Firefox May Have Lost Up to 12% of Its Users So Far in 2021(fosspost.org)
fosspost.org
Firefox May Have Lost Up to 12% of Its Users So Far in 2021
https://fosspost.org/firefox-may-have-lost-12-percent-of-users/
55 comments
Mozilla's recent history should be (and probably will be at some point) a case study in PR. They had enormous reserves of goodwill, trust, and positive perception, and managed to squander all of that in a relatively short period of time.
another interesting case would be Blizzard Entertainment
that company went from being beloved by nearly all to universally hated in under 18 months
it has been astounding to watch so much destroyed so quickly
that company went from being beloved by nearly all to universally hated in under 18 months
it has been astounding to watch so much destroyed so quickly
Mozilla has been a death by a thousand cuts over many years.
The first "user-enhancing" [1] in-browser ads ("sponsored tiles") were introduced in 2014. Pocket imposition was 2015 [2]. Mr Robot was 2017 [3]. Cliqz was 2017 [4]. booking.com was 2018 [5].
[1] https://twitter.com/dherman76/status/433320156496789504
[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1172126
[3] https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/mozilla-back...
[4] https://www.zdnet.com/article/firefox-tests-cliqz-engine-whi...
[5] https://venturebeat.com/2018/12/31/mozilla-ad-on-firefoxs-ne...
The first "user-enhancing" [1] in-browser ads ("sponsored tiles") were introduced in 2014. Pocket imposition was 2015 [2]. Mr Robot was 2017 [3]. Cliqz was 2017 [4]. booking.com was 2018 [5].
[1] https://twitter.com/dherman76/status/433320156496789504
[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1172126
[3] https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/mozilla-back...
[4] https://www.zdnet.com/article/firefox-tests-cliqz-engine-whi...
[5] https://venturebeat.com/2018/12/31/mozilla-ad-on-firefoxs-ne...
Blizzard's death has been far longer than that. Classic case of things moving slowly, and then the final straw hits the camel's back. The company has had game quality issues for a long time.
well it took way way longer in blizzards case and it was their fate. not enough games for their core audience, d3 not as good as d2, wow addons being more stale after 3.0, etc.. the last 3 years was just the tip of all the downs of the years before.
In this case it was an acquisition wasn't it? I remember reading from disappointed fans that we should call this company Activision-Blizzard and that Blizzard itself died a long time ago.
Their pr has been bad, but their behaviour has been mostly good. Most of the controversies I looked into in detail were not portrayed accurately in the media
Behavior has been horrible as well. Dumbing down Firefox, ignoring power users and dismissing any criticisms to changes. I was a hardcore fan but they alienated me so I left it over a year ago and don't regret it at all.
well, maybe if FF updates didn't seem to make it worse each time I'd be more inclined in believing you
My gut tells me Rust is going places and I predict in retrospect Mozilla will be seen as having abandoned their stake in Rust just as it was taking off. Just another example.
To be fair there's some apparent history of Google sabotaging the browser so people favour Chrome.
e.g. https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...
That said, it's not healthy that Mozilla have relied on search revenue from Google.
Personally I've used FF for 10 years+, on Linux nowadays
e.g. https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...
That said, it's not healthy that Mozilla have relied on search revenue from Google.
Personally I've used FF for 10 years+, on Linux nowadays
How did they manage that ?
By replacing focus with office politics, politics at the office, and a bunch of projects so stupid and far from their mission/audience that they literally can and did shock a theater full of people into silence.
Blizzard specifically lost people passionate about their work, getting taken over by business types, realizing too late that it wasn't Blizzard the company that made great products, but great people making great products. As a consequence of passionate people leaving, their audience doesn't feel like they are being understood at all, or even listened to. The devs that were regularly talking to the players and spoke spoke their language have departed, some of them now working on their own game (Palia), where they continue to work as they used to.
Mozilla just appears to be spreading itself very thin, straying far from their mission of creating a good browser.
Blizzard specifically lost people passionate about their work, getting taken over by business types, realizing too late that it wasn't Blizzard the company that made great products, but great people making great products. As a consequence of passionate people leaving, their audience doesn't feel like they are being understood at all, or even listened to. The devs that were regularly talking to the players and spoke spoke their language have departed, some of them now working on their own game (Palia), where they continue to work as they used to.
Mozilla just appears to be spreading itself very thin, straying far from their mission of creating a good browser.
> a bunch of projects so stupid and far from their mission/audience that they literally can and did shock a theater full of people into silence.
I didn't hear about this. Care to explain?
I didn't hear about this. Care to explain?
It's what happens when decision makers are completely disconnected from their audience.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmkHAlhCvWg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmkHAlhCvWg
Ah. I made a mistake and mixed this comment tree up with a sibling[1] that threw Blizzard into the discussion.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27911924
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27911924
I really hate to sound negative talking about Mozilla, because I think their mission is appealing to me, but it came down to a matter of execution of that vision.
From personal experience, my perception of Mozilla has been negatively affected by how they've handled the rewrite of Firefox for Android. It was released too early, and it's still missing the ability to search through browsing history. And there are still so many bugs and performance issues almost a year after its release. I opened issues for many of them and they have been left ignored to this day.
- Scrolling up on Google search's results page and some other pages is not registered half the time, and sometimes triggers pull-to-refresh instead
- Scrolling up inside an input box while the page is at the top of the screen causes unintentional pull-to-refresh
- Bitwarden autofill is not registered unless you kill and restart the app after logging in
- You can't save images that require cookies to be passed to the request, such as under DDoS protected pages
- Links will sometimes redirect to about:blank unless you go back and click them again
- Most recently visited page is not restored when closing and reopening the app, even though it's saved to the history (closed as wontfix)
- Uses large amounts of memory, causing Android share actions to be silently killed due to OOM unless you quickly kill the app right after sending them
- Closing a tab and clicking "Undo" in the popup sends the tab all the way to the top of the list, instead of its original position (inconvenient if you have a large number of tabs open)
- Frequently loses open tabs in memory, even within ten seconds of navigating to another tab
I'm pretty much only using mobile Firefox out of principle and for uBlock Origin at this point. And sometimes I still have to use something like Brave to get around performance issues.
And then Mozilla announces that they've spent their development resources on projects like Rally and DoH that I personally have no interest in using.
It's certainly frustrating. It makes you wonder what their management is thinking.
I hope I'm not alone in thinking these are objectively bad experiences to have on mobile, which will only increase the marketshare of Blink-based Android browsers. It's been my experience that, when one of their mobile team's engineers says that they have to wait for the corresponding GeckoView issue to be fixed before it can be upstreamed into FfA, you might as well give up hope of seeing it fixed for at least another few months, if ever. And I can't understand why they close and ignore some issues that still have a very real impact on the browsing experience to this day.
It's sad, because Firefox is the only opportunity on mobile to take advantage of uBlock Origin and other WebExtensions (though full support is still not implemented yet), and Brave's adblocking is at times inferior, like for Twitter's web version.
Apologies for the rant, but I feel that it had to be said.
From personal experience, my perception of Mozilla has been negatively affected by how they've handled the rewrite of Firefox for Android. It was released too early, and it's still missing the ability to search through browsing history. And there are still so many bugs and performance issues almost a year after its release. I opened issues for many of them and they have been left ignored to this day.
- Scrolling up on Google search's results page and some other pages is not registered half the time, and sometimes triggers pull-to-refresh instead
- Scrolling up inside an input box while the page is at the top of the screen causes unintentional pull-to-refresh
- Bitwarden autofill is not registered unless you kill and restart the app after logging in
- You can't save images that require cookies to be passed to the request, such as under DDoS protected pages
- Links will sometimes redirect to about:blank unless you go back and click them again
- Most recently visited page is not restored when closing and reopening the app, even though it's saved to the history (closed as wontfix)
- Uses large amounts of memory, causing Android share actions to be silently killed due to OOM unless you quickly kill the app right after sending them
- Closing a tab and clicking "Undo" in the popup sends the tab all the way to the top of the list, instead of its original position (inconvenient if you have a large number of tabs open)
- Frequently loses open tabs in memory, even within ten seconds of navigating to another tab
I'm pretty much only using mobile Firefox out of principle and for uBlock Origin at this point. And sometimes I still have to use something like Brave to get around performance issues.
And then Mozilla announces that they've spent their development resources on projects like Rally and DoH that I personally have no interest in using.
It's certainly frustrating. It makes you wonder what their management is thinking.
I hope I'm not alone in thinking these are objectively bad experiences to have on mobile, which will only increase the marketshare of Blink-based Android browsers. It's been my experience that, when one of their mobile team's engineers says that they have to wait for the corresponding GeckoView issue to be fixed before it can be upstreamed into FfA, you might as well give up hope of seeing it fixed for at least another few months, if ever. And I can't understand why they close and ignore some issues that still have a very real impact on the browsing experience to this day.
It's sad, because Firefox is the only opportunity on mobile to take advantage of uBlock Origin and other WebExtensions (though full support is still not implemented yet), and Brave's adblocking is at times inferior, like for Twitter's web version.
Apologies for the rant, but I feel that it had to be said.
Have you tried Firefox Browser (Nightly for Developers)? I'm using that on Android since the whole debacle that you described. It mostly works fine and from the start it already had a lot of the features that are missing in the main Firefox. I don't understand how it can all be working fine in the dev build whilst the main visible product is so lacking. Sometimes the UI gets some odd changes with updates, but I haven't had to switch browsers again so far. Though I'm not sure if your specific issues are addressed. I mostly ignore or work around them. I have pull to refresh disabled for example as it was driving me nuts.
And yes, I can't understand how Firefox was updated with so many features missing and it is still not there. It's quite sad, really.
And yes, I can't understand how Firefox was updated with so many features missing and it is still not there. It's quite sad, really.
I am running Nightly, actually, mostly in the hopes that the most important issues get fixed sooner. It doesn't seem like that's happening. I might end up going back to stable pretty soon.
I should also mention that Chrome on Android has none of the issues I described earlier. Wouldn't it make sense that even someone like me that desperately wants a reason to stand with Mozilla ends up giving into temptation and uses Brave half the time?
I hope that Mozilla can learn from its mistakes and stay competitive, given that the alternative is an Android browser monoculture. They're one of the few organizations with the resources to implement the increasingly encroaching burden of new web specifications, and I don't think a community-supported fork of Firefox or FfA will survive without some kind of miracle (see Waterfox and its need to eventually implement Web Components or fall out of relevance). The partial WebExtension support on mobile alone is one thing that gives me hope FfA will continue to see support for the near future.
I should also mention that Chrome on Android has none of the issues I described earlier. Wouldn't it make sense that even someone like me that desperately wants a reason to stand with Mozilla ends up giving into temptation and uses Brave half the time?
I hope that Mozilla can learn from its mistakes and stay competitive, given that the alternative is an Android browser monoculture. They're one of the few organizations with the resources to implement the increasingly encroaching burden of new web specifications, and I don't think a community-supported fork of Firefox or FfA will survive without some kind of miracle (see Waterfox and its need to eventually implement Web Components or fall out of relevance). The partial WebExtension support on mobile alone is one thing that gives me hope FfA will continue to see support for the near future.
Not a huge fan of the new Firefox Proton UI, the tabs look more like buttons and I found the previous design a lot more streamlined. The new design doesn't feel as usable as it should be IMO, and it'll be a reason for me to move to another browser if the design isn't updated in the future.
At the moment, I've switched off Proton in the about:config section, but it's only a matter of time before this will no longer be an option. Hopefully Firefox will go back to the old UI or at least make some changes!
At the moment, I've switched off Proton in the about:config section, but it's only a matter of time before this will no longer be an option. Hopefully Firefox will go back to the old UI or at least make some changes!
I loathe the days that window managers and apps decide to steal multiple pixels vertically for useless appearance "improvements". Thank you for making less content visible on my screen.
Firefox (currently) has a setting called browser.compactmode.show which makes the UI more compact when set to true. You might want to check it out?
Using this setting, tab bar plus navigation bar take up 72 pixels vertically for me.
Using this setting, tab bar plus navigation bar take up 72 pixels vertically for me.
They are on record that it will be removed "real soon now". Apparently "nobody uses it"
I did some searching and they seem to keep the about:config option:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1703254
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1703254
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I'm hanging in there with Firefox as a matter of principle. Since Gecko is the only alternative engine left. However under Linux I feel the performance is worse then under Windows. On Windows Firefox performance feels closer to Chrome's performance.
For what it's worth, my Firefox on Linux performance problems disappeared as soon as I switched to Wayland. Touchpad scrolling is now smooth and responsive, like it is in Windows. I also force-enable WebRender, since I think it's disabled by default on Wayland, but I'm not sure if that's as big of a contributor as the change in windowing system (for some reason.)
Hm, so showing ads on the home screen [1], doing pointless UI redesigns that waste screen space [2], adding features people actively DO not want [3], and breaking the mobile app [4] are NOT good ways to increase userbase? Who knew?
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...
[2] https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/please-dont-remove-the-compa...
[3] https://www.guidingtech.com/disable-pocket-firefox-desktop-m...
[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/ic8uwm/new_update_...
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...
[2] https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/please-dont-remove-the-compa...
[3] https://www.guidingtech.com/disable-pocket-firefox-desktop-m...
[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/ic8uwm/new_update_...
Also pushing political agendas through push notifications.
I've switched to Firefox on mobile because Google keeps forcing the garbage tab layout on me.
I'm one of those users. Actually I think I abandoned Firefox last year.
I want to like Firefox. But every single update for several years has reduced it's utility. Development is no longer focused on the user. Who knows what it's focused on at this point, they say the user, but looking at the design decisions it is easy to see that that isn't true. I don't like being bullshitted.
I think generally the idea of "web browsers" is a negative thing. The internet is supposed to be protocols, the web is supposed to be documents. Having a window that you open that runs more stuff than your operating system unless you're writing code is strange, it is a UX entirely driven by massive technical debt as a result of bad decisions piling on top of one another for decades.
These days as far as browsers go, I use ungoogled chromium, bromite, and gnome web. I've tried pale moon and a few others and they're generally not what they're pitched as. It's hard to build a browser from scratch because of what I mentioned above, and I get that, and the main problem with web browsers is that the web is broken, but I live in a world where I need one and Firefox doesn't deliver.
I want to like Firefox. But every single update for several years has reduced it's utility. Development is no longer focused on the user. Who knows what it's focused on at this point, they say the user, but looking at the design decisions it is easy to see that that isn't true. I don't like being bullshitted.
I think generally the idea of "web browsers" is a negative thing. The internet is supposed to be protocols, the web is supposed to be documents. Having a window that you open that runs more stuff than your operating system unless you're writing code is strange, it is a UX entirely driven by massive technical debt as a result of bad decisions piling on top of one another for decades.
These days as far as browsers go, I use ungoogled chromium, bromite, and gnome web. I've tried pale moon and a few others and they're generally not what they're pitched as. It's hard to build a browser from scratch because of what I mentioned above, and I get that, and the main problem with web browsers is that the web is broken, but I live in a world where I need one and Firefox doesn't deliver.
I'm confused about all the ill will I'm seeing. Mozilla actually respects my privacy, and are one of the few obstacles standing in front of a browser monoculture. I very much want to see them succeed.
Not sure what's wrong with it. I use Firefox nightly and I love it. Admittedly, for mobile I use Brave browser.
Now that Edge is Chromium based, is there still a good reason not to stick with the default browser?
Yes. If you don't want to be using google or google using you, which ever way you look at it. It's better than chrome, but suffers same thins as firefox like default settings.
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>Just since the beginning of 2021, and according to StatCounter, Firefox may have lost
Who doesn't block statcounter.com!?
Edit: Apparently the guy following my comments works for them.
Who doesn't block statcounter.com!?
Edit: Apparently the guy following my comments works for them.
That's a good point, though. Statcounter is probably blocked by most tracker protection implementations, so Firefox users are probably underrepresented because of the privacy Firefox brings.
Only people without privacy-preserving addons will show up in these statistics. It's a game rigged in favour of Google, Microsoft, and only partially, Apple.
Only people without privacy-preserving addons will show up in these statistics. It's a game rigged in favour of Google, Microsoft, and only partially, Apple.
I would have expected more. They reap what they sow.
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I wonder how the office politics translates to this dip in user base.
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By design, Firefox supports and reports to sugar daddy Google. Nothing really "private" about that.
https://www.googlewatchdog.com/how-tos/how-to-eradicate-goog...
https://www.googlewatchdog.com/how-tos/how-to-eradicate-goog...
>Step 2. Turn off “safe browsing”.
>Firefox has a feature called “safe browsing” which reports information about your browsing to Google.
I'm no fan of Google's practices but that list is just fear mongering. For example Google safe browsing just downloads a blocklist. It doesn't send any browsing data to Google.
I'm no fan of Google's practices but that list is just fear mongering. For example Google safe browsing just downloads a blocklist. It doesn't send any browsing data to Google.
Their block list excludes Google which has trackers embedded in the majority of web sites.
There is nothing really "private" about that.
There is nothing really "private" about that.
Do you understand that safe browsing is an anti-malware and anti-phishing system that has nothing to do with tracking?
Do you understand that Firefox boasts "privacy by design" but does very little to promote it?
If you have no problem with this, you might as well use Chrome.
If you have no problem with this, you might as well use Chrome.
The question was specifically about a feature that is not about privacy, but about malware and phishing.
I agree that Firefox could do a lot more for privacy by default but let's be accurate in our criticisms.