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

"Most people" probably can't name the browser they use. They just open "the internet" on whatever device they're on.

I've never experienced any slowness with Firefox, so I don't know what people are talking about. But Chrome is still the default browser on Android and I guess it's the major reason why people are installing Chrome on their computer.

Because not only do you (the end user) have to go out of your way to get it, but you get spammed by Microsoft/Edge and Google/Chrome to install a "faster" and "more secure" browser. Additionally, on the mobile side, Apple is preventing all iPhone/iPad users from picking a real alternative browser that isn't just webkit re-skinned, putting half the population at a disadvantage and to their own corporate interests.

I think you think too much, most people just want a browser that works and they have one preinstalled on their phone / computer. So when you arrive and recommend Firefox they just hear "Hey ! You have a browser that works, why won't you spend time installing this one that works just as fine, I swear".

Extensions and privacy might look like killer features but they are a bit too abstract to be adoption arguments (why would you even need extensions if your browser is so good).

Spent twenty years burning out every committed advocate with broken extensions, UI whack-a-mole, random half-baked corporate decisions, and finally just giving up and being "like Chrome but."

Meanwhile Google engages in blatant anti-competitive behavior to claw ever more market-share away from everything and everyone, and American politics are too much of a dumpster fire to stop them.

Literally the only other browsers that are other browsers are Firefox and Safari, and people only use Safari because iOS is a prison. iPhone users will insist their reskinned Safari webview is-too Firefox or Chrome or whatever, and then wonder why anyone makes a big deal about browsers when everything they've tried works exactly the same.

I used to use Firefox before Chrome came out, because it was better than IE. When Chrome came out it was a breath of fresh air. A real third option! (konqueror didn't really count). And it was faster, cleaner, lighter than Firefox. Just better at everything. So I installed it on all of my family's computers, which they allowed me to do because IE by then was so bad it was an obvious improvement even for the layman.

Then in the intervening years Firefox dwindled to basically no market share and IE died, so now Chrome isn't a third option, it's the only option. And so I switched back to Firefox basically as a political sacrifice, but there's no way I'm going to be able to convince any of my family to switch because Firefox isn't better for them in any perceivable way. It's just different and they don't care. If Firefox had 30% market share I'd almost definitely be using Chromium still myself.

So probably that, but a million times. There was a period where every nerd moved all their associated people to Chrome because it was new, great, and non-dominant. It was hip and indie. And now they're still there and there's no reason for them to move that they care about.

Firefox being slow has almost nothing to do with Mozilla's incompetence or the browser's inability to handle websites.

When devs build websites, they usually build them for the most popular browser, aka Chrome. They couldn't be bothered to help the minority of people who use Firefox. Also, cost. Building a website to work with 2 different engines is more expensive than building it for just one engine that'll work for 99% of users. That's why a lot of banking websites never support FF.

Another primary reason is Google's Monopoly. Almost everyone uses some Google service or another. Google's websites are tailored to perfectly fit Chromium, not FF. This is why you'll sometimes see websites break or even crash. YouTube's recent ambient mode made the site choke quite a lot on FF. An average Joe ain't got the knowledge to know or even troubleshoot the issue and they'll just shift to Chromium, where everything just works.

Firefox is not a worse browser, it's just the lack of visibility. You have to want to install Firefox to try it, the only exception I know it's in Linux where most of the time it's the default browser. Google Chrome, on the other hand, is promoted each time you search anything in Google without Google Chrome.

Declining market share and dying are not at all the same thing. Remember that FOSS can survive without resources tha M$ and ABC have.

Anyway, what do you mean you're conservative? I don't understand at all. What values pushed you to what browsers? Laziness and defaults, maybe, but that's a different position.

Firefox does not have a way to force them into it.

• ChromeOS - Chrome only. Default. Google.com beggs you to get an account and try Chrome. Android, comes with Android preinstalled.
• Windows - Annoying Try Edge popup force them during boot. Bing Chat is Edge Only.

I was using Firefox before Chrome when it took significant market share from Internet Explorer.

In my view a large reason was corporations made the (IMO) big mistake of using Chrome for applications and as a browser.

It’s the classic Microsoft effect of people get comfortable using it at work and then don’t change.

It also doesn’t hurt that Chrome is tied to the majority of smart phones.

I use Firefox everywhere, but there are a few main issues that stop me from converting people...

• The lack of tab groups. This seems silly, but most people I know, especially on mobile, keep a lot of tabs open. If they're researching something, or shopping for something they'll leave 20 tabs open. Having that in one tab group in Chrome is a better way to organize than just tons of tabs.
• Sites that don't work well on Firefox. Again, specifically on mobile I run into sites that work on Chrome but not on Firefox.
• General stability issues. I need to force close Firefox once or twice a day because it will just fail to load pages.

Firefox was long the No 2 browser, then Chrome came along at the time that Google was cool and they actually marketed it with TV ads. It looked cooler and more modern, it had some innovative features... Firefox never recovered

Old timer here.

In the old days Microsoft essentially conquered the web by creating specialized features only available for their web browser.

This is the reason why we still suffer with IE compatibility mode in Edge. A lot of corporations still have systems that rely on clients being IE compatible.

Google essentially does the same with their services and Chrome.

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.

I work in IT and had to abandon Firefox because of compatibility issues that came up on a regular basis. it appears companies are simply not using it as part of their QA anymore. Also, in general the GUI theming has issues for me with the font and distinguishing highlights with my crappy vision. I tried every theme out there and for some reason apparently people writing themes just don't care to make it so you can see what is highlighted and what is not. Even The default theme sucks in my opinion. There were a number of other nits that I just kept having issues with - getting prompted on eBay to verify my identity for no reason, repeatedly, which doesn't happen on chromium and stuff like that.

I wish Apple would adopt the Firefox rendering engine and take Safari cross platform. It would give Firefox a fighting chance at the overall market.

Number 3 is by far the most important, because most people just don't think about what web browser they're using. A lot of people don't even think about web browsers at all. They just think of the web browser app as "the internet", and that's it.

Firefox is honestly just kinda always lagging behind on supporting features. If you want to use the latest tech, Chrome is always first to have it.

One that irks me a lot of the lack of any proper PWA support. On both mobile and desktop, you can install websites as apps, and they behave like apps. Slack, Discord, Spotify, YouTube Music, and a whole bunch of others you can install as a PWA and they look just like their desktop counterparts but much lighter, they're sandboxed and safer to use, and generally perform well. You click an external link on Slack as a PWA? It opens in a new regular browser window. Push notifications get routed to the correct window when you click/tap on it.

Firefox can do that with extremely hacky extensions on desktop, and just can't on mobile. Best it can do is make a shortcut. But if you receive a notification it opens it in a new tab in the browser, it's just not nearly as good of an experience.

I rely a lot on PWAs like The Lounge to use IRC as my primary messaging app. I could wrap it in a dummy Cordova app or something but then it's still running Chrome under the hood anyway, because Firefox also doesn't support being Android's WebView plugin.

That's changing but Firefox on mobile currently only supports like a dozen extensions and that's it, you can't even force install them unless you run nightly builds.

Firefox's engine was also extremely laggy on mobile but that fortunately has also improved a fair bit recently.

Then there's all the useless features literally nobody asked for like Pocket, sponsored links in the new tab page, Mozilla VPN, and other addons they bought over time with questionable privacy policies. Just make the browser good before you venture into other bloatware.

Firefox just hasn't had any reason to be used in recent years other than not being related to Google/Chromium. And even then, we've had ungoogled Chromium forks since the beginning. It's the political party you picked for the sake of being against the other worse one.

Internet Explorer / Edge is not complete garbage anymore, that's not helping for sure. Also, there was a period where Firefox was actually kinda lacking. That's in the past since the "Quantum" update I'd say.

I have been using FF for at least 10 years. Tried many of the others. Always come back.

I have told others about it but people rarely make the change even if they see it is better....

It's fast enough on any remotely modern hardware.

Personally I love the ability to still pimp it out with style sheets.

And yeah, Mozilla has so many, many problems. In many ways they have become Google's pet, IMO. But most importantly they are not Google.

I think when Chrome came out Google was still a cool, hip company and Chrome fixed a lot of issues Firefox had. I used it for years. So they managed to become the normie cultural default. These people are hard to change habit-wise.

I could be wrong though. Just sort of thinking out loud.

Firefox is kinda like Linux in my opinion. Yes, some games might not run on linux and some games don't run as good as on windows, but most run just fine. But since I don't use windows I don't know the difference and so I don't care about it either. Same thing with firefox, chrome might do x better, but then I have not used it in years so I just don't care about it. Blissful ignorance I suppose? Either way I am happy with linux and firefox since both have not only downsides, but plenty advantages too in my opinion.

I'd guess that:

• Google is a bigger brand that attracts many people as a lot of them are already using some of the company's products
• These other products are well integrated with the browser: browser history is shared across devices along with passwords and extensions
• Google advertises Chrome in the Google Search, it's a default search engine even in Firefox

Most people are not tech savvy and/or privacy-oriented.

Why make the effort to switch to Firefox, if the browser that came installed with your device works?

Or, more realistically, people don't even grok the concept of a web browser.

Firefox on Android removed the feature to open local html files. No, I'm not interested in running a webserver on a phone for local files lol.

Switched to Vivaldi.

Back when IE was on top and Firefox was the best browser, firefox started to put a lot of bad updates, then chrome came, it was faster and firefox started to lose its marketshare, for while firefox only peformed well on linux, by the time quantum came out and it's performance was good on windows again, Chrome was already the new IE, but Google is way better at managing this leadership it than Microsoft ever was, the only technical problem it has is devouring RAM.

In my opinion, gecko being so tied to the browser is also a problem. There's a ton of browsers using Blink, that gives google a lot of control over how the web will evolve. Having other browsers using gecko that aren't Firefox forks would be great.

One reason is that if you use Gmail, every two weeks appears a "y u no use chrome" nag popup that can't be permanently dismissed

I've used Firefox for years and I love it on Android, but on my work laptop (MacBook) I really enjoy using Arc. The vertical tabs let me organise things better, the spaces let me isolate tabs properly in a visually pleasing way, and I don't really care for extensions on desktop as I don't really browse much outside of work. I also prefer chromium dev tools, though it isn't that bad to switch to Firefox's dev tools.

If Firefox adopts few features from Arc, both in form and function, I wouldn't mind coming back. I know sidebar exists which lets you have vertical tabs via extensions, but damn Arc does it the best so far, natively!

Edit: oh, another reason was lack of background blur effects for Google meet. It's coming soon I think (I filed it on bugzilla), but damn it was needed like 3 years ago.

For me, until all below are supported Firefox can't be my primary browser.

1. PWA not supported and only possible with FirefoxPWA. I can't rely to anything but native, Mozilla could break FirefoxPWA any time they want.
2. I use my browser for my multimedia needs and I use my own Emby Server. Firefox doesn't support mkv container and the most important it desn't support HEVC. Please do not tell me about HEVC royalties and how much Mozilla would have to pay MPEG-LA. Chromium based browsers have enabled hardware HEVC decoding and they pay nothing to MPEG-LA because the royalties have been already payed by my graphics card. Mozilla simply doesn't care.

Websites glitch out more often on Firefox. I had my favorite Mastodon instance not letting me scroll back up because of some weird jittering bug that only applies to Firefox for some reason.

Photoshop Web (Beta) only supports Chromium-based browsers, Descript only supports Chromium-based browsers (well, Firefox still seems to work but you're on your own), and many new webapps are only supporting Chromium-based browsers. Now, these are beta products, so that might change, but it seems unlikely. So I've been switching to Chromium-based browsers to use some of these apps, but I'd really rather not. It's the way everything is going, unfortunately.

A lot of developers target the web because it means they can have one codebase that is supported on multiple operating systems. Imagine how much harder it would be to develop a macOS, ChromeOS and GNU/Linux version in concert with the Windows version. In reality, some browser engines support more web features than others, and Google has by far the most resources to keep up with those standards. So Firefox is an afterthought. Google Chrome is on every operating system worth supporting anyway, so why bother supporting another browser? It's a lot less work and testing.

MDN is the best place to read about those standards, though.

I like Firefox:

• userChrome.css lets me make Firefox look like a GNOME program
• I much prefer the developer tools. Everything is a lot easier. I always use Firefox when doing web development.
• I can easily customize the browser. For me, this means having a separate dedicated URL bar and search engine bar.
  • The search engine bar lets me swap between search engines very quickly and keep my previous search terms for new tabs. Switching search engines is really annoying in Chromium-based browsers because you need to use shortcuts, and there's no autocomplete for shortcuts. It also doesn't tell you whether you typed the shortcut correctly, so you're guessing every time! It's really under-developed. The Android Chromium-based browsers are even worse. You can't change search engines at all when searching; you need to change your default engine. Firefox lets you search any search engine easily on iOS, and slightly less easily on Android.
• I can...turn off history? Apparently this is an amazingly complex feature that Chromium-based browsers just can't handle. The best you can do is clear it when exiting, but you can't just turn history off.

Okay, it's mostly the search engine thing, to be honest.

But Firefox still doesn't use the new GNOME thumbnail view when you're uploading files, for example...

I didn't find the performance gap really high when I switched from Chromium to Firefox. Even on my shitty old laptop, Firefox works fine. I have to admit though that it uses way too much memory.

I do agree with your 3rd point though. History has taught us that defaults matter a lot. Firefox isn't a default anywhere apart from linux distros and FirefoxOS was a failure.

If you've been on youtube for the past 6 months or so, there were a lot of OperaGX sponsorships given to large creators and a decent majority of people have used it, liked it, and started recommending it to others via youtube comments.

There's also the fact that chrome is the browser that, at least here, is the most well known at this point and is usually preinstalled on school computers, so this builds up familiarity.

And probably a smaller reason why is because mozilla itself - it hasn't been that great of a company and the firefox over the years has gotten somewhat worse and worse.

I still miss the print a webpage to pdf on mobile firefox.

Because the U.S. government used the 2001 Microsoft Internet Explorer Antitrust hearings to blackmail Microsoft into government servitude: implanting NSA backdoors, not patching vulnerabilities, disabling system administration tools, constantly hiding or moving useful features. Remember from the Snowden leaks that the NSA's favorite prey is the System and/or Network Administrator who holds all the keys? But what about the guy that makes the keys, wouldn't he be the biggest prey?

On my private PC I use firefox on my work laptop I use chrome. The gmail and gdrive integration just makes it easier.

Still on my private I have to switch to chrome for a few things because it just has more storage

I use Firefox. The only thing I don't like about it is that Duck duck go isn't a terribly accurate search engine compared to Google.

Number 2 for me. And it's noticeable. I'd love to use it, but I just can't ignore the performance difference.

2. It's actually faster than Chromium in recent build benchmarks. Firefox runs JS faster.

I'm not so obsessed with foss, just use what is most convenient and Firefox turned up not to be it

Shockingly, a lot of people have no clue how extension works, but Firefox will eventually sell out, they all do.

Sadly, on pc many ppl that are not tech savvy assimilate internet to google chrome, I had some cases where they asked me "I want to install internet" when they means I want to install chrome to browse internet. I remember when chrome became more known by 2009/2010 Firefox had some issues, it crashes frequently and it was a bit slower, so people who found chrome faster adopted it fastly and it was more and more recommended. In my case I'm using FF since 2006 and I never stopped.

Because Mozilla sucks as a company. They should be coming up with new ways to promote Firefox. Instead they are just getting paid by google and selling vpns

Firefox boot slower on Android. Webkit-based browsers boot much faster. I think they make use of some preloading of the browser itself.

I think a lot comes down to preinstalled SW on phones (Chrome/Safari) and the enterprise world. My rather large employer just switched from FF preinstalled to Edge for all work devices since it alreadz comes with Windows.

Maybe Firefox is missing a really compelling enterprise offering for Desktops? Everybody less savvy is on mobile anyways, which is dominated by the Duopoly Apple/Google.

I use Firefox, but it has been becoming a chore.

Specifically on Android, randomly it'll just not load a page or change tabs. It'll also randomly just lose the entire DOM and only render a black screen.

I still put up with it but I'm hoping they can focus on UX quirks a little more.

Hashtag late but Firefox’s main downsides is that it’s tab flushing sucks compared to Edge, and there’s no native vertical tabs.

In Edge, if a tab is put to sleep, clicking it again does not require a full refresh. Why does it need to completely reload in Firefox?

I’m aware there’s extensions for tab groups and vertical tabs (I’m using Simple Tab Groups), but it should be a natively supported feature.

Add that to the fact that Firefox is now the web developer equivalent of IE6 circa 2010 - minuscule user base and requires weird hacks to get websites to look good on it - and you got a recipe for people not wanting to use it.

Also lying about being the privacy focused browser when it has a bunch of telemetry and a bundled sponsored extension I had to look up how to get rid of, that part sucks too.

I have no doubt that the second that FF gains a sizeable market share they will just turn in to literally every other corporation that has ever existed. They're not special, they're not your friend. They are selling a product to make money. And while they're struggling, they are working their asses off to make a good product that beats the alternatives.

So until FF announced their intention to DC, I'm not telling a fucking soul.

Too many bad UX updates. I won’t go back to a browser without vertical tabs.

almost no one cares about what Firefox adds, the convenience and trust Google got pretty much got everyone i think

Corporations hate freedom. Imagine that.

For me it's a silly issue, they don't let me customize my homepage and let set extensions like tabliss on homepage on android such a basic feature yet not available also external download manager implementation on android is horrible

UI is worse, performance is mostly a bit slower, the morals seem cloudy sometimes.
and.. the biggest one: PEOPLE ARE APATHETIC

I install chrome on a computer and log in, I'm immediately connected to my calendar, email, cloud storage, remote desktop, documents, and my login info is synced floor all the other things I do and will auto login for me on a large number of those sites. In short it saves me a crazy amount of time.

normies i guess but i probably fit into the normie category somewhat

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.

Because I think people are used to Chrome.

That being said, I used Edge till November 2022, before the Manifest V3 change.

Ever since the first release, I've tried Firefox a few times. Each time I was left with a feeling of needing dozens of extensions to get it up to par with the browser I was using at the time (mainly Opera and now Vivaldi). The extensions I found were never customisable enough, and would often break and/or be abandoned after a while.

Don't get me wrong: Chrome, IE, Edge, and Safari are worse - each time I used them I got the urge to throw my computer out the window after just a few minutes. But Firefox is just not customisable enough to my liking, and extension are IMO not the answer.

I actually switched away from Firefox to Vivaldi a few months ago mainly for 2 reasons.

1. Firefox's profiles are dogshit. They are almost a hidden feature and are very cumbersome to use.

2. The Android browser support for certain types of extensions is dodgy. Using uBlock Origin delays the loading of all webpages by a few seconds for some reason. There is a Github issue about this that has been open for a few years now.

I want the browser I use to be on both Android and desktop. Vivaldi has been OK so far.

I do miss a lot of the good stuff from Firefox, especially their address bar. For some reason I find it much better than anything on Chromium based browsers. Firefox's is much snappier and is correct with it's suggestions the majority of the time.

I also like Firefox's sync between devices to be much better.

When those 2 issues are resolved I will come back, but as it stands now it's a hassle for my needs.

The thing with Firefox is that it's not the best at performance, especially on phones where the browser can be laggy. I use Ungoogled Chromium instead which is Chrome without Google and some nice tweaks !

Firefox is far from the best for privacy. There are a ton of Firefox forks that add a ton of privacy. If you care about privacy, you use one of those. If you don't care about privacy you use Chrome or Chromium (functionally superior) so it's not too complicated.

Firefox on android is terrible. The UI is awful (how hard is to create a usable bookmark system?) and forced opening a new tab are my two pet peeves. Also, it is much, much slower than a chromium based browser in my experience and seems to take a lot more memory. Also, occasionally I'll find websites that don't work 100% because they were coded primarily for chromium based browsers. FU Google.

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)

All browsers have extensions, even Safari. This has nothing to do with FF particularly

It’s just not as fast as Chrome or Brave. I can’t deny this, but despite of this, I find it’s worthy.

Firefox is now a memory hog as bad as Chrome, but doesn't offer speed and responsiveness, which is kind of a shitty trade-off

It’s not the default.

Neither is Chrome, yet people actively download and install it.

Many features which are Google specific aren’t supported.

True

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.

True

Because Librewolf is better

Cuz frankly, they dum

They use whatevers already on their phone/computer. Most non-tech savvy people likely use iPhone.

Thank Mozilla for this. They're too busy with other shit and between feature removals and crappy UI changes, they've managed to loose a huge amount of users. I used to be one of them. Now I wouldn't touch FF with a 10 feet pole. I simply refuse to give Mozilla more visibility.

Firefox lost it's shares to normies because it was bad. Then it lost shares of tinkers because it moved extension, user agent and so on to chromium. Small market shares means developers don't give a damn about testing on firefox. Firefox doesn't show correctly pages and has no good support for pwa, microsoft teams etc. Chromium invents new things wich only edge and chrome have/support. Normies use browser wich just work out of the box for work and pleasure. It's a circle. You can tinker with your niche browser but massed decides what is what. Chrome/Edge are just better for every day use. Simple as that.*

I suppose I never considered switching off of Chrome because I didn’t need my browser to do anything better for me. I’ve always been fine with Chrome’s speed, the UI is nice, and in general I don’t experience any issues with it.

Despite the memes, Firefox was the one which decided it wanted to deep throat 30gb of my ram by default for no discernable reason so I stopped using it. Only extentions I had installed were ad block and the reddit enchantment suite. Since then I've been really enjoying the video pop out of opera.

1. It doesn't have native integration for features some people find incredibly useful. For example, tab stacking and the eternally useful side bar of Opera/Vivaldi. These features are hand waived away by FF fans but to those that find them integral it's worth staying on a browser that doesn't require bloating it up with extensions just to replicate the baked in features of another offering.

2. People are starting to realize that all the "Mozilla is the hero in the fight against chromium!" Bullshit is really just talking points since they're funded primarily by Google. Taking the bite out of any moral arguments to use it. Convincing the couple hundred thousand fediversians to switch would be consider a rounding error in the global user base of chrome, and the future of the web will continue to evolve as browser suppliers find ways of circumventing whatever crap Google cooks up. Nothing is ever "the end." As long as software exists something will be designed to crack it.

3. You sound like an AI generated Firefox Ad.