Mozilla is trying to innovate and bring new features to Firefox, but the browser continues to lose users. Despite these concerning market trends, the company is actively...
Firefox is a well known browser. People just don’t use it because Chrome offers something else. Firefox has always been a “Chrome lite”, following in their footsteps instead of standing on it’s own terms.
They abandoned their privacy direction, only coming back when it’s beneficial for them to market it. While Chrome sucks for adding features that aren’t standard, Firefox needs to just be quick with it too. It took Firefox forever to add tab groups, something people were asking for all the time.
They are absolutely out of touch with their user base and have no direction. Opera GX targeted the gaming niche and now they have similar market share to Firefox, which is insane. It’s a shit browser, but at least they went for something. Firefox just idles and adds whatever is popular way too late. Nobody wanted AI shit added, why was any development time wasted on it? The engineer is right.
You know what I mean. It was around for 4 years before Chrome, now they have both existed together for 18 years. Firefox was steady for a few years, then Chrome came along and blew it out of the water. Obviously Google pushing it on their main page was the biggest reason for it’s insane adoption, but it was also just the better browser at that point, Mozilla have been doing catch-up ever since and constantly tripping up.
I do agree Chrome was the better browser, hell I switched to it primarily after a few years because of how much faster it was.
I don’t really think that’s the case anymore though, Chrome has been enshittifying for years now, and in my experience, they’re pretty on-par, except of course I can use extensions without the impending doom spectre on Firefox and on mobile.
Exactly. I also swapped, it was just so much better back then.
I use Firefox now, but they don’t seem to know what they want to do with it. Speed wise it’s fast, it’s more private, it has good extension support. I think they could have leaned into features like Firefox Send, added a P2P mode, people would have used a built-in file sharing thing with good support to it. Pocket was nice, maybe they could have evolved it some way.
They just never really tried to give the browser an identity I feel like.
“Why would I swap to Firefox?” All I can say is, it’s more private (after toggling settings off, ugh). Most don’t care about consolidation of the web to one engine.
Most of us caring more about FOSS and privacy, use forks like Librewolf and we will probably all end up on a Servo browser.
They are correct, yes? Firefox 1.0 in 2004, Chrome in 2008. I remember I was in highschool when Firefox came out, in uni when Chrome came out. Seems about right.
firefox was originally phoenix, which was originally the mozilla suite, which was originally netscape. the experience was there from 1999, with the same people behind it.
Firefox is a well known browser. People just don’t use it because Chrome offers something else. Firefox has always been a “Chrome lite”, following in their footsteps instead of standing on it’s own terms.
They abandoned their privacy direction, only coming back when it’s beneficial for them to market it. While Chrome sucks for adding features that aren’t standard, Firefox needs to just be quick with it too. It took Firefox forever to add tab groups, something people were asking for all the time.
They are absolutely out of touch with their user base and have no direction. Opera GX targeted the gaming niche and now they have similar market share to Firefox, which is insane. It’s a shit browser, but at least they went for something. Firefox just idles and adds whatever is popular way too late. Nobody wanted AI shit added, why was any development time wasted on it? The engineer is right.
Always? Firefox existed before Chrome
You know what I mean. It was around for 4 years before Chrome, now they have both existed together for 18 years. Firefox was steady for a few years, then Chrome came along and blew it out of the water. Obviously Google pushing it on their main page was the biggest reason for it’s insane adoption, but it was also just the better browser at that point, Mozilla have been doing catch-up ever since and constantly tripping up.
I do agree Chrome was the better browser, hell I switched to it primarily after a few years because of how much faster it was.
I don’t really think that’s the case anymore though, Chrome has been enshittifying for years now, and in my experience, they’re pretty on-par, except of course I can use extensions without the impending doom spectre on Firefox and on mobile.
Exactly. I also swapped, it was just so much better back then.
I use Firefox now, but they don’t seem to know what they want to do with it. Speed wise it’s fast, it’s more private, it has good extension support. I think they could have leaned into features like Firefox Send, added a P2P mode, people would have used a built-in file sharing thing with good support to it. Pocket was nice, maybe they could have evolved it some way.
They just never really tried to give the browser an identity I feel like.
“Why would I swap to Firefox?” All I can say is, it’s more private (after toggling settings off, ugh). Most don’t care about consolidation of the web to one engine.
Most of us caring more about FOSS and privacy, use forks like Librewolf and we will probably all end up on a Servo browser.
…four? what reality are you from?
They are correct, yes? Firefox 1.0 in 2004, Chrome in 2008. I remember I was in highschool when Firefox came out, in uni when Chrome came out. Seems about right.
firefox was originally phoenix, which was originally the mozilla suite, which was originally netscape. the experience was there from 1999, with the same people behind it.
And Chromium was around since 2006? It’s all semantics and not the main point anyway.
could also go back to khtml if we want, but the chromium beta was pretty rough.
I am aware, I was using Phoenix back in the day. But Firefox version 1.0 came out 4 years before Chrome. They are not loving in an alternate reality.