On losing market share.

I truly appreciate all of the efforts Mozilla has brought, but there are things I cannot tolerate, and @mindbleach@sh.itjust.works is accurate and concise, which I'd like to expound upon.

[Mozilla] spent twenty years burning out every committed advocate with broken extensions, UI whack-a-mole, random half-baked corporate decisions, [before finally mimicking Chrome.]

Firefox's user-base was mostly nerds, and nerds' grass-roots referrals; well and truly, Firefox was a developers first browser. What happens when you have many enthusiastic nerds contributing to a project? Free-ish improvements. You still need someone to review pushes, correct merge conflicts, implement requests, prioritize feedback, and maintain the playground after all.

However, Mozilla made some questionable and unilateral decisions that alienated their user-base. For the sake of brevity, I'll list some of the issues that caused me to switch to LibreWolf. Descending importance:

• Deciding developers would no longer be the target audience. (History follows. 2020 a new CEO is appointed: Mitchell Baker. Mozilla announces funding cuts to various departments, such as MDN, developer tools, and security researchers. MDN slowly loses its status as the, 1, go-to web reference and, 2, place to find the latest advancements of the web. Dev tools in Chrome gain features FF can't keep up with. Earlier in May, of this year, 2023: Mozilla begins new developer blogs in an effort to regain the gold mine they discarded, along with various other measures.)

• Installing the Mr. Robot extension without warning, let alone consent. (This was 6 years ago. I should let it go.)

• Whitelisting only 6 mobile add-ons. (Add-on manager now announced to be "(re-)opened" later this year.)

• Making it very difficult to opt-out of said mobile add-on decision, and impossible without opting-in to telemetry.

• about:config unavailability in mobile Firefox.

• Massive issues in major versions, which should've been caught by beta testing if not alpha.

My biggest gripes boil down to throwing us away, and the decisions made in pursuing generic and more profitable consumers. Mostly in removing the freedom, tinkering ability, control, etc that Firefox previously provided.

Ultimately, they have contributed greatly. I don't expect they quite understand how controlling and authoritarian decisions are driving away their hardest dying supporters, but I can hope they remember their roots. I hope they can learn and change. I'd like to get some faith back in the company I was such a large fan of. I wish them all the wisdom and success they can manage. If they go the way of Netscape, I hope some other idealist nerds pick up the torch.

I wish them well, but Firefox is no longer my browser.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'd guess that:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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