Firefox dying at just 10% marketshare

[john_alex]

From my point of view, Chrome had, has and will always have the advantage of being bundled with a lot of freeware stuff (more than half of the freeware I use comes bundled with Chrome one way or another), not to mention being promoted all over the internet.  

 

Google has the money to throw around and entice developers to bundle the browser with their software. I doubt the Mozilla Foundation can do the same, hence Chrome has the advantage.

[Malisk]

I actually recommend looking at Wikipedia here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

 

They provide statistics from several sources and I think this is a case where a single source of any kind may be misleading. The varying results from these counters make me believe they might be culturally influenced. That is, one counter could be used more by enterprise websites, another more by commercial websites. In either case, it's always best to use an as large set of data as possible when it comes to statistics. Especially so when we have so few organizations doing this. It'd be easier to see the trend if we had 10 prominent services, but we basically just have Stat Counter and Net Applications, and they differ, so a trend is hard to see.

[BajiRav]

I believe anyone who thinks IE or Firefox are slow/bloated compared to Chrome, haven't used either of them recently.

It's Chrome which needs to die(don't have any hopes of them improving performance or dropping superfluous features) but sadly Google/Android are taking over the world.

[Gabe84]

I don't know.

 

I have a very old machine (AMD Athlon from 2006 + 3GB RAM), before my XP got completely corrupted - after I installed iTunes by the way, my bad, I know - I used to use Comodo Dragon, it is based on Chromium and was much better than both Chrome and Firefox on XP, which were both unusable for me, let alone IE which I abandoned back in 2000 for Netscape and then Mozilla Browser and Firebird later; then I switched to Lubuntu Linux and found Firefox installed with "Ubuntu Firefox Modifications", and it runs great, it never crashes, sure, it's hard to open content-rich websites but that's because I use a old machine, while Chrome it's unusable for me and Chromium crashes whenever I try to open a web page, the only problem I have with Firefox is that sometimes when I try to view a large image it doesn't display the image correctly, that's why I also have Midori installed.

 

I also have a few extensions installed (ABP, Ghostery, HTTPS Everywhere, X-notifier, LastPass, EPUBReader, I had to remove Hola! though) but it still runs fine.

[kaosommadawn]

Unsurprised am I. Firefox was my default browser for a long time until they allowed advertising, I`ve tried quite a few ways of getting rid of it to no avail. Windows put out a fix for the problem on exploder and it worked so now that's my default. If Firefox could fix that advertising problem I`d have no hesitation in moving back to it.

[torrentthief]

In a few months time firefox will be multiprocess, when that happens i expect to see a marketshare increase. The browser itself can become sluggish with multiple tabs, multiprocess will ensure that the browser itself will be responsive. This will also improve security too. The speed difference between chrome and firefox is tiny so that isn't going to be a factor for most people any more.

[Steven P. Administrators]

In a few months time firefox will be multiprocess, when that happens i expect to see a marketshare increase. The browser itself can become sluggish with multiple tabs, multiprocess will ensure that the browser itself will be responsive. This will also improve security too. The speed difference between chrome and firefox is tiny so that isn't going to be a factor for most people any more.

Is this already in the beta or nightlies (Aurora) channels?

 

Personally I am waiting to see what Spartan has to offer in terms of extension support. I switched from FF around 3 years ago because of the memory leak issues (I always have loads of tabs open) but Chrome is going that way too lol (as already pointed out in many threads here). 

Oh I forgot to mention how I also can't get along with FF Sync, Chrome 'just works'  which is also a plus.

[Co-ords]

RIP Firefox...

[torrentthief]

Is this already in the beta or nightlies (Aurora) channels?

It can be enabled in nightlies - "To enable or disable e10s, open Nightly's Preferences and check the "Enable E10S" checkbox. You will need to restart Nightly." It is scheduled to be in Firefox 42 final released in November 2015.

 

Many addons don't work with e10s a.k.a electrolysis a.k.a multiprocess but they will do within the next few months. Firefox released an Addon SDK a few months ago, if people recompile their addons to work with the new sdk it will be multiprocess compatible by default.

 

I switched from FF around 3 years ago because of the memory leak issues (I always have loads of tabs open) 

 

Firefox solved their memory leaks about 1.5-2yrs ago. I have around 60 tabs open and it works very well for me. I'm using firefox 38 beta x64 at the moment, the 64bit is significantly faster than 32bit with loads of tabs open, it allows more ram to be used too.

 

Here is a video showing the improvement of responsiveness with firefox multiprocess:

 

[francescob]

First it took them ages to get smooth scrolling, DPI scaling (which they broke with Firefox 4 and only reimplemented properly a couple years ago) and silent updates, then they kept breaking page rendering with some ATI/Intel cards and still no 64bit support in the stable version, no metro-friendly version, no tab processes isolation. If it wasn't that the RAM usage of Chrome is just horrible I wouldn't even think about installing Firefox again.

[TopGhia]

I'd never use Firefox with yours(as the saying goes)

I sincerely hope it goes under,although it won'tWhat Mozilla did to Eich was sick,all because of the tyranny of the evil queer mafia.

It seems opposition to gay marriage disqualifies you from leadership & to bring about ruination of your career. 

Traditionalists & conservatives are now blacklisted,denied top jobs & driven into social exile.

The new blacklist means diversity of sexuality,gender & race is mandatory but thought & opinion is restricted.

Go & rot Mozilla & take the sodding gay mafia & libs with you. 

[torrentthief]

First it took them ages to get smooth scrolling, DPI scaling (which they broke with Firefox 4 and only reimplemented properly a couple years ago) and silent updates, then they kept breaking page rendering with some ATI/Intel cards and still no 64bit support in the stable version, no metro-friendly version, no tab processes isolation. If it wasn't that the RAM usage of Chrome is just horrible I wouldn't even think about installing Firefox again.

Multiprocess will be here in november, 64bit betas are available, final versions will be available in a few months time. Nobody uses metro so there's no point wasting money on supporting that.

[yowanvista]

Firefox has been stagnating lately, a lot of features like per-tab process are being delayed indefinitely. Firefox would be an irrelevant browser without all the innovation brought to Chromium by Google, Firefox is already using most of the stuff developed by Google like Angle backend, they're even going to implement the Chromium sandbox in the near future.

[Jarrichvdv]

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

That's pretty lame.

[ambiance]

I hope they bounce back and I'll be a loyal user until the end. I would hate to move Chrome from secondary to primary.

[francescob]

64bit betas are available

I know it's available in betas, that's why I specifically wrote about the stable version. My point was that they're eternally behind. Also I forgot that Chrome (and Win8) bundles Flash so no more risk of having outdated Flash versions installed and no more need of having Flash update services running or to having to visit the Adobe website to download the latest major version that apparently is now released every other week.

 

Nobody uses metro so there's no point wasting money on supporting that.

Firefox is unusable on tablets, either they need to release a Metro version or fix the rendering so that it adapts to the display size and zooms smoothly.

[Defcon]

Mozilla is the driving force and spirit behind much of the web, there'd be no web as we know it without their efforts and certainly no bloody Chrome. They do it for FREE to help everyone and have multiple projects. Chrome is nothing but a glorified ad delivery vehicle for Google services. I can't believe how idiotic people in this thread are dismissing Firefox.

I'm typing this from Firefox on my cheap android tablet. Everyone knows chrome is a disaster on android, just like on desktop. Its why the stock AOSP browser is ten times better than chrome.

[HawkMan]

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)

 

 

 

Not true.

 

Only programs who did certain actions, like setting system wide default settings. and Firefox kept doing this way into 7 despite MS telling them they're breaking the install guidelines. 

[HawkMan]

I don't care all that much about extensions and addons, but I hate restarting my browser and the fact FF, still after all these years after they first said they would, haven't managed to make addons load without a restart. combined with the rapid new versions and addons breaking between releases(maybe they finally managed to fix this with a proper standard, I don't know as I don't use FF much and don't install much addons on it because of this annoyance) is what primarily makes them unusable. 

[HawkMan]

First it took them ages to get smooth scrolling, DPI scaling (which they broke with Firefox 4 and only reimplemented properly a couple years ago) and silent updates, then they kept breaking page rendering with some ATI/Intel cards and still no 64bit support in the stable version, no metro-friendly version, no tab processes isolation. If it wasn't that the RAM usage of Chrome is just horrible I wouldn't even think about installing Firefox again.

 

That is actually the one good thing it has going for it, though they don't do it right.

 

this is where Opera 12 had it's major advantage back in the day. It ran as one process, but inside that process all tabs where still separate so you didn't get the rdiciulous resource usage of Chrome and Opera today, but you still had stability and a crashed tab didn't crash the browser and a slow tab didn't slow down everything else, AND it didn't populate your task manager with 50 processes. 

[+Zagadka Subscriber²]

Mozilla is the driving force and spirit behind much of the web, there'd be no web as we know it without their efforts

 

Well, "was" would be more accurate in the current state, and there were great changes from the development of Mosaic, the Netscape brand, and later Mozilla development of Phoenix and eventually FF. Past efforts mean little when the current product is flagging.

[simplezz]

I actually recommend looking at Wikipedia here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

 

They provide statistics from several sources and I think this is a case where a single source of any kind may be misleading. The varying results from these counters make me believe they might be culturally influenced. That is, one counter could be used more by enterprise websites, another more by commercial websites. In either case, it's always best to use an as large set of data as possible when it comes to statistics. Especially so when we have so few organizations doing this. It'd be easier to see the trend if we had 10 prominent services, but we basically just have Stat Counter and Net Applications, and they differ, so a trend is hard to see.

The difference is, Net Applications manipulates their smaller dataset using their own private geoweighting algorithms. This tends to favour IE greatly, as evidenced by the disparity with all other stat sources. It's easy to see why Neowin and pro-Microsofties around here love to quote their numbers.

 

And don't forget, Adblock Plus/Noscript users aren't registered by these sources. Yet another reason extension loving FF users aren't counted. I myself and everyone I install Firefox for aren't part of these statistics either because of the aforementioned addons. It would be interesting to see Mozilla's own stats and how much they disagree with Net Applications.

[nub]

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.

 

What are you talking about? Firefox is less resource intenstive and has a perfectly fine Mobile browser which supports Firefox Sync.

[AndyAmo]

I'm sorry,

 

I'm a retired computer professional, I may not be an intense user but I do consider myself to be an enthusiast.  One who recommends Firefox to everyone asking for my opinion. I've never had memory leaks, I've never had extensions break on me due to an upgrade and I've been a satisfied with all round perfromance running the 64 bit Nightly for a good few years? I simply don't understand all this talk about Firefox failing?  I have been hearing the same criticisms and finger pointer for a dozen years and yet in my experience Firefox has served me very well. I run Chrome, Canary, IE and now Project Spartan in addition to Firefox. I have also run Opera, Vivaldi and a few others just to get a sense of what is possible. Why would anyone use only one Browser these days? They each have different strengths and weakenesses and I will pick one over another depending on the web page and service I want to access.

 

If, overtime, there is a complelling reason to change my default browser I suppose I will but I do wonder at the schadenfreude being expressed in among the criticism here and the viriolic attacks of what is, after all, a free service that you don't have to use if you don't like it. I remember when IE6 was the only game in town and there was good reason to get annoyed.  These days I revel in the choice of different browsers and the features being offered across the board. And I happily use Firefox, why not?

[James M Singleton]

I am very surprised to see that the best browser in the world is only used by 16% of the desktop users. I guess because it is slow, leaks memory and less maintenance-free than the other browsers. The new Chrome-like UI seems to have added to the decline. I suspect that the shine will wear off and Chrome users return to Firefox or that new Microsoft browser. I have to use Firefox because of the addons like FireFTP and the customizations. I do use them all and noticed how slow Chrome has become with a cold start. It could be the three extentions slowing down Chrome though. Chrome might be the most advanced browser but, Firefox is still the best in my opinion and for my needs.