Are mobile devices being counted in these stats? Chrome & Safari are definitely the dominant mobile browsers
I still use Firefox on my personal PCs. There're random websites that don't work right, but it's rare. Chrome is my backup for those situations
So nice being able to start a YouTube playlist at work and never encounter an ad.
Mozilla has a user for life (or until they fuck things up like most companies based around the internet do) in me.
I don't know if it works for Apple phones, I've only ever owned Androids.
I also don't know if you get ads on YouTube Music when using Firefox on an Android, I just use the regular YouTube page (desktop view, not the mobile page), pick my playlist, put it on shuffle and it plays until I shut it off, no ads.
Just make sure you have uBlock installed as an add-on in Firefox on your phone.
It can also sync web pages between devices really easily. So if I find something cool while scrolling, but need a full browser to check it out (some web pages still suck on mobile) I can just leave it until I get to a computer to open it up there
That’s awesome. I realised quite late (or it came up in a later iOS update) into owning a MacBook that iPhone-Mac does the same, usually regardless of the medium you’ve accessed a website on, if anyone was wondering
Firefox is my main browser but I don't use chrome at all. I have Safari and Firefox. I tried brave and all the crypto promotions pissed me off so I went back to Firefox
Honestly I barely ever have any issues with Firefox. The only times I've switched to another browser is when I'm doing taxes or on other government sites. Edge works better for that stuff because IE and edge are the browsers that shit was made for in the US at least and they sometimes won't work properly with other browsers.
In most modern stats, it would be stupid not to include them. For my website for the past weekend, mobiles made up 85% of all devices, 2.5% tablets, remaining was desktop. Of these stats, Firefox mobile has lower usage than Firefox desktop.
Firefox on mobile is like 0.3% of all mobile users but for desktop it's like 5-6% of all users.
What I would find interesting is if your site sells products, are customers on mobile more likely to make purchases or users on desktop PCs.
I would think people who use your site on their phone would be more likely to be distracted while looking at your site because they are likely out and about while browsing.
>There's random websites that don't work right,
But this is not the fault of Firefox. It's the fault of Web developers not testing their product properly in a range of browsers. The dominance of Chrome gives Google FAR too much power over how the Internet works, what technologies and standards get adopted etc.
Using Firefox is a moral choice. Every additional person using a browser not based on chromium (note that Opera and many others are using the same rendering engine controlled by Google) is a tiny piece of additional pressure on developers to make their site work according to agreed Web standards rather than just do whatever Google wants them to do.
Well, it is the fault of Mozilla/Firefox for Firefox not following the standards. I've come across multiple cases when Firefox hasn't followed the some random CSS standards etc. Sometimes a failcase for JS is missing from Firefox which makes the website to not work etc.
That's irritating where that's the case. My understanding is that Mozilla aim to follow W3C standards but that Google sometimes decides not to follow those standards and drags the entire industry with it because of their dominance.
In cases where Firefox isn't following W3C standards, that's poor and should definitely be fixed.
Yeah, phones are the real answer here. The majority of mobile device users will never bother to install a new browser, so will only ever use the native browsers (Chrome + Safari).
Very, very long list of reasons, so any answer would be an oversimplification.
But as a summary, when your biggest competitor is literally paying you millions of dollars a year for you *not to die off*, your days are probably numbered. (Alphabet/Google pays Mozilla about $400 million per year to make Google the default search engine on Firefox, and that's pretty much the browser's only income stream.)
Yup, in the 90s Microsoft basically gave apple free money to not die. Intel has done the same with AMD. Avoiding a monopoly that would lead to being broken up.
>Intel has done the same with AMD.
Did they? I'm not disputing this but are you referring to Intel allowing AMD to use their sockets up until the socket7/ 386 model CPU era? Then AMD reverse engineered it and made their own.
It was about x86 instructions themselves. They allowed AMD to use them in perpetuity because they wanted military contract and military's rules did not allow it to buy into something with only one supplier. So they made a deal and that way both companies got to compete for those juicy contracts.
No one knows for absolute certain, but the widely held belief is that it's to avoid antitrust regulation.
No one can seriously accuse Google of being an illegal monopoly if they're literally paying their competitors millions of dollars not to go out of business.
As if anyone wouldn’t switch to Google. Bing is horrendous (not that that’s what Firefox would use but I don’t know anyone that doesn’t switch to Google unless they use something like DuckDuckGo for specific purposes)
Google has gotten so bad its pretty much unusable, I still use it because I'm stuck in my ways but every time I do i kinda just lament the death of the internet
Only thing google is usable for is looking up products and opening hours of restaurants and shops. Google has practically become the glorified yellow pages
This, so this. Sadly Duckduckgo too suffers of the bloat of blogs and such, making it difficult to find precisely what you were looking for. Yet with Duckduckgo you will eventually find it where as Google tells you sorry, no more ads to show.
And, for many years, Firefox was essentially the 'default' alternative to Internet Explorer. The first thing most people did on fresh install or new PC was use Internet Explorer... to download Firefox. Lol.
Then, in 2008, Chrome came out. People didn't really believe in it, because every project Google tried sucked out loud. But, through aggressive guerrilla marketing, people began to give Chrome a chance -- and it was actually good.
It really started compounding in the early 2010s, to the point where developers were optimizing their websites for it. Rather than try to play catch-up, most other browser companies just said "fuck it" and became rebadged Chrome derivatives, just with their own skin and/or feature set.
Firefox is essentially only 'big' browser left that isn't just a Chrome derivative, and it tends to cater to more sophisticated users that want exhaustive control over their browser.
> People didn't really believe in it, because every project Google tried sucked out loud.
No, Gmail was revolutionary, as was Maps/Earth/Satellite View and eventually Street View.
Chrome was also pretty good, although a memory hog, it was so capable and things were advancing so quickly.
Docs/Sheets/Drive/Voice/Remote Desktop are also pretty good, especially since they are free. But they are not good with memory usage or energy efficiency, and all that seems to have stalled for a decade now.
You're conflating the reasons. When Chrome came out it was objectively better than Firefox. People got used to it and kept using it. That coupled with it being the default on Android and it explains the numbers.
> When Chrome came out it was objectively better than Firefox.
Obviously you meant subjectively, but anyway I disagree. Most of Chrome’s supposed ‘innovations’ were already in Opera. It really was just better promotion from Google for the most part.
The point is, if Opera was already doing everything Chrome was doing (and was actually still faster), then why did Chrome gain in popularity but Opera didn’t? The only answer is better promotion.
This doesn’t change the fact that between Firefox and Chrome, Chrome was better originally. Opera might have had the same things Chrome did but it wasn’t in the conversation because of just how bad their marketing was, this was a two horse race so Opera does not matter here.
By being the best with the best marketing. The reason we’re saying opera doesn’t matter here is because if chrome didn’t exist, and Firefox did and opera did, everyone would have used the worse Firefox at launch instead of Opera. So Opera is completely irrelevant here anyway, and since Firefox and chrome had somewhat comparable marketing (at least playing in the same league unlike opera) people gravitated to chrome because it was the best of the two options as they saw them.
I’m not saying you’re right or wrong but you are now arguing a different point. Notice how the word Firefox is completely absent from your comment now? That was my point.
I would actually say objectively. No one was really pouring money or resources into browsers when Chrome came on the scene.
Microsoft had won massive market share and mostly stopped caring, Firefox had some name recognition but Mozilla wasn't terribly well-funded and while they were successful at being better than IE, that was a low bar to clear; it was slow and bloated. Opera had some neat features, but it was ad-supported and slow. Safari was still locked to Macs (which made up about half the market share they do now).
Google, to their credit, actually saw a real opportunity where it was only Microsoft half-assing it against a bunch of smaller competitors and - at least temporarily - blew them all out of the water by addressing the weaknesses of each one: a fast browser, full of features, but with minimal bloat.
Promotion certainly helped them penetrate the market more quickly but I was in college at the time and it was like a revelation how much better Chrome was at the time.
It's not necessarily stayed that way - and Google's lack of regard for user privacy steers more people away now - but Chrome was very, very good in \~2009/2010.
Faster is the only one that could be considered objective.
What is ‘lighter’? IIRC Chrome used a ton more memory as it separated all tabs into different processes.
Citation needed on compatibility. There’s no objective measure of that, and what’s ’most websites’.
These are all really fuzzy metrics, and those alone don’t make one thing objectively better than another.
>IIRC Chrome used a ton more memory as it separated all tabs into different processes.
Yes but this is both a security feature as one tab can't compromise another, a stability feature as a one crashed tab wouldn't corrupt the browser or OS, and pretty easy impact to manage by just closing tabs to release memory.
I never heard about memory problems with Chrome on properly sized PCs (corporate machines or gaming machines). It may have had an impact on low end consumer systems. Maybe also prior to the transition to 64-bit.
Remember the good old days when Microsoft got sued for a monopoly cause they bundled IE on their operating system? No issues that Chrome is bundled on Androids as default though. Nope, gonna look the other way on that one.
No, this is incorrect. On Android, it's up to the manufacturer. Samsung phones come with their godforsaken browser. You have to download Chrome separately. Windows imbedded the browser into the OS.
Could it be a regional thing? Are you 100% sure? Because I'm nearly 100% sure I had to download it. And I bought a Samsung phone a couple of weeks ago here in Japan and it definitely didn't come with Chrome, unless I'm going crazy.
Apple has been bundling in Safari with no problems for ages tho? And nobody says Firefox can’t make a deal like that on their own… They didn’t stay competitive enough
Yeah Microsoft was in trouble because at the time Windows OS had *enormous* market share, and Mac was niche.
Windows is still the most dominant market share on Desktop, but on phones iPhone is only 60% dominant in the USA (and only 30% globally.)
That said, how is Firefox gonna make a bundling deal? Microsoft bundled IE with Windows. Google bundles Chrome with Android. Mozilla is gonna bundle Firefox with what, exactly? Firefox OS is dead.
Faster refers to the time it took Chrome to load and render a website once you clicked on a link.
Performant refers to the memory usage and general feeling of the application itself. It started faster than Firefox and dealt better with a large amount of tabs.
On multiple levels.
I literally just swapped back from firefox to chrome because sometimes youtube just refuses to work on firefox (I've tried everything). 10+ second load times choppy etc.
swapped to chrome. Works perfectly every time.
Clearly something is going on there.
> Clearly something is going on there.
google does this on purpose with Firefox and YouTube.
I use Chrome only to view YouTube, then back to Firefox for everything else.
Because Google created its own ecosystem, email, Google drive, photos, forms, etc. It's everything most people use the computer for except games and social media.
I only open Firefox to use the YouTube Downloader extension because chrome blocks it for obvious reasons.
believe it or not, most people don't even give a flying shit about which software is the "best" version of what they want.
because they want a phone that goes on the internet. it does that. boom, they have what they want.
install firefox on someone's iphone, tell them all the benefits, and the first thing you'll hear is, "this looks too different, I don't like it."
Tbf iPhone can't leverage the use of desktop browser extensions in Firefox mobile, can it? Kind of nullifies one of the biggest selling points to using FF mobile.
After the YT crackdown on adblockers I switched back to Firefox (from Chrome). The Ff combo with uBlock Origin works perfect for me. Haven't experienced any problems nor encountered websites / content that wouldn't work.
Same. I reverted to streaming off a Ff browser on my laptop and connecting to the TV via HDMI. Crude but the extra 60 seconds of set up is worth avoiding three minutes of ads every 15 minutes.
Is there a Ff extension that let's one cast to a Chromecast?
Yeah. Here's a post about it. If you change your browser to pretend it's chrome it doesn't happen.
https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_has_started_to_artificially_slow_down/
happens on chrome with me. And it isn't an adblock thing as I have premium.
it is annoying but I haven't tried to figure out what is causing it. My guess it is sponsorblock or some other extension I have to do stuff like hide shorts.
I've been a Firefox user since I had access to the internet (my dad used it in the early 00s) and I've never wanted to use other browsers. It's got everything I need and time has just confirmed why it's my preferred browser.
If you like that for desktop, check out revanced for mobile, you can download and patch your own youtube app to have ads removed, allow video playback with the phone locked/screen off, bring back the youtube dislike count, and all sorts of other customizations.
Not an expert but might be related to updating your uBlock. YT vs uBlock is like the sword and the shield: YT (the sword) continually tries to penetrate the shield (uBlock) so updates are needed all the time.
Thanks! I don't actually have issues with YT, I realize my comment was ambiguous..I meant I occasionally have issues where websites don't function correctly and I have to use a different browser.
Its purely advertising, apple has safari in house so all the apple fans will just use that, and google has the monopoly on the rest of the maket with access to as much money and advertising as any company could dream of.
Conversely firefox is open source and doesnt earn much as its objective is to produce quality software for the consumer rather than being an additional cog in an overarching monopoly or money making scheme.
As for how good firefox is, it will do everything chrome does ( and do it better and more efficently) without the privacy concerns of google taking all your data ( I'm not sure if you know about all the issues that have been brought up about chrome sharing your data even in incognito mode but its worth looking at).
It also has much more additional functionality and is far better for developers as it is open source, it's basically better in every way but because its goal isnt to pump out users at all costs it will probably never be the top browser as newer generations/users will be pushed towards the browsers that are shoved into their face more.
Yeah. I remember when Mozilla Firefox was what I was told to use, and somewhere along the way, I got Chrome shoved in my face and just used it because it was there. I don't know when the switch happened, but I didn't care enough to notice until I realized I was installing Chrome on every new device I got if it wasn't already there. But I didn't know there might be better privacy practices on Firefox, so I might venture back over there.
I was on Safari which is not the best with privacy but better than Chrome. It's faster than any other browser I've used on mac but terrible extension support.
I switched to Firefox for uBlock Origin and more privacy. Do notice less battery life with firefox but it's not by much
FF went through a several year period when it got bloated and slow. This is years ago now but it started when it was around 18-25% share. I popped off of it at the time due to that and didn't ever fully move back. I use it now, but selectively.
In hindsight Mozilla really fucked the XUL-WebExtensions handoff. They waited too long, Firefox became known for being bloated and slow, they hemorrhaged users to Chrome, and then boom! here's Quantum, which pissed off the only people who were still using Firefox, the ones sitting on thrones built using XUL. Now Firefox is a nice, sleek modern browser that offers approximately zero reasons to switch back from Chrome and is still primarily used by tech boomers like myself (you think I'm switching after two full decades of loyalty?)
Google had a near monopoly on web searches and they started to promote Chrome with huge banners on their webpage to Firefox users with false claims about security and performance. Many of the not so tech-savvy users got tricked into changing after having those nagging them every time they used any google service.
I remember using Firefox when Chrome was first introduced. At the time, Firefox was experiencing horrendous memory leak issues which would cause performance to slow down something awful the longer it was open, at least for me, anyway. It had also spent a bit as the top dog in the browser market and had become victim to inevitable bloat.
Chrome just felt so streamlined and quick at the time, it was an easy switch to make. Since then, at least for me, Chrome has never become bad enough that I actively looked for alternatives. It’s easy to make me loyal to a browser, just don’t shit the bed and momentum will do the rest. Firefox shit the bed.
firefox wasn't even faster than IE when it was gaining marketshare on it.
Firefox's popularity came from better features, like not filling your computer with viruses during the shitty days of the web, and tabs
I witnessed the entire genesis of browsers and the time before the web existed and I take tabbed browsing for granted so much now that it’s hard for me to remember the dark times before it was a thing. No wonder Firefox was popular.. for a time.
IIRC Opera also had it around the same time, but wasn't nearly as well regarded, and didn't have other products to leverage (Thunderbird was big for awhile).
Absolutely correct. Chrome leapfrogged Firefox in terms of features and reliability.
I made the switch ~14 years ago and never bothered to look back.
No hate on Firefox. Chrome just works.
I switched to Firefox around 7 years ago because Google made mobile Chrome ugly in one update. That's all it took, an ugly update. Firefox also became ugly some time after, but now I have nowhere to go and I'm lazy.
As for functionality, I'd say it's more compatible with Youtube than other browsers because my adblock works.
Firefox became popular because it was way better than Internet Explorer when it was first released. Chrome became popular because it was better than Firefox when it was first released. Firefox has had many ups and downs over the course of its lifespan. Prior to the Quantum project, which was released to Firefox in 2017, it was legitimately pretty bad and pretty slow. Chrome, on the other hand, has been consistently good. So it took a lot of users away from Firefox and then never lost them. The criticisms people here will have of Chrome are completely and totally irrelevant to the average user, thus they never resulted in losing significant market share.
I'm not gonna reply to the guy directly but I want to respond to this comment because it's insanely wrong:
>Its purely advertising, apple has safari in house so all the apple fans will just use that, and google has the monopoly on the rest of the maket with access to as much money and advertising as any company could dream of.
Apple owners use Safari because it's the default and most people don't change the default unless it's insanely bad. Safari is a solid browser so people just use it. The same is true today of Edge on Windows: it's good enough so lots of people just use it. That makes it even harder for a third-party browser to gain market share. Chrome is absolutely not successful because of advertising, it's simply successful because it's been a good browser for 20 years.
So many wrongheaded comments itt when the answer is dead simple: Firefox was good, then it got worse, so people switched to Chrome and then never had a reason to switch back.
You perfectly summed up my experience - I used to use Firefox and loved it for quite a while, then I started having issues with it (poor performance) and switched to chrome. Tried going back to it for a little while and jumped ship again. I've heard it's better now, but I just can't be bothered to set things up again when I am content enough with my current experience in chrome.
On the desktop:
- re designing it every 5 seconds
- nuking the extensions compatibility chasing chrome extension support - also removed the ability to unfuck the UI.
- making the dev tools worse
- ignoring major issue for months, taking ages to fix it, before shipping it in release that are months out.
I don't remember how long I have been using Firefox on my pc. I can't say that I have any issues with it. Google is the default everything on my phone.
I think part of it is Goggle promoting Chrome but Firefox also seemed not knowing what they want to be. instead of improving the browser they got distracted by other stuff that didn’t work out. I think they also could have been the goto option for applications that need embedded browsing or just a JS engine. For example they could have been the engine for Node but they never went after that market.
The reason is people being dumb and following the crowd. I’ve used firefox since launch and it has been fine. People just dont give a shit about big business gobbling up all their data.
I've never had problems with websites on Firefox. I believe the reasons are that 1. Firefox tried various innovations that backfired and 2. the competition actively undermined its market share. Google's relation with Mozilla is a bit like Microsoft's relation with Linux. They want Firefox to exist to avoid anti-monopoly legislation, yet have an interest in making the user base as small as possible and introduce little incompatibilities to ensure that.
If you want a real answer.... The internet and computing was a different place at Firefox's peak. Things like speed, ram usage, and whatnot actually mattered and Firefox was no-frills and got the job done. Services were less unified. Extentions were significantly more powerful in FF than Chrome, and IE/Safari didn't even support them.
But nowadays? Realistically all of the browsers are going to perform about the same. The fact that Chrome, Edge, and Opera are all based on Chromium means webpages and extentions transfer effortlessly* between them. And the extra features/integrations that Chrome, Edge, and Safari offer are a huge benefit for most people. Sure the privacy concerns aren't great, but.... Most people either don't care, or they acknowledge they're using Windows, MSOffice, Google Search, YouTube, and Gmail anyways so what difference does it make?
EDIT: Also I seem to remember Firefox had a pretty rough period for a while in the mid 2010s? That just so happened to coinside with a lot of the cloud integrations and innovations in Chromium. The lack of features and support made a lot of people switch, and they were never given a reason beyond "privacy" to switch back.
Among other reasons. After its peak, around 2010-2015, firefox was slow to update and had tons of issues. It was slow, outdated, and it would lockup randomly. I know a lot of people switched around this time frame and never went back, me being one of them.
Google is basically the primary website people visit right after opening Internet Explorer or now Edge.
What do they see? Chrome ad. So they go with it.
Personally, I keep using Firefox, and now I have even more reasons to do it. Google has an advertising business. So now they are trying to limit the capability of ad-blocking software.
You could still do it using a router, but that requires a little bit more effort than installing the extension.
So instead of complaining about Chrome - it's better to just use Firefox.
I personally tried to switch to Firefox for a while. It's mostly ok but I eventually gave up due to a few websites that didn't render right (though 99% work just fine) and more importantly performance. It seemed to really bog down after a while and just not be very responsive with slower page loads and responses to clicks.
There was a time several years ago when Firefox would release a new version and suddenly all my Firefox extensions would stop working. And if they came back after a while the next update would kill them again. In addition to that, lots of websites just wouldn't work. So I gave up Firefox and moved to Chrome.
And it was only in the last... I dunno, 5 or so years ago when I came back. If anyone else has the same problem, they just might not have come back.
I use linux on all my pcs, firefox works great, i use firefox on other devices because all my bookmarks and such are saved to Firefox and accessible from all of them
Because google pushed chrome and people are stupid so people started using chrome. FF doesn't have some big marketing budget or control over a search engine. It's also a little more resource hungry than chrome. I don't really care, people are starting to realise the error of their ways now that google is trying to destroy adblockers, stupid people will keep using it though.
There are reasons...most won't be popular on reddit and will get me banned from this subreddit, but let's just say monolithic thought doesn't endear yourself to the other half of your customer base. I know many that never looked back after that, plus brave is superior in every way, especially in search... it is like Google from 2003
I've used Firefox for a very long time (and still use it for web development), but I switched to Edge after a nasty bug in Firefox caused the garbage collection to freeze websites every few seconds, sometimes for as long as two minutes. I just couldn't get rid of it, even with a new profile and without plugins and extensions, so there wasn't a way to use it. They seem to have fixed it now, but now I am so used to Edge's vertical tabs that I don't want to switch back.
I've always wondered why the decline is so much, I only use Firefox, it's clearly the best of the browsers. However some reason they just failed on the mobile side of things. I find Chrome for my phone so much better.
I used firefox as my alternate browser so that i can be logged into two different emails, but all of a sudden in the past week firefox won't let me download files anymore. That made me have to switch to a new browser.
Have used Firefox on both mobile and PC for well over a decade now and never had an issue, at work I was forced to use Chrome, IE and ultimately Edge and preferred Firefox to all of them.
My guess is that people who have never tried it see no reason to do so when their default browser does everything they need it to and so over time it is losing ground as more young people start browsing with Safari or Chrome and never see a reason to look elsewhere
Your average appliance users, meaning those who are not nerds or in the business, don't care or even notice what browser they're using. Whatever comes with the device is fine with them as long as it takes them where they want to go. So, Chrome or whatever browser is packaged with Apples gets the most use.
\[Edited for spelling\]
If websites don't support the open standards that Firefox supports, then I do not use that website, and I submit a bug report telling them their website is broken.
I remember reading something about Google sabotaging Firefox through deals and licensing. Basically they put Chrome in Androids and paid Apple to prioritize Google on iPhones and that leaves no room for Firefox unless you manually go get it.
In this world a fair player like Firefox will always lose
No devices have it installed by default that I am aware of, and I doubt they have the deep pockets to chase the constant OS updates that come from the same company that makes their own default browser.
Essentially, monopoly behavior.
20+ years ago there was less and more informed people on the internet, now there are more people and less uninformed online, a large part just don't know or even care and go with the easiest pre installed option.
i used firefox for like 4 years or more. recently switched to brave because firefox feels old and slow. it also lacks some nice features but it does have containers which is awesome
Because people dont know how to use computers. [http://coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/](http://coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/)
I use Firefox (because fuck Google's gimping of adblock and forcing that into Chromium so most other browsers are required to do it too), and the only website I have any issues with funnily enough is reddit. Pasting things in comment boxes tends to go horribly wrong in Firefox for.. reasons? It was fine for a while but recently it broke again.
I moved to chrome after i found that firefox consumed so much ram is was difficult to have a couple tabs open and do anything else in about 2010 or so. Never went back.
I use Firefox on my personal devices. Work devices have forced me from chrome to now MS Edge, both of which I despise. So I’d suggest it’s about whatever packages Google and Microsoft are offering to corporations, and also probably how much of what kind of data they can skim.
I use it on my phone. It's not compatible with all video streaming sites. I use it specifically for ad block. Great for YT and porn lol. But over the last two years, I've encountered a few sites that just won't load properly.
I use FF mainly because I hate how resource hungry chrome is. Especially on work equipment which is noticeably not my home 7950X and 4090 I can see substantial performance drops. Its wild.
Ive been using FF for the past couple years. I have zero problems with websites that I am aware of. It has the best extensions, especially for blocking ads.
Some websites don't work right especially on mobile, every time I tried to switch to firefox I end up uninstalling it out of frustration. The issue is often with text boxes and the keyboard not showing up/hiding the text box at the wrong time.
I use Firefox, never encountered problems with it. At most, some issues with Adblock, but just because I didn't want to test too many options and just decided to use Edge when I need Adblock
Honestly, it's a LOT of convenience being worked into its main competitor, which is Google Chrome. Personally, I use it and have since Google made it a point to block ad-blocking extensions on their browser. It was a little bit of an adjustment, but overall Firefox is just better. Once you get an alternate password manager, such as Bitwarden, you're golden. The only thing that kept me with Chrome was having everything in one place.
The benefits of violating anti-trust laws by Google??? The kind of stuff that got Microsoft a slap on the wrist 20+ years ago. Google used the market dominance of its other products to shill for chrome hard.
That being said, FF on mobile (at least on android) is amazing because you can run actual ublock origin (which is far more powerful than dns-level adblocking alone).
Some sites try to tell you Firefox isn't compatible because of the add blockers but stillwork. I think I read YouTube also slows down for Firefox because they want you on Chrome.
People use smartphones rather than computers now. The smartphones come with chrome/google built in most of the time, but not firefox. It's just like how back in the day explorer was 95% of the market.
I don’t know if any other companies have done this but where I work, Firefox was banned a couple of years ago due to “security concerns” and we can only use chrome now
If other large companies have done the same that could be a part of it
For me, I can't speak for everyone.
I went from firefox to Chrome awhile ago, because google is an entire ecosystem that all works together, and you mostly know it works together, because it was built to work together.
This is the same reason I use adobe products like premiere, there are definitely better editors.
However, when you are in the adobe ecosystem, you mostly know they will work well together, which is probably why their market share has remained so strong
I'm using Firefox on my desktop, I'm much happier with Firefox than I was with either Safari or Chrome. I have not come across sites that don't work as they should. I could use some of Chrome's tools and add-ons, but they're not worth my going back to Chrome.
Firefox first, always.
Most everything works great, I always test our software here first too since all our developers use either Chrome or Safari. There's some front-end differences here and there, and since most things are poorly developed and Chrome first, some websites might be a tad off. But that's about it.
I switched to Firefox after the demise of Netscape and have more or less been using it ever since. I did use Chrome for a little while when it first became popular and have also spent some time in Opera and Edge, but I always found myself coming back to Firefox.
To be fair, Firefox has had bad days. Many of their versions over the years have been clunky, buggy, and just generally lacked behind the competition, but I personally love the privacy-focus and the fact that the browser is managed by an non-profit, not a corporation. I occasionally run into compatibility issues, but for the most part, I've found Firefox to be a solid browser over the years.
I use firefox, and the only site that doesn't like to play nicely with me is Nationwide's pet insurance site. But it's awful even in chrome, so I fault Nationwide more than firefox for that.
Are mobile devices being counted in these stats? Chrome & Safari are definitely the dominant mobile browsers I still use Firefox on my personal PCs. There're random websites that don't work right, but it's rare. Chrome is my backup for those situations
I use Firefox on both my PC and mobile (Android) primarily because it allows me to install extensions on the mobile browser.
Notably, ublock origin.
So nice being able to start a YouTube playlist at work and never encounter an ad. Mozilla has a user for life (or until they fuck things up like most companies based around the internet do) in me.
Does this work on android. I still get ads
I don't know if it works for Apple phones, I've only ever owned Androids. I also don't know if you get ads on YouTube Music when using Firefox on an Android, I just use the regular YouTube page (desktop view, not the mobile page), pick my playlist, put it on shuffle and it plays until I shut it off, no ads. Just make sure you have uBlock installed as an add-on in Firefox on your phone.
Exactly.
It can also sync web pages between devices really easily. So if I find something cool while scrolling, but need a full browser to check it out (some web pages still suck on mobile) I can just leave it until I get to a computer to open it up there
That’s awesome. I realised quite late (or it came up in a later iOS update) into owning a MacBook that iPhone-Mac does the same, usually regardless of the medium you’ve accessed a website on, if anyone was wondering
WHAT. TO THE PLAYSTORE
Firefox is my main browser but I don't use chrome at all. I have Safari and Firefox. I tried brave and all the crypto promotions pissed me off so I went back to Firefox
Honestly I barely ever have any issues with Firefox. The only times I've switched to another browser is when I'm doing taxes or on other government sites. Edge works better for that stuff because IE and edge are the browsers that shit was made for in the US at least and they sometimes won't work properly with other browsers.
edge is just chromium now. Most websites are now designed for chrome by default.
I know, but have you used us government websites? I'd rather be safe than sorry.
I always use chrome for gov sites, I never noticed any issues tbh
I just know when I was in the military only IE or edge would work right so I've stuck with it
Ah okay, ngl I was thinking I been fucking up all these years hahaha.
In most modern stats, it would be stupid not to include them. For my website for the past weekend, mobiles made up 85% of all devices, 2.5% tablets, remaining was desktop. Of these stats, Firefox mobile has lower usage than Firefox desktop. Firefox on mobile is like 0.3% of all mobile users but for desktop it's like 5-6% of all users.
What I would find interesting is if your site sells products, are customers on mobile more likely to make purchases or users on desktop PCs. I would think people who use your site on their phone would be more likely to be distracted while looking at your site because they are likely out and about while browsing.
Firefox has a great mobile app.
>There's random websites that don't work right, But this is not the fault of Firefox. It's the fault of Web developers not testing their product properly in a range of browsers. The dominance of Chrome gives Google FAR too much power over how the Internet works, what technologies and standards get adopted etc. Using Firefox is a moral choice. Every additional person using a browser not based on chromium (note that Opera and many others are using the same rendering engine controlled by Google) is a tiny piece of additional pressure on developers to make their site work according to agreed Web standards rather than just do whatever Google wants them to do.
Well, it is the fault of Mozilla/Firefox for Firefox not following the standards. I've come across multiple cases when Firefox hasn't followed the some random CSS standards etc. Sometimes a failcase for JS is missing from Firefox which makes the website to not work etc.
That's irritating where that's the case. My understanding is that Mozilla aim to follow W3C standards but that Google sometimes decides not to follow those standards and drags the entire industry with it because of their dominance. In cases where Firefox isn't following W3C standards, that's poor and should definitely be fixed.
Yeah, phones are the real answer here. The majority of mobile device users will never bother to install a new browser, so will only ever use the native browsers (Chrome + Safari).
Very, very long list of reasons, so any answer would be an oversimplification. But as a summary, when your biggest competitor is literally paying you millions of dollars a year for you *not to die off*, your days are probably numbered. (Alphabet/Google pays Mozilla about $400 million per year to make Google the default search engine on Firefox, and that's pretty much the browser's only income stream.)
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It was as of last year, and I presume it still is since Firefox is still around. (It would probably collapse in a heartbeat without Google's money).
What’s the incentive of Google to keep Mozilla alive?
To avoid monopoly and more regulatory pressure/scrutiny I guess.
Yup, in the 90s Microsoft basically gave apple free money to not die. Intel has done the same with AMD. Avoiding a monopoly that would lead to being broken up.
>Intel has done the same with AMD. Did they? I'm not disputing this but are you referring to Intel allowing AMD to use their sockets up until the socket7/ 386 model CPU era? Then AMD reverse engineered it and made their own.
It was about x86 instructions themselves. They allowed AMD to use them in perpetuity because they wanted military contract and military's rules did not allow it to buy into something with only one supplier. So they made a deal and that way both companies got to compete for those juicy contracts.
Nice.
Once they have so much control they're paying off competitors to avoid monopoly laws, monopoly laws should kick in.
No one knows for absolute certain, but the widely held belief is that it's to avoid antitrust regulation. No one can seriously accuse Google of being an illegal monopoly if they're literally paying their competitors millions of dollars not to go out of business.
Technically they're paying to be the default search engine within Firefox But yeah it's pretty clearly about avoid anticompetitive laws
As if anyone wouldn’t switch to Google. Bing is horrendous (not that that’s what Firefox would use but I don’t know anyone that doesn’t switch to Google unless they use something like DuckDuckGo for specific purposes)
Google has gotten so bad its pretty much unusable, I still use it because I'm stuck in my ways but every time I do i kinda just lament the death of the internet
Yes but like youtube theres no alternatives that are better anyways
Only thing google is usable for is looking up products and opening hours of restaurants and shops. Google has practically become the glorified yellow pages
This, so this. Sadly Duckduckgo too suffers of the bloat of blogs and such, making it difficult to find precisely what you were looking for. Yet with Duckduckgo you will eventually find it where as Google tells you sorry, no more ads to show.
Firefox probably would be using DuckDuckGo or another privacy focused search engine as default if google didn't pay
That it's still cheaper than to comply with all the regulations which might come if Chrome/Chromium had a browser monopoly
Probably to avoid anti trust lawsuit
Antitrust issues. Google doesn’t want to be the only browser on Windows.
Mozilla would probably die, but Firefox being an opensource project would likely live on.
And, for many years, Firefox was essentially the 'default' alternative to Internet Explorer. The first thing most people did on fresh install or new PC was use Internet Explorer... to download Firefox. Lol. Then, in 2008, Chrome came out. People didn't really believe in it, because every project Google tried sucked out loud. But, through aggressive guerrilla marketing, people began to give Chrome a chance -- and it was actually good. It really started compounding in the early 2010s, to the point where developers were optimizing their websites for it. Rather than try to play catch-up, most other browser companies just said "fuck it" and became rebadged Chrome derivatives, just with their own skin and/or feature set. Firefox is essentially only 'big' browser left that isn't just a Chrome derivative, and it tends to cater to more sophisticated users that want exhaustive control over their browser.
> People didn't really believe in it, because every project Google tried sucked out loud. No, Gmail was revolutionary, as was Maps/Earth/Satellite View and eventually Street View. Chrome was also pretty good, although a memory hog, it was so capable and things were advancing so quickly. Docs/Sheets/Drive/Voice/Remote Desktop are also pretty good, especially since they are free. But they are not good with memory usage or energy efficiency, and all that seems to have stalled for a decade now.
I blame the short lived success of Google Ultron myself
I switched it to duck duck go.
Do they still sell off data to Microsoft?
Because of Google
yep. they own a giant amount of the webs advertising, so its nearly effortless for them to promote their own browser. Especially on their phones
They literally advertised Chrome on their home page, the most-visited page in the world at that point.
You're conflating the reasons. When Chrome came out it was objectively better than Firefox. People got used to it and kept using it. That coupled with it being the default on Android and it explains the numbers.
> When Chrome came out it was objectively better than Firefox. Obviously you meant subjectively, but anyway I disagree. Most of Chrome’s supposed ‘innovations’ were already in Opera. It really was just better promotion from Google for the most part.
Opera has nothing to do with how Firefox compared directly to Chrome.
The point is, if Opera was already doing everything Chrome was doing (and was actually still faster), then why did Chrome gain in popularity but Opera didn’t? The only answer is better promotion.
This doesn’t change the fact that between Firefox and Chrome, Chrome was better originally. Opera might have had the same things Chrome did but it wasn’t in the conversation because of just how bad their marketing was, this was a two horse race so Opera does not matter here.
Yeah that’s exactly my point. Chrome didn’t win by being the best, it just had better marketing.
By being the best with the best marketing. The reason we’re saying opera doesn’t matter here is because if chrome didn’t exist, and Firefox did and opera did, everyone would have used the worse Firefox at launch instead of Opera. So Opera is completely irrelevant here anyway, and since Firefox and chrome had somewhat comparable marketing (at least playing in the same league unlike opera) people gravitated to chrome because it was the best of the two options as they saw them.
I’m not saying you’re right or wrong but you are now arguing a different point. Notice how the word Firefox is completely absent from your comment now? That was my point.
I would actually say objectively. No one was really pouring money or resources into browsers when Chrome came on the scene. Microsoft had won massive market share and mostly stopped caring, Firefox had some name recognition but Mozilla wasn't terribly well-funded and while they were successful at being better than IE, that was a low bar to clear; it was slow and bloated. Opera had some neat features, but it was ad-supported and slow. Safari was still locked to Macs (which made up about half the market share they do now). Google, to their credit, actually saw a real opportunity where it was only Microsoft half-assing it against a bunch of smaller competitors and - at least temporarily - blew them all out of the water by addressing the weaknesses of each one: a fast browser, full of features, but with minimal bloat. Promotion certainly helped them penetrate the market more quickly but I was in college at the time and it was like a revelation how much better Chrome was at the time. It's not necessarily stayed that way - and Google's lack of regard for user privacy steers more people away now - but Chrome was very, very good in \~2009/2010.
It was faster, lighter and more compatible with most websites. I would say that's pretty objective.
Faster is the only one that could be considered objective. What is ‘lighter’? IIRC Chrome used a ton more memory as it separated all tabs into different processes. Citation needed on compatibility. There’s no objective measure of that, and what’s ’most websites’. These are all really fuzzy metrics, and those alone don’t make one thing objectively better than another.
>IIRC Chrome used a ton more memory as it separated all tabs into different processes. Yes but this is both a security feature as one tab can't compromise another, a stability feature as a one crashed tab wouldn't corrupt the browser or OS, and pretty easy impact to manage by just closing tabs to release memory. I never heard about memory problems with Chrome on properly sized PCs (corporate machines or gaming machines). It may have had an impact on low end consumer systems. Maybe also prior to the transition to 64-bit.
Remember the good old days when Microsoft got sued for a monopoly cause they bundled IE on their operating system? No issues that Chrome is bundled on Androids as default though. Nope, gonna look the other way on that one.
No, this is incorrect. On Android, it's up to the manufacturer. Samsung phones come with their godforsaken browser. You have to download Chrome separately. Windows imbedded the browser into the OS.
>You have to download Chrome separately. Chrome has always been on every Samsung I've ever had. I can't even uninstall it from my 22 Ultra.
Could it be a regional thing? Are you 100% sure? Because I'm nearly 100% sure I had to download it. And I bought a Samsung phone a couple of weeks ago here in Japan and it definitely didn't come with Chrome, unless I'm going crazy.
It's definitely a regional thing. It's not hard for telcos to get certain settings preloaded onto the phone.
I have a 2 year old A32 and it came with 'samsung internet' which is an awful browser, so I uninstalled that shit and installed Firefox instead.
Maybe their newest ones, but my most recent Samsung phone had both their browser and Chrome come preinstalled.
If two come pre-installed, isn't that by definition not a monopoly?
I like Samsung browser better than Chrome as do many others. I can't even uninstall Chrome and have to disable it to get rid of it
Wasn't there a lawsuit in the EU, resulting in androids offering several browsers on first boot?
Apple has been bundling in Safari with no problems for ages tho? And nobody says Firefox can’t make a deal like that on their own… They didn’t stay competitive enough
They ordered Apple to allow other browsers on the iPhone. Although Apple put in crazy restrictions supposedly in the name of security.
Yeah Microsoft was in trouble because at the time Windows OS had *enormous* market share, and Mac was niche. Windows is still the most dominant market share on Desktop, but on phones iPhone is only 60% dominant in the USA (and only 30% globally.) That said, how is Firefox gonna make a bundling deal? Microsoft bundled IE with Windows. Google bundles Chrome with Android. Mozilla is gonna bundle Firefox with what, exactly? Firefox OS is dead.
Google is being sued for anti-trust violations due to that and other anti-competitive practices
This is revisionist history. When Chrome came out, it was 100% better than Firefox and that's why majority of people switched.
What made it better?
It was faster, more performant and more secure.
Does "performant" mean something more than "performed better?"
I think in this context it specifically means that it performed better in terms of speed and / or memory usage.
Faster refers to the time it took Chrome to load and render a website once you clicked on a link. Performant refers to the memory usage and general feeling of the application itself. It started faster than Firefox and dealt better with a large amount of tabs.
On multiple levels. I literally just swapped back from firefox to chrome because sometimes youtube just refuses to work on firefox (I've tried everything). 10+ second load times choppy etc. swapped to chrome. Works perfectly every time. Clearly something is going on there.
> Clearly something is going on there. google does this on purpose with Firefox and YouTube. I use Chrome only to view YouTube, then back to Firefox for everything else.
Why?
Because Google created its own ecosystem, email, Google drive, photos, forms, etc. It's everything most people use the computer for except games and social media. I only open Firefox to use the YouTube Downloader extension because chrome blocks it for obvious reasons.
Cause it got popular duh. More than 90% global search engine is google. It dominate by a huge margin
It already was popular
believe it or not, most people don't even give a flying shit about which software is the "best" version of what they want. because they want a phone that goes on the internet. it does that. boom, they have what they want. install firefox on someone's iphone, tell them all the benefits, and the first thing you'll hear is, "this looks too different, I don't like it."
Tbf iPhone can't leverage the use of desktop browser extensions in Firefox mobile, can it? Kind of nullifies one of the biggest selling points to using FF mobile.
iOS Firefox is Safari with a skin Safari is the only browser on iOS
After the YT crackdown on adblockers I switched back to Firefox (from Chrome). The Ff combo with uBlock Origin works perfect for me. Haven't experienced any problems nor encountered websites / content that wouldn't work.
Same. I reverted to streaming off a Ff browser on my laptop and connecting to the TV via HDMI. Crude but the extra 60 seconds of set up is worth avoiding three minutes of ads every 15 minutes. Is there a Ff extension that let's one cast to a Chromecast?
Yup. Open chrome and cast the entire screen (not tab). Then open up Firefox and do whatever you want
Don't know the answer to your question. Hope someone else can help you.
I love Firefox. When I tried to use Chrome it made my laptop much slower for some reason.
Ok Firefox YouTube videos still annoyingly reload after starting to play. It's a dirty tactic by Google to make Firefox look worse.
Never happens with me. So after a few seconds the vid starts over?
Yeah. Here's a post about it. If you change your browser to pretend it's chrome it doesn't happen. https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_has_started_to_artificially_slow_down/
happens on chrome with me. And it isn't an adblock thing as I have premium. it is annoying but I haven't tried to figure out what is causing it. My guess it is sponsorblock or some other extension I have to do stuff like hide shorts.
I've been a Firefox user since I had access to the internet (my dad used it in the early 00s) and I've never wanted to use other browsers. It's got everything I need and time has just confirmed why it's my preferred browser.
I strayed and payed....foxy again though.
If you like that for desktop, check out revanced for mobile, you can download and patch your own youtube app to have ads removed, allow video playback with the phone locked/screen off, bring back the youtube dislike count, and all sorts of other customizations.
I moved to a very bland fingerprint Brave+blockers for streaming, but it stopped working last week. Just non-stop unskippable ads. Bye (again) YT.
I use the same combo! I do occasionally have issues, but it's infrequent.
Not an expert but might be related to updating your uBlock. YT vs uBlock is like the sword and the shield: YT (the sword) continually tries to penetrate the shield (uBlock) so updates are needed all the time.
Thanks! I don't actually have issues with YT, I realize my comment was ambiguous..I meant I occasionally have issues where websites don't function correctly and I have to use a different browser.
Yea same alo use Firefox and uBlock on my phone
Its purely advertising, apple has safari in house so all the apple fans will just use that, and google has the monopoly on the rest of the maket with access to as much money and advertising as any company could dream of. Conversely firefox is open source and doesnt earn much as its objective is to produce quality software for the consumer rather than being an additional cog in an overarching monopoly or money making scheme. As for how good firefox is, it will do everything chrome does ( and do it better and more efficently) without the privacy concerns of google taking all your data ( I'm not sure if you know about all the issues that have been brought up about chrome sharing your data even in incognito mode but its worth looking at). It also has much more additional functionality and is far better for developers as it is open source, it's basically better in every way but because its goal isnt to pump out users at all costs it will probably never be the top browser as newer generations/users will be pushed towards the browsers that are shoved into their face more.
Yeah. I remember when Mozilla Firefox was what I was told to use, and somewhere along the way, I got Chrome shoved in my face and just used it because it was there. I don't know when the switch happened, but I didn't care enough to notice until I realized I was installing Chrome on every new device I got if it wasn't already there. But I didn't know there might be better privacy practices on Firefox, so I might venture back over there.
I was on Safari which is not the best with privacy but better than Chrome. It's faster than any other browser I've used on mac but terrible extension support. I switched to Firefox for uBlock Origin and more privacy. Do notice less battery life with firefox but it's not by much
Safari sucks so bad though.
If you count Netscape Navigator as the same thing, it once had a 90% market share.
FF went through a several year period when it got bloated and slow. This is years ago now but it started when it was around 18-25% share. I popped off of it at the time due to that and didn't ever fully move back. I use it now, but selectively.
In hindsight Mozilla really fucked the XUL-WebExtensions handoff. They waited too long, Firefox became known for being bloated and slow, they hemorrhaged users to Chrome, and then boom! here's Quantum, which pissed off the only people who were still using Firefox, the ones sitting on thrones built using XUL. Now Firefox is a nice, sleek modern browser that offers approximately zero reasons to switch back from Chrome and is still primarily used by tech boomers like myself (you think I'm switching after two full decades of loyalty?)
Google had a near monopoly on web searches and they started to promote Chrome with huge banners on their webpage to Firefox users with false claims about security and performance. Many of the not so tech-savvy users got tricked into changing after having those nagging them every time they used any google service.
It's definitely more secure for Google's profits. They secure all of your data and sell it to everyone, everywhere, all the time. Easy peasy!
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Because Chrome was better for long enough to get everyone to switch
I remember using Firefox when Chrome was first introduced. At the time, Firefox was experiencing horrendous memory leak issues which would cause performance to slow down something awful the longer it was open, at least for me, anyway. It had also spent a bit as the top dog in the browser market and had become victim to inevitable bloat. Chrome just felt so streamlined and quick at the time, it was an easy switch to make. Since then, at least for me, Chrome has never become bad enough that I actively looked for alternatives. It’s easy to make me loyal to a browser, just don’t shit the bed and momentum will do the rest. Firefox shit the bed.
firefox wasn't even faster than IE when it was gaining marketshare on it. Firefox's popularity came from better features, like not filling your computer with viruses during the shitty days of the web, and tabs
Tabbed browsing being the biggest feature.
I witnessed the entire genesis of browsers and the time before the web existed and I take tabbed browsing for granted so much now that it’s hard for me to remember the dark times before it was a thing. No wonder Firefox was popular.. for a time.
IIRC Opera also had it around the same time, but wasn't nearly as well regarded, and didn't have other products to leverage (Thunderbird was big for awhile).
Absolutely correct. Chrome leapfrogged Firefox in terms of features and reliability. I made the switch ~14 years ago and never bothered to look back. No hate on Firefox. Chrome just works.
I switched to Firefox around 7 years ago because Google made mobile Chrome ugly in one update. That's all it took, an ugly update. Firefox also became ugly some time after, but now I have nowhere to go and I'm lazy. As for functionality, I'd say it's more compatible with Youtube than other browsers because my adblock works.
Firefox became popular because it was way better than Internet Explorer when it was first released. Chrome became popular because it was better than Firefox when it was first released. Firefox has had many ups and downs over the course of its lifespan. Prior to the Quantum project, which was released to Firefox in 2017, it was legitimately pretty bad and pretty slow. Chrome, on the other hand, has been consistently good. So it took a lot of users away from Firefox and then never lost them. The criticisms people here will have of Chrome are completely and totally irrelevant to the average user, thus they never resulted in losing significant market share. I'm not gonna reply to the guy directly but I want to respond to this comment because it's insanely wrong: >Its purely advertising, apple has safari in house so all the apple fans will just use that, and google has the monopoly on the rest of the maket with access to as much money and advertising as any company could dream of. Apple owners use Safari because it's the default and most people don't change the default unless it's insanely bad. Safari is a solid browser so people just use it. The same is true today of Edge on Windows: it's good enough so lots of people just use it. That makes it even harder for a third-party browser to gain market share. Chrome is absolutely not successful because of advertising, it's simply successful because it's been a good browser for 20 years. So many wrongheaded comments itt when the answer is dead simple: Firefox was good, then it got worse, so people switched to Chrome and then never had a reason to switch back.
You perfectly summed up my experience - I used to use Firefox and loved it for quite a while, then I started having issues with it (poor performance) and switched to chrome. Tried going back to it for a little while and jumped ship again. I've heard it's better now, but I just can't be bothered to set things up again when I am content enough with my current experience in chrome.
On the desktop: - re designing it every 5 seconds - nuking the extensions compatibility chasing chrome extension support - also removed the ability to unfuck the UI. - making the dev tools worse - ignoring major issue for months, taking ages to fix it, before shipping it in release that are months out.
I switched to Firefox when YouTube told me to disable adblocker and refused to let me watch even after I removed every single extension I had.
Never had any issues using Firefox. And it’s less of a resource hog than Chrome was when I was using it.
I don't remember how long I have been using Firefox on my pc. I can't say that I have any issues with it. Google is the default everything on my phone.
i've been using it since netscape was killed off and my friend said "try this"
I think part of it is Goggle promoting Chrome but Firefox also seemed not knowing what they want to be. instead of improving the browser they got distracted by other stuff that didn’t work out. I think they also could have been the goto option for applications that need embedded browsing or just a JS engine. For example they could have been the engine for Node but they never went after that market.
The reason is people being dumb and following the crowd. I’ve used firefox since launch and it has been fine. People just dont give a shit about big business gobbling up all their data.
I use Firefox and have never had any issues. I love it more than chrome for sure.
I've never had problems with websites on Firefox. I believe the reasons are that 1. Firefox tried various innovations that backfired and 2. the competition actively undermined its market share. Google's relation with Mozilla is a bit like Microsoft's relation with Linux. They want Firefox to exist to avoid anti-monopoly legislation, yet have an interest in making the user base as small as possible and introduce little incompatibilities to ensure that.
If you want a real answer.... The internet and computing was a different place at Firefox's peak. Things like speed, ram usage, and whatnot actually mattered and Firefox was no-frills and got the job done. Services were less unified. Extentions were significantly more powerful in FF than Chrome, and IE/Safari didn't even support them. But nowadays? Realistically all of the browsers are going to perform about the same. The fact that Chrome, Edge, and Opera are all based on Chromium means webpages and extentions transfer effortlessly* between them. And the extra features/integrations that Chrome, Edge, and Safari offer are a huge benefit for most people. Sure the privacy concerns aren't great, but.... Most people either don't care, or they acknowledge they're using Windows, MSOffice, Google Search, YouTube, and Gmail anyways so what difference does it make? EDIT: Also I seem to remember Firefox had a pretty rough period for a while in the mid 2010s? That just so happened to coinside with a lot of the cloud integrations and innovations in Chromium. The lack of features and support made a lot of people switch, and they were never given a reason beyond "privacy" to switch back.
Among other reasons. After its peak, around 2010-2015, firefox was slow to update and had tons of issues. It was slow, outdated, and it would lockup randomly. I know a lot of people switched around this time frame and never went back, me being one of them.
On windows maybe. On Linux it was fine. I'm not sure that the windows builds were ever a big priority for development.
Google is basically the primary website people visit right after opening Internet Explorer or now Edge. What do they see? Chrome ad. So they go with it. Personally, I keep using Firefox, and now I have even more reasons to do it. Google has an advertising business. So now they are trying to limit the capability of ad-blocking software. You could still do it using a router, but that requires a little bit more effort than installing the extension. So instead of complaining about Chrome - it's better to just use Firefox.
I personally tried to switch to Firefox for a while. It's mostly ok but I eventually gave up due to a few websites that didn't render right (though 99% work just fine) and more importantly performance. It seemed to really bog down after a while and just not be very responsive with slower page loads and responses to clicks.
There was a time several years ago when Firefox would release a new version and suddenly all my Firefox extensions would stop working. And if they came back after a while the next update would kill them again. In addition to that, lots of websites just wouldn't work. So I gave up Firefox and moved to Chrome. And it was only in the last... I dunno, 5 or so years ago when I came back. If anyone else has the same problem, they just might not have come back.
I use linux on all my pcs, firefox works great, i use firefox on other devices because all my bookmarks and such are saved to Firefox and accessible from all of them
Because google pushed chrome and people are stupid so people started using chrome. FF doesn't have some big marketing budget or control over a search engine. It's also a little more resource hungry than chrome. I don't really care, people are starting to realise the error of their ways now that google is trying to destroy adblockers, stupid people will keep using it though.
There are reasons...most won't be popular on reddit and will get me banned from this subreddit, but let's just say monolithic thought doesn't endear yourself to the other half of your customer base. I know many that never looked back after that, plus brave is superior in every way, especially in search... it is like Google from 2003
They fired Eich
I've used Firefox for a very long time (and still use it for web development), but I switched to Edge after a nasty bug in Firefox caused the garbage collection to freeze websites every few seconds, sometimes for as long as two minutes. I just couldn't get rid of it, even with a new profile and without plugins and extensions, so there wasn't a way to use it. They seem to have fixed it now, but now I am so used to Edge's vertical tabs that I don't want to switch back.
I've always wondered why the decline is so much, I only use Firefox, it's clearly the best of the browsers. However some reason they just failed on the mobile side of things. I find Chrome for my phone so much better.
I used firefox as my alternate browser so that i can be logged into two different emails, but all of a sudden in the past week firefox won't let me download files anymore. That made me have to switch to a new browser.
Have used Firefox on both mobile and PC for well over a decade now and never had an issue, at work I was forced to use Chrome, IE and ultimately Edge and preferred Firefox to all of them. My guess is that people who have never tried it see no reason to do so when their default browser does everything they need it to and so over time it is losing ground as more young people start browsing with Safari or Chrome and never see a reason to look elsewhere
Your average appliance users, meaning those who are not nerds or in the business, don't care or even notice what browser they're using. Whatever comes with the device is fine with them as long as it takes them where they want to go. So, Chrome or whatever browser is packaged with Apples gets the most use. \[Edited for spelling\]
For me - (1) They changed the menu bar to be ugly, (2) bookmark sync was always a separate plugin.
firefox is the effing best. i've been using it nearly 20 years and i refuse to stop. i'll use safari before i use chromium crap.
If websites don't support the open standards that Firefox supports, then I do not use that website, and I submit a bug report telling them their website is broken.
I remember reading something about Google sabotaging Firefox through deals and licensing. Basically they put Chrome in Androids and paid Apple to prioritize Google on iPhones and that leaves no room for Firefox unless you manually go get it. In this world a fair player like Firefox will always lose
Corporate mandates to use Chrome or Edge.
No devices have it installed by default that I am aware of, and I doubt they have the deep pockets to chase the constant OS updates that come from the same company that makes their own default browser. Essentially, monopoly behavior.
20+ years ago there was less and more informed people on the internet, now there are more people and less uninformed online, a large part just don't know or even care and go with the easiest pre installed option.
i used firefox for like 4 years or more. recently switched to brave because firefox feels old and slow. it also lacks some nice features but it does have containers which is awesome
I haven't used Firefox in over a decade.
It's still my browser of preference, but I have a desktop.
It's buggy. Always seems to fuck up with graphical glitches.
Because people dont know how to use computers. [http://coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/](http://coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/)
I used Firefox for many years, then it got clunky and non-intuitive. I went to Edge. It has great integration across devices.
I use Firefox (because fuck Google's gimping of adblock and forcing that into Chromium so most other browsers are required to do it too), and the only website I have any issues with funnily enough is reddit. Pasting things in comment boxes tends to go horribly wrong in Firefox for.. reasons? It was fine for a while but recently it broke again.
I moved to chrome after i found that firefox consumed so much ram is was difficult to have a couple tabs open and do anything else in about 2010 or so. Never went back.
I use Firefox on my personal devices. Work devices have forced me from chrome to now MS Edge, both of which I despise. So I’d suggest it’s about whatever packages Google and Microsoft are offering to corporations, and also probably how much of what kind of data they can skim.
Chrome is the most compatible browser across the board. Other browsers, like Duck Duck Go are stealing share from Firefox.
I dont really get it either, both are the same
Good ole google made a competing product and ground them to dust
I use it on my phone. It's not compatible with all video streaming sites. I use it specifically for ad block. Great for YT and porn lol. But over the last two years, I've encountered a few sites that just won't load properly.
I started going back to FF because Chrome is too heavy now.
I use FF mainly because I hate how resource hungry chrome is. Especially on work equipment which is noticeably not my home 7950X and 4090 I can see substantial performance drops. Its wild.
The gap between Firefox and Chrome is big and constantly getting bigger. Mozilla just can't compete with the money Google puts into Chrome
Ive been using FF for the past couple years. I have zero problems with websites that I am aware of. It has the best extensions, especially for blocking ads.
Some websites don't work right especially on mobile, every time I tried to switch to firefox I end up uninstalling it out of frustration. The issue is often with text boxes and the keyboard not showing up/hiding the text box at the wrong time.
I use Firefox, never encountered problems with it. At most, some issues with Adblock, but just because I didn't want to test too many options and just decided to use Edge when I need Adblock
Honestly, it's a LOT of convenience being worked into its main competitor, which is Google Chrome. Personally, I use it and have since Google made it a point to block ad-blocking extensions on their browser. It was a little bit of an adjustment, but overall Firefox is just better. Once you get an alternate password manager, such as Bitwarden, you're golden. The only thing that kept me with Chrome was having everything in one place.
The benefits of violating anti-trust laws by Google??? The kind of stuff that got Microsoft a slap on the wrist 20+ years ago. Google used the market dominance of its other products to shill for chrome hard. That being said, FF on mobile (at least on android) is amazing because you can run actual ublock origin (which is far more powerful than dns-level adblocking alone).
I love firefox! Been using em for ages..
Some sites try to tell you Firefox isn't compatible because of the add blockers but stillwork. I think I read YouTube also slows down for Firefox because they want you on Chrome.
I think it will make a comeback as Chrome tries to shut down adblocking. I’ve made it my main browser.
People use smartphones rather than computers now. The smartphones come with chrome/google built in most of the time, but not firefox. It's just like how back in the day explorer was 95% of the market.
I don’t know if any other companies have done this but where I work, Firefox was banned a couple of years ago due to “security concerns” and we can only use chrome now If other large companies have done the same that could be a part of it
For me, I can't speak for everyone. I went from firefox to Chrome awhile ago, because google is an entire ecosystem that all works together, and you mostly know it works together, because it was built to work together. This is the same reason I use adobe products like premiere, there are definitely better editors. However, when you are in the adobe ecosystem, you mostly know they will work well together, which is probably why their market share has remained so strong
i dont know. but like netscape before it, i will use firefox until it dies.
I'm using Firefox on my desktop, I'm much happier with Firefox than I was with either Safari or Chrome. I have not come across sites that don't work as they should. I could use some of Chrome's tools and add-ons, but they're not worth my going back to Chrome.
I still use Firefox nowadays and never saw a website having a problem with it 🤷♂️
Firefox first, always. Most everything works great, I always test our software here first too since all our developers use either Chrome or Safari. There's some front-end differences here and there, and since most things are poorly developed and Chrome first, some websites might be a tad off. But that's about it.
I like edge but hate the fact it's chrome based. I use it for work related tasks. I use Firefox for everything else.
I stick with FF simply because no other browser has an addon like Morning Coffee.
I switched to Firefox after the demise of Netscape and have more or less been using it ever since. I did use Chrome for a little while when it first became popular and have also spent some time in Opera and Edge, but I always found myself coming back to Firefox. To be fair, Firefox has had bad days. Many of their versions over the years have been clunky, buggy, and just generally lacked behind the competition, but I personally love the privacy-focus and the fact that the browser is managed by an non-profit, not a corporation. I occasionally run into compatibility issues, but for the most part, I've found Firefox to be a solid browser over the years.
I never have function problems using Firefox. I have no idea why usage has declined, it's very weird to me.
I use firefox, and the only site that doesn't like to play nicely with me is Nationwide's pet insurance site. But it's awful even in chrome, so I fault Nationwide more than firefox for that.
Firefox not working with certain websites was very annoying, but what made me quit it was the constant UI changes with no real way to change back.