using 580MB of RAM for 6 tabs and 16 addons.

[gohpep]

Not only this!

 

They have ignored their users similiar to Windows 8 and now Windows 10 who do not want the flat cell phone look. Firefox kept dumbing down their gui and taking away features. Meanwhile Chrome and IE have stepped up their game. Mozilla then bloated the hell out of their releases right when IE and Chrome started going trim. Infact, Mozilla was rejected pre Firefox because of bloat. People forgot Firefox was a renegade project of stripped rewritten use :-)

 

Firefox kept adding social media apis, webrtc functionality, chat, whatever it could while Chrome kept adding more HTML 5 and CSS 3 to do just that. Firefox injects ads on its users too. Doing pretty much everything but improving it's browser.

 

Last, Mozilla is laughably introducing electrolysis for threads per tab! IE 8 and Chrome 1.0 had this in 2009! It is outdated and obsolete as a result. This means if you have +30 tabs open it uses one core while the rest of your 3 cores are idle. It means if you go to a porn site your yahoo tab can send spam as javascript can communicate to your other tabs and use invisible iframes?! No seriously there is no security or sandboxing that is real as a result. With Chrome and IE you have per thread/process tabs which means the operating system can use all cores and provide security. Electrolysis is trying to mimick this and wont be ready until 2016 or 2017.

 

Forget it. They lost and I agree in the tech world it can be unforgivable to become obsolete. The mindshare is gone too and mostly old people (same who used IE 6 last decade) are the only ones left using it. There maybe a few techie loyalist who swear by some extension but that is it.

Wait, Chrome is going trim? You're joking right? Firefox is snappier and faster than ever, before the rapid releases, I felt like Firefox was bloated. Plus, you have things like MemShrink.

 

And is this actually a joke? Firefox isn't adding more standards support?

 

Electrolysis has been ready for a very long time, it is just compatibility that gets into the way, like addons breaking that can't be fixed by the addon developer.

 

And Firefox does have proper sandboxing to prevent JavaScript exploits like that. If you want to talk security, Firefox is the doing the most innovative things, for example, opportunistic encryption.

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

...

Firefox kept adding social media apis, webrtc functionality, chat, whatever it could while Chrome kept adding more HTML 5 and CSS 3 to do just that. Firefox injects ads on its users too. Doing pretty much everything but improving it's browser.

 

Last, Mozilla is laughably introducing electrolysis for threads per tab! IE 8 and Chrome 1.0 had this in 2009! It is outdated and obsolete as a result. This means if you have +30 tabs open it uses one core while the rest of your 3 cores are idle. It means if you go to a porn site your yahoo tab can send spam as javascript can communicate to your other tabs and use invisible iframes?! No seriously there is no security or sandboxing that is real as a result. With Chrome and IE you have per thread/process tabs which means the operating system can use all cores and provide security. Electrolysis is trying to mimick this and wont be ready until 2016 or 2017.

...

 

This is absolute nonsense, you claim Mozilla are bad for supporting standards, but Chrome is good for supporting those very same standards (I'll give you a hint on the 2 main groups supporting WebRTC, Mozilla and Google). It doesn't inject ads either, you've made that up.

Also, you have no idea what "Electrolysis" is (It's not "threads", every browser is already multi-threaded, including Firefox). And it's the web security model that stops sites running JS on other pages, not process sandboxing (Because even with a sandboxed process per tab like Chrome, pages can still communicate with each other)

If you want to claim this stuff is bad I'd suggest actually doing research on it, because as it stands you're just using words that you don't seem to know the meaning of.

 

...

The hamburger menu in Firefox is way different than Chrome's. Just because they both have menus doesn't mean they are the same. Menus are a fundamental part of any application.

...

Yep, the claims of "copying" in browsers have always been kinda dumb. Firefox "copied" Chrome by using tabs on top, just like Safari, Opera and IE also use. Even if the tabs look different, it's the fact that they exist which is what generates the complaints (We should go back to the time when tabs themselves were "copied" from Opera, therefore Chrome copied them from Firefox, etc.)

[Mockingbird]

The problem with Firefox was that it has huge memory leaks. Eventually, the system would run out of memory and the whole browser would crash.

 

Mozilla was slow to address these issues, but decided to quickly bump up major version numbers to gave the false appearance that development was happening faster.

 

Those version bumps broke extensions.

 

By the time Mozilla fixed those memory leaks, most of the enthusiasts have already moved on, taking with them their non-technical friends and family, leading to a death spiral.

 

Of cause the irony is that Chrome has become more bloated than Firefox.

 

"By the time the rescue ship from Mozilla arrived, there weren't many souls left to save."

[sundayx Veteran]

The reason I'd choose Chrome over Firefox is I'm able to sync everything amongst different computers and my iPhone. That alone has time and time again brought me back from various browsers (FF, Safari) back to Chrome.

[Orange Battery]

Must say, I found myself downloading FF last week in order to get something at work running. I'd encourage people to have a look at it now, it feels quicker than Chrome.

[simplezz]

Sigh.. here we go again with the quoting of Net Applications like it's the definitive stats service when it's clearly not. NA massively favours IE compared to other stats.

 

Let's take a look at Statcounter shall we:

Note how FF and IE almost come to a single point by March 2015. So if FF is dying, then I guess IE is too.

 

There's also something else which a lot of people forget. Firefox users typically employ addons such as Adblock Plus, Noscript, etc. These prevent stats from registering. The true number of Firefox users is likely underestimated a great deal, even on Statcounter.

[Bi4me]

Pretty normal. Everything pretty much pushes you to install Chrome. It's preinstalled on your phone, almost every piece of free software offers you to install Chrome and the products of Google which everybody uses suggest using Chrome.

 

And while we know what we want, a lot of average users just install whatever they're being thrown. So I dare to say most of Chrome's userbase is coming from unaware installs by inexperienced users.

 

I myself have tried multiple times switching to Chrome but it just isn't good enough for me. It's heavy and has little customization options. It most certainly doesn't have all of the options Firefox has.

[simplezz]

And while we know what we want, a lot of average users just install whatever they're being thrown. So I dare to say most of Chrome's userbase is coming from unaware installs by inexperienced users.

So, just like IE users then? After all, the only reason IE has any marketshare whatsoever, is because Microsoft forcibly made it inextricable from the underlying OS (for anticompetitive purposes of course).

[game_over]

It will be because most browser vendors offer services where firefox just offers a browser.

 

Safari is heavily integrated with Apple eco-system/sync, etc... Chrome is heavily integrated with Google services/sync etc...

 

IE is heavily integrated in Windows and i'm assuming has sync etc?

 

What does firefox have? their OS that nobody uses? rubbish sync? memory leaks.. browsers should be getting lighter and i always find Firefox more bloated than the others and I use them all for testing websites.

[seta-san]

It will be because most browser vendors offer services where firefox just offers a browser.

 

Safari is heavily integrated with Apple eco-system/sync, etc... Chrome is heavily integrated with Google services/sync etc...

 

IE is heavily integrated in Windows and i'm assuming has sync etc?

 

What does firefox have? their OS that nobody uses? rubbish sync? memory leaks.. browsers should be getting lighter and i always find Firefox more bloated than the others and I use them all for testing websites.

 

white safari and IE are integrated into their eco-system. chrome's integration with google services are just creepy. I could never imagine allowing google to follow me across the internet like that.