Per the article, this is irrelevant. The case being made is that the figure seen by the government falling under 2%, which it is getting close to, will trigger a chain-reaction of consequences that will dramatically hurt Firefox, and it's not clear if Mozilla, the organization, could weather that.
It doesn't particularly matter whether or not the figure is accurate in that context. Maybe that can be fixed easily by having Firefox contextually relax tracking a bit or by having the government change how they perform the tracking, but the status quo is not really sustainable. And that's really all the article is saying at the end of the day.
I work in govt tech, we already internally do not care about FF support at all and only really look to chrome based browsers (chrome edge mostly) and safari. Many people don't even know what it is anymore, seems like time killed this browser too. Mozilla spending too much time/money and other crap over the years
USDS aren’t idiots, and if they haven’t realised this yet then maybe this post will focus attention. They want to support every citizen it’s reasonable to support (or at least I did when I was working for GOV.UK) and dropping support from a lack of knowledge shouldn’t be on the agenda.
Per the article, this is irrelevant. The case being made is that the figure seen by the government falling under 2%, which it is getting close to
So, the default position of the government is, "If we can't surveil you, we can't help you?" (Or taken the other way, you want us to help you? Let us surveil you!) This seems to be how it works out in practice, just because of favorable economics in mass surveillance. Example: RFID and license plate readers for toll collection. Various registrations with government agencies are another example.
Well, if the world including whatever governments, institutions, groups, interests, companies, FOSS projects, OS distros, etc... all want to depend only on Chromium, then fine.
If Mozilla can't even play this card, then they should really just shut down.
Or, maybe, like Wikpedia, they should stop begging for more-more-more, and spend what they get wisely.
Not to mention, they could simply start bug bounties and/or crowdfunding for actual deliverables and/or services (ie. a security team).
And if all this fails, then it fails. Maybe we'll simply get a Firemium or Chromefox/fix whatever the name. A fork where adblock works.
“Enhanced Tracking Protection” is a poor name: it’s not just one thing, but has two modes: Standard and Strict. (There’s also Custom, which lets you go somewhere between the two, or restrict cookies even more tightly.)
The default is Standard. It doesn’t block GA. The cynic in me suggests they decided making Firefox disappear altogether from popular stats by default would have harmed them more than not doing it harms their users, or that the backlash would be too great for their liking.
Sources like Google Analytics and Statcounter are still chronically undercounting minority browsers and platforms, which are much more likely to block these sorts of things, and Firefox and Linux will be particularly heavily hit, but I’m sure the difference it makes isn’t as large as I’d like it to be.
The US government's page it uses to track web browser usage uses an analytics engine made by a company that makes its own web browser? That sounds like a pretty big issue!
What stood out to me was that they didn't break out mobile from PC. The mobile landscape dominates usage these days and extremely few people make an active choice in browser there. The presented stats to me reads more like Android vs iPhone than it does Chrome vs everyone else.
If that's the case there would be a sudden decrease in the market share graph around 2019 (although that graph is from Statscounter which has Firefox currently sitting at around 3.2%).
The decline has already been happening since around 2010 without any drastic ups or downs.
Do you anticipate the losses are due to people with aging machines upgrading and using a different browser? As a very happy Firefox user, I have a very hard time believing it's because people find the experience to be poor. I feel as if the losses you are describing have to be losses to defaults on new devices and people that fairly don't care enough to change them.
The desktop is virtually dead for any "normal" user, and their Android or Apple tablet/phone don't prompt them with a choice (other vendor constraints notwithstanding). It's not remotely a fair fight. You are guaranteed to lose users for reasons totally outside your control.
Do you have a source for a more accurate picture of Firefox' market share? Every single report I've seen shows the same thing: long downward trend and a tiny fraction of the usage of Chrome and Safari.
Just to add some anecdata, we have both Google Analytics (if you accept the GDPR tracking request…) and our own internal statistics based purely on useragents. Here are some percentages for November (this is Germany, generally far higher FF usage)
Ours:
Chrome 37.4%
Firefox 24.7%
Safari 21.1%
Edge 7.5%
Opera 2.6%
My programming blog (https://thecodist.com) sees Chrome 52%, Safari 27%, Firefox 9%, over six months covering a fair amount of the world. I use Plausible. I never found GA to be very reliable.
If this is the case, it seems that they need to recode the Enhanced Tracking Protection for GA to ensure that they get flagged as FFox.
Might also be useful to have a plug-in to make a daily 'ping'/check-in from FFox to any govt sites used by their users. E.g., I use USPS and SBA/SBIR sites, but only occasionally or monthly, but if most FFox users who did so got logged more like daily instead of ~fortnightly or ~monthly, it'd improve the numbers. (Obviously, also must be done carefully so as to not get wholesale discounted).
The cascade effect of the US Govt abandoning support would be catastrophic, likely terminal, which would be bad for everyone.
I switched over after the Manifest v3 debacle, and after a couple of months, I wonder if the implications of using a browser with a lower market share are overblown.
I haven't encountered any site that misbehaves, and the only missing feature so far is within the Google Drive web app because it uses a Chrome-only extension [1].
Maybe the ongoing standardization of the web shows its effects here, and using a standard-conform niche browser is not that bad anymore.
In my experience there are almost never issues. Standardization has gotten much better, and as a web developer I appreciate all the effort the various browser teams have put into ensuring common behavior.
The effort of "supporting Firefox" as a developer is basically opening the app in Firefox and confirming that it works, which it basically always does because the app is built on standardized web features. (Other types of support might be different. e.g maybe you have help doc that tells your users how to clear the site cookies. Do you also want to write instructions for Firefox, Safari, Opera etc?)
The bigger concern is that some day Google might not need web standards. If developers target Chrome rather than the web platform, Google has free reign and no longer needs to compromise with Apple and Mozilla. For example, Mozilla's veto of the controversial Topics API would hold little weight if nobody cares about Firefox support. If Chrome gets to a dominant enough position it could move from embracing to extending quite quickly.
People have different opinions on Google, but even those who believe Google has no ill intentions still feel better if there are some checks and balances. Were Firefox to become obsolete, Apple would be the last one standing. And with the DMA, some are predicting that Safari could soon follow Firefox's decline.
The concern is that the standardization process for the web stack these days consists mostly of the big guys (Google especially) throwing out a draft standard, which then slowly undergoes standardization process even as it is already getting used on the web because devs like new & shiny and/or because the added features genuinely do make something simpler. There aren't that many sites that actively break on Firefox because of this, and when they do, it's usually a temporary thing until they catch up, but as you rightly note, this is largely because devs are still forced to contend with users of other browsers. And the more popular Chrome is, the less of a forcing function that becomes, and the more whatever "draft standard" proposals are in Blink become the de facto standard.
I have had several sites refuse to work properly (American Airlines maybe? It was some airline) with every single add-in disabled and with every security feature I could find disabled.
I am with you that it's super rare, I have only had to open chrome due to it being that bad a few times, usually I just need to disable javascript blocking or enable more cookies. But there are legitimately sites that are just so badly written that they won't take your money if you use Firefox.
I guess Google meet has frozen video for me on Firefox, but I expect Google to intentionally break their website for people not using Chrome after the "DRM Website" thing struck them as a great idea. Using Google products at this point is just asking for more lockin when we should really all know better. At least Zoom is a different company from Google...
But overblown for sure, if I disable javascript blocking and cookie autodelete and temporary containers that keep the site from realizing I already logged in -- pretty reasonable issues -- 99.99% of the issues I have vanish.
Same for me! I have been always using Firefox as my main browser for at least 15 years and never had any problems. Actually, I don't really understand why so many tech-savvy people continue to use Chrome... Just switch to Firefox, for foxs sake!
Part of it is that there are some genuine technical advantages to be had from Blink-based browsers. Most notably, tab process isolation: one tab crashing (and they do crash) generally doesn't bring the whole process down.
There's also UX. Right now I can have proper vertical tabs in Edge by changing a single prominent option in settings, but Firefox is still dragging their feet (yes, I know there are extensions for this, but they add a vertical tab bar in addition to the standard horizontal one, because you can't hide the latter without hacks).
OTOH Firefox has containers, which is arguably a lot more important if you care about online privacy in any serious way. But people don't like to trade away their convenience, especially once they already got used to it.
What we desperately need is a browser based around Firefox implementation of web standards and with all the privacy bells and whistles, but also UI that doesn't constantly tell users that they are "holding it wrong".
Over the last year or so various websites have mysteriously walled me off with 403s and 5xxs only when I use Firefox. I suspect that merely using a less popular browser is tripping some attempted security measure.
I agree it seems overblown. I haven't encountered a site that doesn't work. Even google meet and zoom's web client work great.
Not sure what all the fuss is about. It's a great browser. Chrome got very, very aggravating and I've had no problems since switching maybe 4 years ago. Even FF mobile works well.
One problem I have is that screen-sharing doesn't work in Messenger video chat. I have to switch to Chromium for that to work, so I have to remember to start the chat in Chromium instead of FF where I have a Messenger tab pinned.
Not sure how so many in the thread are using FF problem-free? In the past few years I've encountered more and more sites that don't work properly with FF. Most of the issues are around modals that won't dismiss or even display at all. Other issues I can't identify, but the site becomes unresponsive or some content won't load. I think the Ticketmaster ticket selection page was the last one I couldn't use at all with FF. My cable company's site became Chromium only sometime this year and it still is.
Sometimes the cause is uBlock Origin, so I always try turning it off and refreshing. Rarely it's due to enhanced tracking protection. A few times I restarted FF in safe mode to rule out add-ins. It's always just FF.
I had a problem with a shopping web-site the other day. I disabled uBlock origin, and then all extensions, but it still refused to work. I thought I'd finally found one of these mythical "Chrome-only" sites, but no - exactly the same broken site in Chrome, so the site was just totally broken. Nothing to do with FF.
Same here. I used to have more FF problems with .gov sites but in the past 2-3 years, rarely. Now & then I have to manipulate NoScript or uBlock to get some feature working on most sites.
But most of the time, I'd rather ignore those sites anyway. After I have a look at them ... which I tend to do after NoScript show me the huge list of crap they expect me to load just for the 'privilege'. Good developers/orgs just don't do that. Most go into a 'Block list' I mostly use to remind myself not to bother trying. I take my business elsewhere.
Speaking as a library developer, Firefox is expensive for us to support in https://replicache.dev and https://reflect.net due to lots of long-open bugs, particularly in the storage system. Firefox also generally has the slowest performance which affects us.
I'm not bagging on the team, it's frankly amazing they've been able to mostly keep up, it's just a fact that maintaining a competitive web browser is a gargantuan task that requires a large team and investment.
When people say firefox is more performant than other browsers, they mean to say you can use actual powerful adblockers like ublock origin that then make it a totally rigged race against other browsers in terms of real world performance.
I think there's a strong argument to be made here that governments should be actively subsidizing (if not directly managing) some implementation of the web standards that is guaranteed to actually be fully conforming to them, accessible etc. The web stack is such a fundamental part of our infrastructure these days that it feels irresponsible to leave it entirely to the whims of the private market - especially one that is dominated by large oligopolies which said governments are already actively investigating.
I have been using FF as my primary browser for a few years now. I have not found any site that does not work but sometimes I have to turn off uBlock Origin.
Some Xero products don’t work properly no matter what your browser is.
For me, Mozilla has bugs or weaknesses in Linux. YouTube chews my cpu (hardware acceleration is broken, at least for me). Tabs ‘freeze’ due to a bug in an X11 lib. Pop up bubbles (do you want to enable gps to this site type bubbles) if visible before switching workspaces appear on all workspaces but cannot be actioned and appear on top.
Mozilla as a company appears to be attempting poor monetisation models like attempting to build social networks etc. I would consider paying them a yearly fee if I thought they’d use money wisely, but at the moment executive appear more interested in vanity projects.
I've been using Firefox as my primary browser since 2005-2006ish. A site misbehaving because of it is a rare enough occurrence that offhand I can't remember any time that it has happened.
One issue I do come across occasionally, and I'm not sure if it's Firefox alone or the combination of add-ons I use in Firefox, is sites being overzealous with captchas. I find myself doing 3-5 captchas occasionally just to use a site.
Agreed. Even if Firefox makes up a small part of the market share, any website that serves millions of people will want to support it. Imagine if you have a website with 1,000,000 monthly visitors, and 2% of them use Firefox. Dropping support will mean 20,000 less monthly visitors. This gives us an idea of how much you should spend on support. If you make an average of $0.10 a month per user, you should be okay with spending at least $2000 a month on Firefox. That's a pretty big budget, and it's reasonable to go much higher than that if your website is rapidly growing. The big players like Google and Facebook will also be comfortable supporting Firefox at a loss, since you don't want to bleed users and create market space for a competitor. At most, you lose a few small websites that you probably weren't going to visit anyways.
> Imagine if you have a website with 1,000,000 monthly visitors, and 2% of them use Firefox. Dropping support will mean 20,000 less monthly visitors.
It will always be 2% which will always be, at maximum, 2% more revenue. That's probably negligible if you have to support them and there's an opportunity cost to that money. You'd probably be better off spending that money on advertising than Firefox support, especially since Firefox users typically know when a page isn't working, it's probably them and they have a backup solution available.
I used Firefox for a long time but switched because I just got tired of switching all the time and I started regularly using a site that didn't work in Firefox (I don't remember now but I think it was my credit card).
> At most, you lose a few small websites that you probably weren't going to visit anyways.
I think this is wrong. It starts with a website to look up train departures that no longer works on Ff. Then the site to buy movie or concert tickets fails on FF. Booking a restaurant, again, requires you to take out chrome.
Which has two concequences. People stop using FF all together because switching all the time is work. And people ensure they always have a copy of chrome around, while fewer and fewer need to keep a copy of FF around.
And so FF spirals exponentially into insignificance.
A handful of Google services are buggy and slow in FireFox. Stackdriver in particular is an absolute shambles. Thankfully I'm an embedded guy so most of the stuff in Stackdriver is hieroglyphics to me anyway.
I can't prove that Google is doing that intentionally, but I wouldn't put it past them.
webusb is another missing feature, and AFAIK Mozilla has a strong stance against enabling it because of the security implications. This is one of the only reasons I keep a chrome-ish browser installed.
1. Firefox blocks various analytics and tracking quite aggressively by default. Additionally, users of Firefox are, by and large, privacy minded and will have further mitigations. Any count of Firefox users is likely to be undercounting.
2. For the kind of basic web stuff(simple pages, forms etc) that USWDS supports it shouldn't matter greatly if Firefox is not supported. Theses standards are mature and Firefox supports them well, most thing should just work. Now, if websites go out of their way to block Firefox users that's a different problem.
But i doubt that will drive the numbers.
On a side note, I think percentages will overstate firfox's decline. The number of devices with browsers per person will influence it heavily and that number is ever increasing.
I think the average person in my circle has more than 3 and many have more than 4 devices with they use to visit .gov sites (i.e. ipads, phones, laptops, but not including the fridge, car, tv, etc)
Instead of government leaving it up to "market share", in an industry with decades of documented history of underhanded anti-competitive behavior, how about:
1. All government Web frontends must be compliant with one of the government-defined profiles of browser features, which are defined in terms of W3C (not WHAT, not Chrome) open standards. With sufficient penalties to motivate compliance.
2. As a practical matter, developers of government Web-based systems -- in addition to developing to documented open standards, and using open standards-based libraries/frameworks -- will be motivated to test with multiple browsers, including Firefox, because that's the most likely way that end users will discover and report noncompliance with the standards and profiles.
3. Government "apps" for non-Web platforms, such as Apple iOS and Google Android, are strongly discouraged. Furthermore, such non-Web apps by default are not compliant unless complete comparable functionality is available via compliant government Web frontends/apps. (To get permission for exceptions in extraordinary circumstances, there will be an onerous and uncertain process, and thus the motivation is to invest in the open standard Web platform for any "extraordinary" platform facilities that might be needed.)
(Also there would be regulations about backend implementations; that's just about browsers.)
Nos. 1 and 3 will win you the developer pico-vote while royally pissing everyone else off.
No. 2 is the matter at hand. You need a cut-off for the multiple browsers requirement. If you don’t, you’ll find contracts to CronyCorp for testing every site against the CronyCorp browser.
I don't think the government wants to (or possibly is even able to) get involved in defining web standards. Tracking market share seems like the least hands-on way to determine support as it's purely "pull based" - they follow everyone else's lead, they aren't trying to dictate what a "good" browser is.
The government is generally very slow and deliberate about technology recommendations let alone requirements when it comes to generally available software.
There's been credible international standards since early on. The government can say "use that international standard for government systems, not these (more) proprietary and unstable things".
Something has to change. Firefox is a GREAT browser. I think a lot of these things boil down to poor marketing. Things like these have to appear 'cool' and appeal to people. There has to be a reason for people to go out and actively want to download Firefox. Something akin to Apple's privacy adverts is how I'd go about it.
They've been trying that and it just pushes people away. I stopped using Firefox when Mozilla tried to score social brownie points. And the numbers seem to collaborate with shrinking and shrinking marketshare, especially after these campaigns. Since on the flip side of what you said, why would people swap from Firefox to chrome, Chrome doesn't bring anything shiny.
I agree with some of what you said about social brownie points. Advertising can be really off putting (I'm very anti-advertisement but I'm not really their target audience since I mostly use Firefox these days). However, they have to do something to get the word out. There needs to be a reason for people to care to install Firefox.
For one, Ubuntu should stop breaking Firefox with Snap, even though I think that is a relatively small user base. (There are some suggested fixes but I think the simplest is to bypass Ubuntu's packages and just download FF directly from Mozilla).
I'm always surprised to read claims that Firefox is the same or better than Chrome.
I switched to Firefox recently and many sites don't quite work: for example the pull request popup menu on GitHub appears off screen so can't be clicked on; the "new post" panel in Discourse is obstructed by the keyboard; FastMail alert box buttons don't work, and many other such annoyances.
It can be used as a main browser but it does have problems. I wouldn't bother with it if it wasn't for the manifest v3 situation
When Google Chrome came out, what made it stand out for me was their impressive developer console.
This lead developers to switch from IE/Firefox where you had to install a plugin for developers, into using Google Chrome that had a native and more advanced tool for debugging.
*For me this is the key*.
If you provide a browser that greatly improve the developer's experience, they (the developers) will move to use it, making it the best compatible browser to use, which will then make the rest of the crowd to use it because the overall experience is better there.
I just hope the team at Firefox will realize this before Google ...
I've been using both Firefox and Brave as my browsers, and Firefox is eating my memory way more than Brave (I have around 60+ tabs open at Brave, and just a few at Firefox). (I'm on Linux Fedora 36 with the latest versions available in the repository).
This is why I'm not using it much, but it saddens me.
Firefox was already statistically irrelevant 5 years ago. On our dashboard, a global e-commerce site with billions of views per year, it's not even in the top 10. Even regional browsers sometimes surpass it.
Firefox is also no longer a developer-default browser. This too has been true for years now.
There's very little Mozilla can do about it. Chrome and Safari are big because they're shipped as a default to platforms with billions of users. And the web works well on both of those browsers. It's not an engineering problem. You can't improve Firefox and expect market share to rise.
It's pretty much a done deal, and Microsoft (as well as Brave) using Chromium cemented that deal.
Sorry, nothing personal. But as a 100% Firefox user I would very likely avoid to visit any global ecommerce site. It's the same world I want to avoid by not using Google products.
I know I am a small minority, but you don't even see that minority.
Even if you assume that 50% of Firefox users are falling into "they wouldn't visit those sites to begin with" or "they run a user-agent spoofer" you're basically going from 2-4% to 4-8%, and the trend is clearly negative.
Late to the party, but these are the things people were saying about Apple in 1999/2000. Apple was sitting with a < 4% marketshare and also (luckily) $5 billion. They turned it around. There are massive differences between Apple and Mozilla clearly, but it does indicate that there's hope for Mozilla.
According to https://radar.cloudflare.com/reports/browser-market-share-20..., Firefox still has 4.7 % global market share, 4.9 % in the US, and significantly more in some relevant countries, like Germany with 15 %. So this may be a bit premature. It’s still a significant-enough market share to support. Of course, if it continues to decline further, Firefox will eventually become irrelevant. Let’s hope this won’t happen.
Firefox needs to focus all their effort on making a good web browser first. If the browser is slow, has a clunky interface, or lags behind on features, then people won't use it. Mozilla focus way too much of their attention on privacy and non-browser related projects.
Look at how much attention that The Browser Company has gotten for their Arc browser on Mac. Their primary focus is great UI and making an excellent browser for their users. What has Firefox been doing with all their money and time?
I always see comments like this on HN, and I struggle to understand why. Firefox is plenty fast. Its interface is extremely similar to most of its competitors. It works well. What special sauce do you expect Mozilla to implement that'll suddenly change their fortunes? It's a browser, after all. And why do you think that such features aren't being implemented due to lack of resources or muddled priorities - surely Mozilla can walk and chew gum?
"What special sauce do you expect Mozilla to implement that'll suddenly change their fortunes?"
XUL extensions maybe? The reason I gave up on Firefox after literally decades of using it was because they kept removing features I was actively using without fixing any of the problems. What's the point of using a niche browser if it is exactly like the non-niche browser, but with more compatibility issues?
I'm typing this on Firefox. It works, I'm not going to stop using it, but it's not as polished as other browsers.
I'll give you an example that annoys me because I look at it every day: the bookmarks bar still uses the same margins as it did in Firefox 3, even after 2 major UI redesigns. Then we have things like windows from Firefox 3 for some stuff with pages that open on tabs and have a different UI. Like, pick one and stick with it.
CTRL/CMD+Click on a bookmark has a different behaviour than CTRL/CMD+Click on a link. No other browser does this.
Profiles are there, but there's no user friendly UI... and no, containers can't do the same things as profiles.
Then you have things like battery use on platforms like macOS, which is still worse for me than Chrome or Safari.
So yeah... it works, but it's not the best browser. I tolerate it mostly because of extensions like uBlock Origin.
It is quite slow on android IMHO. At least for me, in comparison with Chrome.
I also use ublock origin in android which should make loading page faster I guess but unless the page is absolutely awful, chrome remains faster even with ads on.
Every time I launch Firefox (rare) it gives me a popup telling me it needs to install an update and to please relaunch. Come on man. It's not 2006 anymore, that kind of update prompt doesn't fly anymore.
>Firefox needs to focus all their effort on making a good web browser first. If the browser is slow, has a clunky interface, or lags behind on features, then people won't use it.
People don't use one browser over another because of performance, full stop. Certainly not over 10% to 20% differences. Even years ago when Chrome did have an advantage, they would never have gained marketshare so quickly if they hadn't spammed Firefox users visiting google.com with Chrome ads.
Even features don't matter. People use Safari, Safari is severely lacking in "features". 99% of users aren't power users.
I don't really get what you're on about. I switched from Chrome to Firefox a couple months ago and... it's great. I don't notice any differences in performance (if anything, snappier) and the only thing that's "missing" that I had in Chrome is that Chrome had all my credit-card and password data associated with my Google account, which, well, that's not something I want Firefox to have.
TLDR: Firefox is a good web browser. It's not failing in the market because it's not a good browser. It's failing because consumers don't seem to actually care one way or the other.
Privacy must be a tier 1 feature of a web browser.
The fact the market leader goes out of their way to shit all over privacy concerns says more about their marketing pull than the quality of their browser.
Yeah. Although I'm not trying to discount what others experience, I'm always confused to hear that Firefox is slow, because it seems just as fast as Chromium on my computer.
In my opinion, Firefox has been at war with its own users for years. I finally had enough a few years ago, and switched to Vivaldi. Every Firefox upgrade was a gamble on what feature or functionality they'd remove or change this time, or what bone-headed UI design change they'd make. And every time there'd be a Bugzilla bug with a of horde users who just had their favorite feature removed, and every time, without fail, it would get arrogantly WONTFIXed and eventually locked. This cycle has repeated for most of Firefox's existence, but it has accelerated.
Vivaldi can customise damn near every aspect of its user interface. I can set up every menu how I want it. Remove things I done use, and move the most used item to the top. I can dock my tab-bar wherever I want. I can have a proper status bar. The list goes on. It's what Firefox should have been.
Users are just different, I’ve been a happy Firefox (and pocket) user for many years, and wouldn’t be happy with these so called improvements. I don’t need customizability, just need it to work good enough out of the box. Definitely don’t feel that Firefox is at war with me.
> Every Firefox upgrade was a gamble on what feature or functionality they'd remove or change this time
Every upgrade?
I've been using firefox since forever (as long as it has existed) and while I was very annoyed when they removed the customizable UI support a few years ago, that's really the one and only time when they broke functionality as far as I've ever been able to notice.
Feature-wise, Vivaldi is great indeed. But every time I actually try to switch to it as a primary for any prolonged amount of time, I inevitably run into major perf issues and/or deal-breaking bugs. In fact, my most recent attempt was just about a week ago, and vertical tabs w/grouping had numerous visual glitches for me, with tab buttons occasionally becoming taller than the screen, white rectangles that are supposed to go around tab groups having half the width that the tabs inside do etc. I "solved" this by using the Windows pane instead, and all was fine, until the browser just started randomly lagging to the point where everything slowed to the crawl.
And yes, I did report it to their bug tracker - which is private, by the way, so there's no way to know who else is having those problems, or how work on them is proceeding. I will say that the bugs I reported on the last attempt are fixed, but it's little consolation when new equally bad bugs show up in their place. And as for perf issues, there are numerous active threads on Vivaldi forums about them.
I'd love to use Vivaldi as my primary, esp. now that they also have an iOS offering, so tab & history sync across all of my devices is possible. But it really needs to be more stable.
Indeed, the level of customization in Vivaldi is awesome and what Firefox should've done instead of going the other way (that would counter the lame excuse you link to elsewhere that "view image" makes the menu too long - just make the menu editable, duh!), even though their UI is unfortunately not very petformant
This has been my exact journey, been using Firefox since before it was called Firefox, finally got fed up a couple of years ago and switched to Vivaldi. It's such a breath of fresh air not having to dread update notifications anymore.
Firefox on my Macs is more feature-complete and faster than Chrome for me. And the Aweseomebar is truly a replacement for bookmarks for me (full text search showing URLs and titles from years ago with a few keywords is truly amazing).
Once manifestv3 starts really making waves, Firefox will be the best place to go for ublock origin and other adblockers.
That would be my personal preference, laser focus on their browser, but Perhaps they didn't because it's already good and the reason they're falling is combating monopolies. Safari/Edge are defaults in their space and have OS's that can nudge.
Google owns huge swaths of the internet and can nudge people as well and break other OS's on whim.
Mozilla probably felt the need to have other offerings and leadership to winback something when "being a great browser" wasn't enough in the past 14 years.
Readit News
So you really can’t rely on usage figures that don’t represent the truth of your situation.
[1] https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/blob/413b88689f3ca2a30b...
[2] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-now-ava...
It doesn't particularly matter whether or not the figure is accurate in that context. Maybe that can be fixed easily by having Firefox contextually relax tracking a bit or by having the government change how they perform the tracking, but the status quo is not really sustainable. And that's really all the article is saying at the end of the day.
So, the default position of the government is, "If we can't surveil you, we can't help you?" (Or taken the other way, you want us to help you? Let us surveil you!) This seems to be how it works out in practice, just because of favorable economics in mass surveillance. Example: RFID and license plate readers for toll collection. Various registrations with government agencies are another example.
If Mozilla can't even play this card, then they should really just shut down.
Or, maybe, like Wikpedia, they should stop begging for more-more-more, and spend what they get wisely.
Not to mention, they could simply start bug bounties and/or crowdfunding for actual deliverables and/or services (ie. a security team).
And if all this fails, then it fails. Maybe we'll simply get a Firemium or Chromefox/fix whatever the name. A fork where adblock works.
It would be best for the future of Firefox if they don't.
The default is Standard. It doesn’t block GA. The cynic in me suggests they decided making Firefox disappear altogether from popular stats by default would have harmed them more than not doing it harms their users, or that the backlash would be too great for their liking.
Sources like Google Analytics and Statcounter are still chronically undercounting minority browsers and platforms, which are much more likely to block these sorts of things, and Firefox and Linux will be particularly heavily hit, but I’m sure the difference it makes isn’t as large as I’d like it to be.
https://www.npr.org/2023/09/12/1198558372/doj-google-monopol...
And how could Firefox possibly complete against default browsers? Is it even worth the investment?
Dead Comment
The decline has already been happening since around 2010 without any drastic ups or downs.
Truth of the situation is probably worse. We are losing users faster than anticipated.
The desktop is virtually dead for any "normal" user, and their Android or Apple tablet/phone don't prompt them with a choice (other vendor constraints notwithstanding). It's not remotely a fair fight. You are guaranteed to lose users for reasons totally outside your control.
GoAccess puts Firefox at 7.8% and Google Analytics at 3.3%.
GoAccess puts Chrome at 57% and Google Analytics at 73%.
Ours:
Chrome 37.4% Firefox 24.7% Safari 21.1% Edge 7.5% Opera 2.6%
GA:
Chrome 39.3% Safari 31.5% Firefox 11.9% Edge 9.9% Samsung Internet 2.9%
For us, GA is undercounting FF by almost 13 percentage points, over 50%.
because google is using a near monopoly on analytics to bury a competitor in another segment
Might also be useful to have a plug-in to make a daily 'ping'/check-in from FFox to any govt sites used by their users. E.g., I use USPS and SBA/SBIR sites, but only occasionally or monthly, but if most FFox users who did so got logged more like daily instead of ~fortnightly or ~monthly, it'd improve the numbers. (Obviously, also must be done carefully so as to not get wholesale discounted).
The cascade effect of the US Govt abandoning support would be catastrophic, likely terminal, which would be bad for everyone.
That would be backwards
The main reason to use FF is the privacy protections
I find it very frustrating they do not get more recognition for the work they do on that front
I haven't encountered any site that misbehaves, and the only missing feature so far is within the Google Drive web app because it uses a Chrome-only extension [1].
Maybe the ongoing standardization of the web shows its effects here, and using a standard-conform niche browser is not that bad anymore.
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/application-launch...
The effort of "supporting Firefox" as a developer is basically opening the app in Firefox and confirming that it works, which it basically always does because the app is built on standardized web features. (Other types of support might be different. e.g maybe you have help doc that tells your users how to clear the site cookies. Do you also want to write instructions for Firefox, Safari, Opera etc?)
The bigger concern is that some day Google might not need web standards. If developers target Chrome rather than the web platform, Google has free reign and no longer needs to compromise with Apple and Mozilla. For example, Mozilla's veto of the controversial Topics API would hold little weight if nobody cares about Firefox support. If Chrome gets to a dominant enough position it could move from embracing to extending quite quickly.
People have different opinions on Google, but even those who believe Google has no ill intentions still feel better if there are some checks and balances. Were Firefox to become obsolete, Apple would be the last one standing. And with the DMA, some are predicting that Safari could soon follow Firefox's decline.
I am with you that it's super rare, I have only had to open chrome due to it being that bad a few times, usually I just need to disable javascript blocking or enable more cookies. But there are legitimately sites that are just so badly written that they won't take your money if you use Firefox.
I guess Google meet has frozen video for me on Firefox, but I expect Google to intentionally break their website for people not using Chrome after the "DRM Website" thing struck them as a great idea. Using Google products at this point is just asking for more lockin when we should really all know better. At least Zoom is a different company from Google...
But overblown for sure, if I disable javascript blocking and cookie autodelete and temporary containers that keep the site from realizing I already logged in -- pretty reasonable issues -- 99.99% of the issues I have vanish.
There's also UX. Right now I can have proper vertical tabs in Edge by changing a single prominent option in settings, but Firefox is still dragging their feet (yes, I know there are extensions for this, but they add a vertical tab bar in addition to the standard horizontal one, because you can't hide the latter without hacks).
OTOH Firefox has containers, which is arguably a lot more important if you care about online privacy in any serious way. But people don't like to trade away their convenience, especially once they already got used to it.
What we desperately need is a browser based around Firefox implementation of web standards and with all the privacy bells and whistles, but also UI that doesn't constantly tell users that they are "holding it wrong".
Not sure what all the fuss is about. It's a great browser. Chrome got very, very aggravating and I've had no problems since switching maybe 4 years ago. Even FF mobile works well.
Sometimes the cause is uBlock Origin, so I always try turning it off and refreshing. Rarely it's due to enhanced tracking protection. A few times I restarted FF in safe mode to rule out add-ins. It's always just FF.
I had a problem with a shopping web-site the other day. I disabled uBlock origin, and then all extensions, but it still refused to work. I thought I'd finally found one of these mythical "Chrome-only" sites, but no - exactly the same broken site in Chrome, so the site was just totally broken. Nothing to do with FF.
I guess FF has issues on a fairly small set of sites which some users use a fair bit while most users don’t see those sites at all.
The only site I use regularly which has issues is google earth and the reason why is obvious.
But most of the time, I'd rather ignore those sites anyway. After I have a look at them ... which I tend to do after NoScript show me the huge list of crap they expect me to load just for the 'privilege'. Good developers/orgs just don't do that. Most go into a 'Block list' I mostly use to remind myself not to bother trying. I take my business elsewhere.
I'm not bagging on the team, it's frankly amazing they've been able to mostly keep up, it's just a fact that maintaining a competitive web browser is a gargantuan task that requires a large team and investment.
- I can't pay municipal license fees (Site says "Use Chrome")
- I can't use the Vendor management portal for $largePopularTechCompany type company for my small business ("We support Chrome")
- Xero my small business accounting software just doesn't work properly ("Use Chrome")
For me, Mozilla has bugs or weaknesses in Linux. YouTube chews my cpu (hardware acceleration is broken, at least for me). Tabs ‘freeze’ due to a bug in an X11 lib. Pop up bubbles (do you want to enable gps to this site type bubbles) if visible before switching workspaces appear on all workspaces but cannot be actioned and appear on top.
Mozilla as a company appears to be attempting poor monetisation models like attempting to build social networks etc. I would consider paying them a yearly fee if I thought they’d use money wisely, but at the moment executive appear more interested in vanity projects.
One issue I do come across occasionally, and I'm not sure if it's Firefox alone or the combination of add-ons I use in Firefox, is sites being overzealous with captchas. I find myself doing 3-5 captchas occasionally just to use a site.
It will always be 2% which will always be, at maximum, 2% more revenue. That's probably negligible if you have to support them and there's an opportunity cost to that money. You'd probably be better off spending that money on advertising than Firefox support, especially since Firefox users typically know when a page isn't working, it's probably them and they have a backup solution available.
I used Firefox for a long time but switched because I just got tired of switching all the time and I started regularly using a site that didn't work in Firefox (I don't remember now but I think it was my credit card).
I think this is wrong. It starts with a website to look up train departures that no longer works on Ff. Then the site to buy movie or concert tickets fails on FF. Booking a restaurant, again, requires you to take out chrome.
Which has two concequences. People stop using FF all together because switching all the time is work. And people ensure they always have a copy of chrome around, while fewer and fewer need to keep a copy of FF around.
And so FF spirals exponentially into insignificance.
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I can't prove that Google is doing that intentionally, but I wouldn't put it past them.
Edit: I used Firefox on Android, the issues you describe might be Firefox on iOS, which is a different beast.
1. Firefox blocks various analytics and tracking quite aggressively by default. Additionally, users of Firefox are, by and large, privacy minded and will have further mitigations. Any count of Firefox users is likely to be undercounting.
2. For the kind of basic web stuff(simple pages, forms etc) that USWDS supports it shouldn't matter greatly if Firefox is not supported. Theses standards are mature and Firefox supports them well, most thing should just work. Now, if websites go out of their way to block Firefox users that's a different problem.
[1]: https://radar.cloudflare.com/adoption-and-usage
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But i doubt that will drive the numbers. On a side note, I think percentages will overstate firfox's decline. The number of devices with browsers per person will influence it heavily and that number is ever increasing.
I think the average person in my circle has more than 3 and many have more than 4 devices with they use to visit .gov sites (i.e. ipads, phones, laptops, but not including the fridge, car, tv, etc)
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1. All government Web frontends must be compliant with one of the government-defined profiles of browser features, which are defined in terms of W3C (not WHAT, not Chrome) open standards. With sufficient penalties to motivate compliance.
2. As a practical matter, developers of government Web-based systems -- in addition to developing to documented open standards, and using open standards-based libraries/frameworks -- will be motivated to test with multiple browsers, including Firefox, because that's the most likely way that end users will discover and report noncompliance with the standards and profiles.
3. Government "apps" for non-Web platforms, such as Apple iOS and Google Android, are strongly discouraged. Furthermore, such non-Web apps by default are not compliant unless complete comparable functionality is available via compliant government Web frontends/apps. (To get permission for exceptions in extraordinary circumstances, there will be an onerous and uncertain process, and thus the motivation is to invest in the open standard Web platform for any "extraordinary" platform facilities that might be needed.)
(Also there would be regulations about backend implementations; that's just about browsers.)
No. 2 is the matter at hand. You need a cut-off for the multiple browsers requirement. If you don’t, you’ll find contracts to CronyCorp for testing every site against the CronyCorp browser.
The government is generally very slow and deliberate about technology recommendations let alone requirements when it comes to generally available software.
I switched to Firefox recently and many sites don't quite work: for example the pull request popup menu on GitHub appears off screen so can't be clicked on; the "new post" panel in Discourse is obstructed by the keyboard; FastMail alert box buttons don't work, and many other such annoyances.
It can be used as a main browser but it does have problems. I wouldn't bother with it if it wasn't for the manifest v3 situation
This lead developers to switch from IE/Firefox where you had to install a plugin for developers, into using Google Chrome that had a native and more advanced tool for debugging.
*For me this is the key*.
If you provide a browser that greatly improve the developer's experience, they (the developers) will move to use it, making it the best compatible browser to use, which will then make the rest of the crowd to use it because the overall experience is better there.
I just hope the team at Firefox will realize this before Google ...
But.
I've been using both Firefox and Brave as my browsers, and Firefox is eating my memory way more than Brave (I have around 60+ tabs open at Brave, and just a few at Firefox). (I'm on Linux Fedora 36 with the latest versions available in the repository).
This is why I'm not using it much, but it saddens me.
Firefox is also no longer a developer-default browser. This too has been true for years now.
There's very little Mozilla can do about it. Chrome and Safari are big because they're shipped as a default to platforms with billions of users. And the web works well on both of those browsers. It's not an engineering problem. You can't improve Firefox and expect market share to rise.
It's pretty much a done deal, and Microsoft (as well as Brave) using Chromium cemented that deal.
I know I am a small minority, but you don't even see that minority.
Look at how much attention that The Browser Company has gotten for their Arc browser on Mac. Their primary focus is great UI and making an excellent browser for their users. What has Firefox been doing with all their money and time?
Many years ago Firfox was very slow
It has improved enormously, obviously, but some people never forget
It is a lesson. Never take your eye off the ball. Firefox did, back in the day, and Google ate their lunch
XUL extensions maybe? The reason I gave up on Firefox after literally decades of using it was because they kept removing features I was actively using without fixing any of the problems. What's the point of using a niche browser if it is exactly like the non-niche browser, but with more compatibility issues?
I think its OSX and Windows people talking past each other.
On a Mac, Firefox is pale in comparison to Safari.
There is a third party extension for it but I'm generally reluctant to install browser extensions because I worry about security.
I'll give you an example that annoys me because I look at it every day: the bookmarks bar still uses the same margins as it did in Firefox 3, even after 2 major UI redesigns. Then we have things like windows from Firefox 3 for some stuff with pages that open on tabs and have a different UI. Like, pick one and stick with it.
CTRL/CMD+Click on a bookmark has a different behaviour than CTRL/CMD+Click on a link. No other browser does this.
Profiles are there, but there's no user friendly UI... and no, containers can't do the same things as profiles.
Then you have things like battery use on platforms like macOS, which is still worse for me than Chrome or Safari.
So yeah... it works, but it's not the best browser. I tolerate it mostly because of extensions like uBlock Origin.
I also use ublock origin in android which should make loading page faster I guess but unless the page is absolutely awful, chrome remains faster even with ads on.
People don't use one browser over another because of performance, full stop. Certainly not over 10% to 20% differences. Even years ago when Chrome did have an advantage, they would never have gained marketshare so quickly if they hadn't spammed Firefox users visiting google.com with Chrome ads.
Even features don't matter. People use Safari, Safari is severely lacking in "features". 99% of users aren't power users.
TLDR: Firefox is a good web browser. It's not failing in the market because it's not a good browser. It's failing because consumers don't seem to actually care one way or the other.
The fact the market leader goes out of their way to shit all over privacy concerns says more about their marketing pull than the quality of their browser.
Vivaldi can customise damn near every aspect of its user interface. I can set up every menu how I want it. Remove things I done use, and move the most used item to the top. I can dock my tab-bar wherever I want. I can have a proper status bar. The list goes on. It's what Firefox should have been.
Every upgrade?
I've been using firefox since forever (as long as it has existed) and while I was very annoyed when they removed the customizable UI support a few years ago, that's really the one and only time when they broke functionality as far as I've ever been able to notice.
And yes, I did report it to their bug tracker - which is private, by the way, so there's no way to know who else is having those problems, or how work on them is proceeding. I will say that the bugs I reported on the last attempt are fixed, but it's little consolation when new equally bad bugs show up in their place. And as for perf issues, there are numerous active threads on Vivaldi forums about them.
I'd love to use Vivaldi as my primary, esp. now that they also have an iOS offering, so tab & history sync across all of my devices is possible. But it really needs to be more stable.
citation fucking needed.
Once manifestv3 starts really making waves, Firefox will be the best place to go for ublock origin and other adblockers.
Google owns huge swaths of the internet and can nudge people as well and break other OS's on whim.
Mozilla probably felt the need to have other offerings and leadership to winback something when "being a great browser" wasn't enough in the past 14 years.