edited the heading of the question. I think most of us here are reasoning why more people are not using firefox (because it was the initial question), but none of that explains why it's actively losing marketshare.
I don't agree ideologically with Firefox management and am somewhat of a semi-conservative (and my previous posts might testify to that), I think Firefox browser is absolutely amazing! It's beautiful and it just feels good. It has awesome features like containers. It's better for privacy than any mainstream browser out there (even counting Brave here) and it has great integration between PC and Phone. It's open-source (unlike Chrome) and it supports a good chunk of extensions you would need.
This was about PC, but I believe even for Mobiles it looks great and it allows features like extensions (and I hear desktop extensions are coming to firefox android?), it's just a great ecosystem and it's available everywhere unlike most FOSS softwares.
So why is Firefox's market share dying?
I mean, I have a few ideas why it might be, maybe correct me I guess?
- Most people don't know how to use extensions well and how to use Firefox well. (Most of my friends in their 30's still live without ad blockers, so I don't think many are educated here)
- It's just not as fast as Chrome or Brave. I can't deny this, but despite of this, I find it's worthy.
- It's not the default.
- Many features which are Google specific aren't supported.
- Many websites are just not supporting firefox anymore (looking at you snapchat), but you would be right in saying this is the effect of Firefox losing it's market share not the cause (at least for now) and you would be right.
But what else?
I might take time (a lot of it) to get back at you, thanks for understanding.
occasionally I’ll find websites that don’t work 100% because they were coded primarily for chromium based browsers. FU Google
I'm going to call an app developer saying "users are not sophisticated enough to make good decisions about add-ons even if we warn them about incompatibility" as showing a superior attitude toward users.
Ultimately, my objection to how they handled it isn't that some effort was required to install extensions. Instead, it's that:
That does indeed not sound very diplomatic ... but i dont remember seeing that quote anywhere. Do you have a source?
Well, if i remember correctly you only need an account if you want to install extensions on stable. If you use the nightly or beta builds, i think you dont. But please correct me if i am wrong here. I might be mixing this up.
well ... the thing with the roadmap ... is kind of a long standing issue with fiefox products .. from other dicussions i've seen and had i have gathered the opinion that mozilla has intentionally been getting very careful with posting any kind of roadmaps ... with anything besides very vague milestones ... and the only 2 reason i and other people seemed to are because they just wanted to be careful about making promises they might not be able to keep and prevent other from arguing about the roadmap decisions. And i know a lot of people in the community have very strong opinions and get easily angry ... so going with not having a roadmap also seems like a reasonable decisions to keep fallouts/fights from happening. - Mostly guessing here ... but its the best explaination i could come up with ... maybe i am completely wrong and the is actually another or actually no reason ... but i kind of doubt that.
It's not a quote. It's what their decisions say to me. I don't think we're likely to come to an agreement about whether their decisions were patronizing, and that's fine - it's a matter of opinion more than objective fact.
That's not correct. Stable doesn't allow it at all, and an account is required for nightly.
As for a roadmap, saying the intend to open up extension support soon isn't that big a promise since the support already exists and is just locked out by default.
I agree ... we both have differnet opinions and that is indeed fine.
Thank you for the interesting exchange and sharing your opinions.
Have an excellent day!