Firefox dying at just 10% marketshare

By sinetheo
in Web Browser Discussion & Support

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Grand Master

+Eternal Tempest MVC

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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.

 

Safari, Chrome, and latter Oper used web kit.

 

Google forked web kit, removed what they considered redundant / junk code, and branded there engine as "blink". 

Grand Master

seta-san

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I don't take kindly to a man being run out of his job by a bunch of SJWs, who don't measure up to his little toe, that are butthurt about a measly $1000 donation to prop 8 when the majority of Californians supported it too. Go to any website, including this one, and look at it's source code. everytime you see "<script type='text/javascript'>" you need to thank that man.

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Grand Master

+Warwagon MVC

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I like Firefox because I like to be able to have a roboform toolbar instead of a button in the top right. So when I go to a site I can see the matching passcard show up on top so I know i'm on the right (real) site.

Rising Star

Infinione

Posted
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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.

 

Exactly this. I would love to get away from Chrome, it uses a ridiculous amount of memory, and no amount of tweaking seems to improve the startup performance or reduce CPU usage. But I stick with it because of how well it integrates with Google now on android, and the cross platform syncing.

Grand Master

+Red King Subscriber²

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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.

Agree. First time I saw hello I thought "oh great I got malware from somewhere time to ran a virus scan"

Why put trash into the browser?

I use IE11 at home because it is a lot faster than Firefox and runs on more GPUs too.

Spartan might be another nail in Mozilla's coffin.

 

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.

Mozilla was really up its own ass with the whole "NO DRM" / "NO H264" thing.

No one else to blame here.

And yes, Firefox is exceptionally slow when it comes to implementing standard features like 64-bit support and multiprocess tabs.

Firefox will continue to attract old people due to their deal with Yahoo.

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 never seen an advertisement for Firefox. Chrome, yes. Chrome is bundled with everything.

Mozilla should spend a few billion advertising itself IMO. Oh wait... that requires money.

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.

THIS IS A MAJOR POINT. Advertisements in a browser is a SLIPPERY SLOPE.

It screams scumbag and / or we need money to stay afloat because no one cares anymore.

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.

Funny thing is they still have developers like rocallahah or something like that who is a Christian.

 

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.

 

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.

THIS IS ANOTHER MAJOR ISSUE.

Mozilla does not bundle Flash for some reason.

For Windows touch devices Firefox is a NO NO. They actually gave up develping Firefox as a Windows Application.

Grand Master

HawkMan

Posted
Posted

Firefox is as good as it's ever been.  Rock solid, stable & fully customisable.  It also plays nice with everything you throw at it.

 

There's little to dislike about it.

 

"you upgraded or installed an addon, please restart the browser"

Grand Master

+LogicalApex MVC

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"you upgraded or installed an addon, please restart the browser"

Most addons are "no restart" and don't require a restart to install or upgrade...

Grand Master

HawkMan

Posted
Posted

So? 

 

It shouldn't take long for it to restart.  It comes right up.

 

It also disrupts anything I'm doing for somethign that shouldn't require restarting the browser. it's archaic design. 

Most addons are "no restart" and don't require a restart to install or upgrade...

 

every addon I added when I tried FF again a month or so back required a restart, so I just didn't bother with it. 

Veteran

Steve121178

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Posted

It also disrupts anything I'm doing for somethign that shouldn't require restarting the browser. it's archaic design. 

 

As I said above "Restart immediately or when it's convenient.  It always does it in the background anyway unless you force a manual check for updates. "

 

You are using it wrong. 

Grand Master

TAZMINATOR

Posted
Posted

It also disrupts anything I'm doing for somethign that shouldn't require restarting the browser. it's archaic design. 

 

every addon I added when I tried FF again a month or so back required a restart, so I just didn't bother with it.

 

As what Steve said.

 

You don't have to hit restart right away...  you finish surfing the web then hit restart... that's simple.

 

The plugins that need to be restarted can wait and whenever you are ready, HIT button, boom you are done.

 

Depends if you save cookies, history.... then you can restart right away or anytime... then your browser can be restarted and come right up with your web page whatever you left off.

 

Simple.

Grand Master

HawkMan

Posted
Posted

As I said above "Restart immediately or when it's convenient.  It always does it in the background anyway unless you force a manual check for updates. "

 

You are using it wrong. 

 

Oh, so if I install an addon that I need right now, I'll just restart at my convenience.... umm yeah..

Grand Master

Jason S. Global Moderator

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  • Global Moderator
Posted

1. who cares? do you know how many companies would love to have 10% market share?

2. IE dominates b/c the vast majority of people dont know there's another browser available.

3. Safari b/c of iOS

4. Chrome is great, but it's also standard on Android...

 

So what's the point of this article? No one criticizes that America's craft beer accounts for only like 6% of all the beer sold. No one cares that <insert car company> only has some % of the market share...

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Kyang

Posted
Posted

The only thing I hate about Firefox is how bad the "themes" look on Windows 8/8.1.

 

I'm pretty sure they will never, ever, ever, ever, ever fix this.

 

Thankfully, I like the default theme more, and as a basic user, it looks like it's kept pace with the competition well enough in any of the areas I care about/notice/know about.

 

...The_Decryptor's posts in the Firefox Next thread are pretty good morale support too, lol.

Grand Master

Max Norris

Posted
Posted

This is my Firefox on Win10 and I love it!

Ahh DeepDark, using that theme too, one of the better ones for sure.

 

Has the truly worst annoyance of Firefox been mentioned yet? That Flash and other plugins can block hotkeys like CTRL+TAB (e.g. on Youtube) and they still haven't fixed it?

Why use Flash on YouTube? Firefox does HTML 5 video there well enough. For other sites, personally I have an addon called "FlashDisable" that lets me toggle Flash on and off at will, only keeping it around for the one or two sites that I frequent that still uses it.. 99% of the time it's completely disabled though. Wish I could find an addon for Chrome that did similar in a click-and-done fashion. Hopefully in the near future I can get rid of Flash entirely.. getting there.

Guest

Posted
Posted

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.

 

Number of page hits != actual users.

Rising Star

Scar

Posted
Posted

Totally gave up on Firefox at round version 31 after constant freezes and hanging with Flash. Browsing image thumbnails would also freeze and crash the browser. Replaced it with Chrome and can safely say I'm not looking back because I simply can't, Chrome is just too good. It didn't take Chrome forever to release a 64 bit version either.

Grand Master

Praetor

Posted
Posted

wow, lots of FUD in here. I used to use Firefox since (almost) day one, back in the days. But it eventually beamed very sluggish, memory leaks and all that it was mentioned here till death. So i moved to Chrome...

 

But! Recently i had to go back into FF (because i can't use Chrome due to a legal obligation in my job) and i was really surprised to see that most of the issues i had with it were gone (memory leaks, unresponsiveness, poor performance overall). Fact is that FF add-ons are not all the time updated, but since there are several similar ones that is also OK with me. Oh and Chrome right now IS the snail browser; IE11 and FF are much more stable and responsive then Chrome (i use 60 separators in any given time - right now i'm using 92 separators - and FF is just snappy; Chrome would just choke once past 40 separators).

 

TL:DR: FF is right now a very good browser choice.

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