Why is firefox losing market share? Why don't more people use Firefox?
Why is firefox losing market share? Why don't more people use Firefox?
edited the heading of the question. I think most of us here are reasoning why more people are not using firefox (because it was the initial question), but none of that explains why it's actively losing marketshare.
I don't agree ideologically with Firefox management and am somewhat of a semi-conservative (and my previous posts might testify to that), I think Firefox browser is absolutely amazing! It's beautiful and it just feels good. It has awesome features like containers. It's better for privacy than any mainstream browser out there (even counting Brave here) and it has great integration between PC and Phone. It's open-source (unlike Chrome) and it supports a good chunk of extensions you would need.
This was about PC, but I believe even for Mobiles it looks great and it allows features like extensions (and I hear desktop extensions are coming to firefox android?), it's just a great ecosystem and it's available everywhere unlike most FOSS softwares.
So why is Firefox's market share dying?
I mean, I have a few ideas why it might be, maybe correct me I guess?
- Most people don't know how to use extensions well and how to use Firefox well. (Most of my friends in their 30's still live without ad blockers, so I don't think many are educated here)
- It's just not as fast as Chrome or Brave. I can't deny this, but despite of this, I find it's worthy.
- It's not the default.
- Many features which are Google specific aren't supported.
- Many websites are just not supporting firefox anymore (looking at you snapchat), but you would be right in saying this is the effect of Firefox losing it's market share not the cause (at least for now) and you would be right.
But what else?
I might take time (a lot of it) to get back at you, thanks for understanding.
occasionally I’ll find websites that don’t work 100% because they were coded primarily for chromium based browsers. FU Google
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A lot of extensions now seem to be Chrome only (probably because Chrome has so much market share), and from what I looked into there isn't an easy way to use Chrome extensions in FF.
I saw something over the last week starting Firefox had implemented install chrome extensions. Think there are some caveats
"select extensions" I hate this patronizing shit so much. They kill off startpages, they make it impossible to install unsigned extensions. There has to be a better way to protect users from malware than acting like this is not my computer and the software on it isn't mine to do what I want with.
FYI, AFAIK this isnt so much about protonizing users than about a technologie switch on android and then having to re-add necessary functionality ... and doing that while the web-extension api ist still changing.
Think of the malware protection as more of a sideeffect of the general design choices in regards to the web-extension API.
Hope this info helps or is at least a little interesting.
this isnt so much about protonizing users than about a technologie switch on android and then having to re-add necessary functionality
I'm going to disagree there. It's been possible to add more extensions in the unstable nightly builds since just after the change, but requires having a Mozilla account and jumping through some hoops. Iceraven, a third-party build removes some of the hoops, and indeed many extensions not specifically built with Android in mind work just fine.
I can't guess what Mozilla is actually thinking here, but it's not true that it isn't or wasn't technically feasible to allow installation of arbitrary extensions on Firefox for Android following the rewrite.
It’s been possible to add more extensions in the unstable nightly builds since just after the change
possible yes ... but as you might have notices many many more addons even those with a large userbase dont work or dont work properly because of the mentioned missing APIs or other issues. And i absolutely understand that mozilla did not want to expose this situation to "normal users" who would likely easily assume some failure/error on firefox part for not working with the extensions. So keeping this feature behind a "small" barrier (collection and nightly) until those issuse could be properly addressed seems to have been a wise decision, if you look at it like that.
mozilla did not want to expose this situation to “normal users”
That's patronizing.
A checkbox to enable full extensions support and a clickthrough warning on anything that didn't explicitly support the new version for Android would have been more than adequate.
patronizing
def. : showing or characterized by a superior attitude towards others
i dont see any indication for a "superior attitude" ... and i personally agree with you that it would have been nice to have easier access to the incomplete feature ... but looking at it from mozillas viewpoint i guess you could also argue that by not making it "to easy" ... they made sure that many people did not run into the frustrating situation of non-functional addons. i mean if it was as easy as toggeling a switch in settings or about:config ... many normal people would follow some tech article blog post and just flip the switch and forget even that they did. Requiring a bit more effort ... might actually be a smart decision.
I'm going to call an app developer saying "users are not sophisticated enough to make good decisions about add-ons even if we warn them about incompatibility" as showing a superior attitude toward users.
Ultimately, my objection to how they handled it isn't that some effort was required to install extensions. Instead, it's that:
- It requires an account. There's no good reason for it to work that way, and it's antithetical to the goals of privacy and anonymity that Mozilla otherwise seems to support.
- For years, there was no roadmap for broader extension support, leading developers to not waste effort on making extensions compatible.
I’m going to call an app developer saying “users are not sophisticated enough to make good decisions about add-ons even if we warn them about incompatibility” as showing a superior attitude toward users.
That does indeed not sound very diplomatic ... but i dont remember seeing that quote anywhere. Do you have a source?
It requires an account.
Well, if i remember correctly you only need an account if you want to install extensions on stable. If you use the nightly or beta builds, i think you dont. But please correct me if i am wrong here. I might be mixing this up.
For years, there was no roadmap for broader extension support,
well ... the thing with the roadmap ... is kind of a long standing issue with fiefox products .. from other dicussions i've seen and had i have gathered the opinion that mozilla has intentionally been getting very careful with posting any kind of roadmaps ... with anything besides very vague milestones ... and the only 2 reason i and other people seemed to are because they just wanted to be careful about making promises they might not be able to keep and prevent other from arguing about the roadmap decisions. And i know a lot of people in the community have very strong opinions and get easily angry ... so going with not having a roadmap also seems like a reasonable decisions to keep fallouts/fights from happening. - Mostly guessing here ... but its the best explaination i could come up with ... maybe i am completely wrong and the is actually another or actually no reason ... but i kind of doubt that.
i dont remember seeing that quote anywhere
It's not a quote. It's what their decisions say to me. I don't think we're likely to come to an agreement about whether their decisions were patronizing, and that's fine - it's a matter of opinion more than objective fact.
if i remember correctly you only need an account if you want to install extensions on stable
That's not correct. Stable doesn't allow it at all, and an account is required for nightly.
As for a roadmap, saying the intend to open up extension support soon isn't that big a promise since the support already exists and is just locked out by default.
If they're planning on expanding it ultimately then it's not so bad I guess