Why is firefox losing market share? Why don't more people use Firefox?

Maddison@sh.itjust.works to Firefox@lemmy.ml – 511 points –

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?

  1. 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)
  2. It's just not as fast as Chrome or Brave. I can't deny this, but despite of this, I find it's worthy.
  3. It's not the default.
  4. Many features which are Google specific aren't supported.
  5. 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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I do not see any killer feature of Firefox right now. Even the Mozilla's official browser comparison site indicates Microsoft Edge being on par with Firefox, based on Mozilla's own criteria!
This will change in the future. Firefox will be the only major web browser on Android with full-fledged addon support.
I am already using some extensions on Vivaldi (like Consent-o-Matic, some transliteration addons), but this could make me switch to Firefox.

They could also have put in an "Possibility to disable telemetry and tracking from browser vendor"

Support for mv2 uBO is the killer feature of Firefox and its forks.

This, when chrome starts to prevent adblocking, which is coming in the next few months, i predict firefox will see a pretty big uptick in usage.

The killer feature is cookie containers, aka no cross site tracking by default.

Less bloat and the direction of the browser. They've been around forever and they have a consistent track record. Vivaldi is a good example of why it's bad to cram every single feature into a browser creates clutter. Not to mention you're supporting the only non-Chromium browser, which we're seeing the disastrous effects of their monopoly pushing user harmful changes.

Multi account containers is the reason I use Firefox over ungoogled chromium