One additional cause of new Chrome installs taking over from Firefox: bundleware. Chrome is foisted upon users as install-by-default bundleware when users install or update lots of different apps, especially free antivirus apps on Windows. Just clicking "Continue" when your free antivirus on Windows updates will cause Chrome to be installed and set as the default browser. Here's an image of Avast tricking you into installing Chrome: http://imgur.com/hNZLbmL
I've had to fix this for three family members previously as they were using a free antivirus and couldn't figure out why their browser looked different and didn't have an ad-blocker now.
I'm actually kinda glad that Windows 10 forces the user to be very explicit when changing the default browser. Yeah, they use it to push Edge, of course. Better than programs changing it without the user knowing.
As scummy as those installs are, it highlights Google's killer advantage: money. It generates so much cash from advertising that it can pay any company for more distribution (even Firefox!), which in turn generates more cash... Unstoppable until anti-trust kicks in.
In addition to Chrome's bundling deals which override your default browser settings, major Windows updates now appear to reset your default browser to Edge every time.
If I remember, wasn't the version installed by Avast a custom chromium fork until relatively recently? Then there was some security issue, and google basically stop the AV's to knock it off? I think Comodo also did something like this too, though theirs was more of a mess, because Comodo.
AVG also started doing this recently. I get a lot calls from family members and friends who aren't tech-savvy and can't differentiate between browsers. They think their "bookmarks" disappeared but the true reason is Chrome was bundled with something (e.g. AVG) and replaced Firefox as default browser.
I called AVG on twitter but their answer was just typical PR BS: "We're sorry for your inconvenience. Please remember that you can opt-out from this". Yeah, they have clean hands because they put very small checkbox in very small font in installer.
While I don't agree with the technique, I would certainly not call it "tricking". Especially in your example, where it very clearly (more than most) describes what will happen if the boxes remain checked. People who blindly click "next", "ok", or "continue" buttons are tricking themselves, not being tricked. Especially when dealing with "free" software.
I think the "Why?" section's conclusions are off the mark. It basically blames Google's advertising of Chrome for Firefox's decline, and even goes so far as to say "Firefox’s decline is not an engineering problem."
While I don't doubt that Google's advertising of Chrome has drawn away some Firefox users, I also don't think that we can ignore or deny the many controversial changes to Firefox that have likely had an impact, too.
Just off of the top of my head I can think of things like:
* Frequent breakage of extensions when first switching to the more rapid release schedule.
* Frequent and disruptive UI changes that didn't bring users much benefit, such as Australis.
* Removing the ability to easily disable JavaScript.
* Taking many years to get multiprocess support working. (Not that I'm suggesting they should have rushed it, of course.)
* The inclusion of Pocket and Hello.
* Sponsored tiles.
* Users who report experiencing poor performance and high memory usage.
* Disruption caused by requiring signed extensions.
* The removal of support for OSes or OS releases that are moderately older, but still do have active users.
I'm sure there are others that I'm forgetting.
Even if they seem minor, those are the kinds of things that can cause users to switch away from Firefox, or not even start using it in the first place. Losing a small number of users for a variety of minor reasons can add up very quickly, as well. Furthermore, those issues don't really have anything to do with Google or Chrome.
From my experience, the reasons why people switched to Chrome have been because it renders pages much smoother and everything generally looks better. These were the original reasons that they moved over to Firefox from IE as well. I personally helped a number of relatives and friends make these switches.
Late last year, after many years on Chrome, I gave Firefox another serious look and I have switched back. Firefox has improved tremendously and I would prefer to give my support to Mozilla from a philosophical standpoint (the Chrome team does a lot of good work with regards to pushing forward the features of the web and its security but at the end of the day, Chrome is still a strategic piece of Google's business machine and not a philanthropic effort)
While I have my reasons for using Firefox, I don't see a compelling reason for most users already happy with Chrome to switch back. The average web user that I know doesn't really understand where web browsers come from and isn't very interested in learning about it. They just care whether the browser runs better or worse for the tasks that they do. (Except many still hate IE and will not even try Edge because the logo looks similar enough - that's a branding issue that Microsoft has)
What irritates me now are more and more sites that only work with Chrome (where they literally throw up a page that blocks access and says go download Chrome). These are sites that are not Google properties so I'm not blaming Google for this bad behavior, but again, I would like to support the diverse browser landscape that has existed to this point. I guess my main complaint to Google is to please stop popping up dialogs about Chrome across all of your properties. The browser I'm using works perfectly fine thank you, and you should be supporting the open web with your products anyway.
I'd be surprised if any of those, up to the last three, was a big deal for more than 1% or so of users. And I am inclined to think the original article probably has it right about simple saturation marketing as the cause of most user switching.
But performance. Firefox very often outperforms Chrome in microbenchmarks and computationally-intensive code in my tests, but in the real world an awful lot of sites really are much more responsive in Chrome.
For me as a user, most recently an update to the FastMail web UI a couple of weeks ago made it lamentably slow in Firefox -- just mousing over the folder tree caused CPU spikes and lag in updating -- and in the end I switched to opening FastMail in a separate Chrome instance while continuing to use Firefox for everything else. I've just switched it back to Firefox as I type this, to see whether anything has improved.
The web app I'm working on as a developer just now also has problems updating as smoothly in Firefox as in Chrome, and I'm not at all sure whether we'll be able to do anything about it.
I can't think of an example at the moment of a site that feels faster in Firefox.
I believe I have come to think of Firefox as a web browser, and Chrome as a platform for web apps. Things written to be web apps are almost always more responsive in Chrome, even though many of their components (number-crunching work) really do run measurably quicker in Firefox.
I switched to Chrome in ~2011 or 2012 after being a Firefox user and evangelist since... was the first one Phoenix or Firebird? Anyway, that one.
Reasons:
- Firefox got bogged down with just a few tabs open, and caused beachballs (OSX/macOS) systemwide. Chrome was snappier and didn't harm my system's overall responsiveness with several times as many tabs open. This was the main reason.
- Dev tools. Liked Chrome's better.
- Profile handling was, at the time anyway, better.
- IIRC Firefox didn't do per-tab crashing at the time, while Chrome did, which aided overall stability.
Advertising had nothing to do with it. Chrome was just way, way better, especially its (apparent, which is mostly what matters) resource footprint.
Now I'm mostly on Safari, even though it's the worst mainstream browser, just because I gain 1-2hrs of battery life using it over Chrome or Firefox.
Yahoo as the default search engine didn't help, either.
Firefox is about to shoot itself in the foot again. Soon, all old add-ons will stop working, as Firefox tries to get add-on developers to change to their new WebExtensions API. (Which is almost, but not quite, compatible with Google's add-on format.) Many developers are not bothering, and will drop Firefox.
Honestly, as a firefox die-hard who finally gave up, all of those issues were dwarfed by the performance one. The only one I even bothered to config away was the search-engine change.
I stopped using firefox because of performance. Nothing more, nothing less.
You have forgotten a few, such as dropping alsa and making pulseaudio a hard dependency blaming alsa when actually it was their own implementation that was falling behind and they did not want to fix it.
But the issue here is that mozilla do not listen to user feedback and just push whatever they feel like pushing with an attitude and some hostility towards unhappy users. or as pointed out in the mozillazine forums: they're " making far-reaching and very short-sighted decisions in a vacuum. "
It seems inside mozilla they're convinced that firefox is great and answers users' needs, while users feels that firefox is not that good and getting worse. There's quite a gap between mozilla marketing and the reality, which shows that firefox fails to deliver on its promises.
I'm a Firefox user and quit Chrome for the same reason I stopped using Windows after Windows 7: to keep a bare minimum of privacy when using the internet. Here are a few additions to that list:
* Firefox Extensions now must be signed, and there is no workaround, not even one for users willing to delve deeply into settings x,y,z. The rationale for making it difficult to add unsigned extensions is sound, but there is none for making it impossible.
* Firefox claims to be privacy-friendly, but they use an identifier when calling home that, along with other data, uniquely identifies the user. Firefox claims that this communication is encrypted, but this is not enough for state actors, and likely not for others.
* There are about 20 default settings in Firefox that call home to Google behind the scenes.
* All of these settings are incredibly confusing and there is no standard documentation on how any of it works, so even for a technically inclined person it is near-impossible to simply use the browser without spewing your data all over the place- and that's _before_ actually calling up e.g. the NY Times and its 50 trackers, data-miners, beacons, ad networks, social networks, etc.
* The shameful treatment of Brendan Eich (creator of JavaScript and co-founder(!)) still rankles.
All that said, it's the least-worst in the browser world, for now. It seems pretty clear that they have some technically brilliant people as well.
Edit: seems that I need to learn how to write lists...
Yup, FF has just missed the mark on so many points that Chrome just blows past them. Any JS-heavy web applications (YouTube, HBO Go, Netflix) run like garbage in FF. Switch over to Chrome and they are buttery-smooth. Sucks to say this too as someone who's used FF since its beta.
Performance is a big one for me. The Firefox UI feels slower, and every so often it hangs, which is frustrating to no end. When I used Chrome I took speed for granted - something I no longer can with Firefox.
Thank you!
As soon as Pocket was "included" and the response to everyone complaining was a politely worded "fuck you" then I removed FF and haven't looked back.
It's understandable they have to find ways to make money, but those experiments alienated users. Once you've started down that path, there's no returning in a lot of users eyes, mine included.
So true. The Mozilla corp lost touch with their users. All early Netscape employees left, now it's official a non-profit but acts like big corp.
Firefox become unusable - shut down Firebug replaced by half-assed new DevTools, removed XUL based API, multi-process support that's still not working like Chrome1+/IE8+, still dog slow, can't handle more than a few tabs, Addons-website got useless as most addons aren't working anymore.
Sad, but Chrome is so much better, and Firefox is digging in a bigger rabbit hole with every new release. Would be great if we keep another open source competing browser around. Servo based browser could be a fresh start, but they need to focus now, in a year it can be too late.
People switch because Chrome is a superior product, just like Internet Explorer was a superior product to Netscape at one time. That's not a concern. The concern is using market position to engage in anti-competitive behavior, like bundling.
Those are tech-y reasons that might have repelled tech-y users like us on Hacker News, but the bulk of the market are laymen who don't know the difference between a browser and a search engine on whom marketing is very efficient.
Yea, I've always been a huge fan of (and donor to) Mozilla, but in the last few years, I've been losing some respect for them. Getting embroiled in absurd political snafus, head-in-the-sand analysis of their situation which ignores product quality, etc.
I switched to Chrome a lot later than most of my friends, and actively try to switch to Firefox every once in a while, for literally the last 7 or 8 years. There has yet to be a single time where a couple days of usage didn't reveal the browser as far inferior, in ways that affect my day-to-day life materailly (multiprocess support being the biggest, most basic issue for a long time). I spend a LOT of my time in the browser, and I'm a very heavy user (usually about 100 Chrome tabs open total at any given time, with fairly high turnover). The performance and quality penalty I pay when using Firefox just isn't worth it.
I don't disagree with the article's claim that Google's advertising is having a big effect on a drop in FF usage; it's just bizarre for them to act like this is the only possible reason why people are switching.
> * Frequent breakage of extensions when first switching to the more rapid release schedule.
That's why I switched. It broke most of my extensions every time it upgraded. After the 3rd or 4th time it wasn't worth dealing with anymore. I switched to Chromium and I don't remember it breaking an extension.
This is my list, all of which Chrome does better than Firefox (roughly related bug reports included):
* Restore the old settings. They copied Chrome's settings-as-a-tab with the UI just being HTML. But in Chrome I can at least search the settings. Why did Mozilla waste their time on copying the HTML-settings without also implemented the most useful feature? It was just a huge regression, because the UI is now non-native, many things aren't resizeable anymore and some other minor bugs where introduced, without any apparent benefit. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1325286
* When you start Firefox two times in a row, the dialog "Firefox is already running, please close the running instance" or something like this pops up. Chrome doesn't have this problem, maybe just because its startup time is SO much better. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=489981
* Speed and responsiveness of the UI in general are much better in Chrome. (no bug report link, sorry)
Notice how that there's no complain about the look of the main UI, still Mozilla decides to redo it yet again with project Photon ... Did I miss the bug report with lots of votes for that?
And regarding the bug reports (most of them reported years ago): There was a comment on Reddit a while ago where a GNOME (!) developer said something along the lines "We're not Mozilla, we're actually reading and answering our bug reports". That says something.
You seriously think that removing the ability to disable javascript (well, not really, you still can - just not as easily) is in any way a factor? Which other browser makes this easier?
e10s? Come on, give me a break. I bet the vast majority of users have never heard of it, and of the others, most don't know what it's about to any useful degree, and of those that understand this feature, most probably wouldn't know the details of how the various multiprocess implementations actually compare. A vanishingly small proportion of the user base know of this feature, understand it enough, can compare this to other browsers, and then have a strong enough opinion to affect browser choice (and frankly, it's not obvious multiprocess is actually that great of an idea in the first place if you really do know what you're talking about - not one of the browsers actually separates every tab into a separate browser - for a reason!)
As to OS support - firefox still is the last browser to support XP, so I'm not sure what you're referring to. Version 52 was the last one; but that's on an extended support cycle until june 2018, which AFAICT is more than two years later than chrome's last v50. Microsoft hasn't "supported" XP with any reasonable browser... well, not ever (the highest IE version was 9!), and it hasn't supported the OS at all even with security patches for years (with certain notable exceptions).
As to disruptions caused by signed extensions - so that's why the appstore has failed and nobody is using windows anymore? I get it's annoying, but this is a pattern that's recurring all over the industry, and has for many years before FF made this step. If anything, I think it's more plausible FF is being punished because it was too slow to ban unsigned extensions! Because poor experiences based on bad or even malicious extensions do reflect on FF. And for that matter, signing isn't the real issue, it's add-on sandboxing/threading. Chrome got this "more" right, in that it's less likely for an novice extension author to accidentally bring chrome to a grinding halt. But precisely this feature is still causing lots of addon breakage because FF has not yet completely dumped the old, problematic add-on API, presumably because users really hate losing their cherished extensions (and for a reason). I've witnessed several addons that have chrome+FF equivalents where perf issues occured only in FF - which may have been the addon author's "fault" - but that's a really poor excuse.
Poor perf, and the expectation of poor perf sound like more reasonable guesses, but even there I'm not convinced this actually matters as much as you'd hope. Still, that's at least something. But then, the number of people you see working with unworkably slow setups for all kinds of reasons that apparently don't care enough to switch products suggests that even abominable perf isn't necessarily very impactful. Maybe this matters indirectly; in that power users that care influence others in their choices.
> Firefox’s decline is not an engineering problem. Its a market disruption (Desktop to Mobile shift) and monopoly problem. There are no engineering solutions to these market problems. The only way to escape this is to pivot to a different market [...]
Privacy is the one problem that Mozilla/Firefox can address, which Google and Microsoft will be fundamentally conflicted about addressing. It is also a growing market; that is the market Firefox should be aiming for!
It seems to me that Mozilla/Firefox folks don't appreciate this at a deep level. They are eroding user trust in the attempt to gather data for engineering better features. Eg. see the recent controversy regarding Firefox's usage of Google Analytics: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14753546 .
I made some comments on that thread, on how Mozilla/Firefox could try to win the privacy market. I don't want to repeat those comments, so I'll just link to them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14754672
Some crappy companies such as Eurostar currently experience issues in their website when using Firefox (e.g. impossibility of using vouchers in some cases), and when you contact customer support, they clearly state that "Chrome is recommended" for better results, and that "there are known issues with Firefox". I initially thought it was due to some Firefox add-ons, but even with all of them disabled, things do work better in Chrome.
I've also seen other (somewhat badly-designed) websites where using Chrome leads to less issues, probably because its developers are only testing with it and using non-standard or legacy features/plug-ins. Because of those issues, I am forced to recommend family members to try Chrome when things seem broken, to the point that some have now switched to it by default. I really hope this will not become another IE-like situation...
It's not just marketing. It's also Google websites that only work with Chrome.
For example, Hangout. I can no longer use Hangout using Firefox.
Or I think Gmail Inbox, which also came out only working on Chrome initially.
It's the sum of all these things that look very much like "best viewed with internet explorer" type stuff. I don't ever want to go back to such a world.
> looks like the site requires a login now. It used to be available publicly for years and was public until a few days ago
I'm no longer a Mozillian, but stuff like this is really, really weird. I'm referring in general to things being hidden or locked up—Mozilla as an organization operated more openly than anything else I can think of, which is part of what used to make it so beautiful (and successful)—but specifically, I'm talking about sign ins.
I stopped touching stuff on developer.mozilla.org 5+ years ago (or even consulting it, really), but I was reading some docs on the site last week and saw something that was so outright wrong that I felt it had to be fixed. I tried to, and it turns out that you have to use GitHub to sign in. The idea of requiring a social media sign in for a Mozilla web property is one of the most un-Mozilla things possible and really blew me away.
Google definitely has been a (major) contributor to the decline of Firefox, both with all the google site notices suggesting users switch to Chrome and the works-on-chrome-first features of Gmail, Drive, etc. That last issue is years old, but I would bet it got a lot of people to first try Chrome.
Another factor could have been Mozilla's defaulting to Yahoo for search (and the difficulty some people had with changing and keeping the change to another search provider). For quite a few years Yahoo has not been very good at search, and Mozilla's insistence on teaming up with them probably brought Mozilla's name down.
I still believe that Mozilla biggest mistake with mobile was not Firefox OS, it was that they started on Android too late. They should have been on Android from day one, but they weren't, and when they did build Fennec, it was really bad. They eventually fixed it, but by that point Chrome for Android was already out.
And then they pivoted to Firefox OS. At a time when WebOS had already failed, Nokia had already failed, and the writing was on the wall for Blackberry and Windows Phone. It was already well known that the market couldn't support another mobile OS, and that was the moment they decided to build one, totally bizarre.
I firmly believe that if Mozilla had gone all-in on Firefox for Android at the time when Android's browser was just atrociously bad, they could have been the hip option there, and had a leg-up on Chrome for Android.
To everyone that says "people don't install 3rd party browsers on mobile", that's 100% wrong. Chrome for Android was a 3rd party browser for several years and was popular.
Maybe this is a good opportunity for Firefox to abandon its "forced mediocrity" model.
The vanilla installation of Firefox lacks basic UI components (mouse gestures for example), lacks session management, and the bookmark and history interfaces look like they were made in 1995.
When you click an old entry in History I don't understand why it's so difficult for the selection to stay near the formerly clicked item, instead of it selecting the top most entry forcing you to scroll all the way down again if you want to open another entry that's near the previously clicked entry.
Why can't Bookmarks employ a simple logistic classifier? OK I've stopped using Firefox's bookmark system a long time ago (because its so shitty) but if I were to be still using it I would expect the browser to be smart enough to figure out that if all my bookmarks from a certain site are in a specific bookmark folder that most likely means this new bookmark from that same site should go there and should be offered as the 1st choice.
Now, yes, of course you can add all these features in a slow JavaScript-based addon which will eat your memory and cpu time and allow the Firefox team to blame the addons when something goes wrong with Firefox, but at some point you have to reconsider if this is such a good idea.
Sure very few people use mouse gestures in Firefox and adding them out of the box could be interpreted as bloat, but maybe if more users even knew what mouse gestures were and how useful they are, they would start considering them a fundamental aspect of a browser's interface and not just a fancy knick-knack.
The article's ADI charts do not account for Mozilla moving Windows XP and Vista users from the Firefox release channel to the ESR (Extended Support Release) channel in March 2017 [1]. New versions of Firefox do not support XP or Vista, but XP and Vista users will continue to receive ESR security updates at least through 2018 Q1. You can see a similar "drop" in Mozilla's Firefox Hardware Report [2].
While Firefox on mobile is virtually nonexistent, what this post asserts just doesn't look true to me. He's basically asserting that Chrome is where Internet Explorer was in the late 90's, but when I see what browser people are using for presentations, or when I am pair-programming or otherwise able to see directly what people are using, I see Firefox commonly. Outside the U.S., I don't have much visibility, but the StatCounter data (https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpr...) which shows Firefox on the increase in the last year, looks a lot more like what I am witnessing.
I've been saying this for years, that Chrome's market share is mostly caused by
Google's aggressive advertisement. Many users don't even know exactly what a browser is, they just clicked that button at some point because the text next to it told them to do so.
With every new version, i give firefox another try and it always just feels sluggish compared to chrome. The UI is not as responsive and the pages don't seem to load as quickly. I don't know if there's any actual data or measurements to back this up and i haven't tried to measure any speed differences, but for me the reason I use chrome instead of firefox is absolutely an engineering problem and not a marketing one.
I'd much rather use a Mozilla product than a Google one, but chrome is simply a better browser.
Lots of haters on here! :) Like most of you, I use all browsers to test sites and applications. But Firefox is my main browser on all platforms for a bunch of reasons and I have no issues with performance. It has all the add-ins I need. I like the way it looks compared to the alternatives. The test pilot add-ins have been great. https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments
And last but not least, by using it I'm supporting the open web and not feeding a monopoly.
I think half the problem with Firefox is that it has a marketing problem. Most folks today just trust Google and so Chrome is a product that has trustworthiness that will stand out for folks especially on the matter of speed/reliability. If Mozilla wants to do anything to save their project then they have to start re/building their brand recognition and trustworthiness among COMMON USERS (technical users tend to inform themselves so it's really not an issue IMO beyond actually talking to us). It'll be an uphill battle all the way but I think they'll find it's worth it.
I disagree with the article. When Firefox first got popular the default was internet explorer which was already installed on your computer. However because Firefox was so far ahead word spread and people took the time to install it.
These however there is no really big advantage to using Firefox over chrome, and when the difference is that close marketing and convenience will win. In other words if Firefox would've been on or with internet explorer years ago it would never have gained the market share it did in the first place.
It's not just a marketing issue but a combination of a marketing and engineering issue.
I was expecting a bit more than blaming google... The reason I stopped using firefox is because it became nothing more than a 'meh' chrome clone and slowly killed its ecosystem.
I find it pretty amusing that nobody is going to acknowledge the idea that maybe, just maybe, there's also a component of the fact that Firefox has simply fallen behind Chrome in many aspects, losing the preference of many developers and power users. They are far from the majority, but there are without a doubt cascading effects. Google's marketing is probably only getting more aggressive because there's going to be diminishing returns the further they go.
They argue they're privacy minded and then remove control from the user.
Everyone who doesn't care about control is just going to use chrome, edge or IE so going after that market is probably not a good use of resources.
I don't quite get the whole performance thing, chrome eats memory constantly and trashes the machine which is something firefox doesn't do. It's single threaded though so shitty pages will hang it.
[+] [-] JohnTHaller|8 years ago|reply
I've had to fix this for three family members previously as they were using a free antivirus and couldn't figure out why their browser looked different and didn't have an ad-blocker now.
[+] [-] Fej|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vm|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kibwen|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jaepa|8 years ago|reply
EDIT: Found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11057532
[+] [-] digi_owl|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karolg|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noja|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stronglikedan|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jventura|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] epoch1970|8 years ago|reply
While I don't doubt that Google's advertising of Chrome has drawn away some Firefox users, I also don't think that we can ignore or deny the many controversial changes to Firefox that have likely had an impact, too.
Just off of the top of my head I can think of things like:
* Frequent breakage of extensions when first switching to the more rapid release schedule.
* Frequent and disruptive UI changes that didn't bring users much benefit, such as Australis.
* Removing the ability to easily disable JavaScript.
* Taking many years to get multiprocess support working. (Not that I'm suggesting they should have rushed it, of course.)
* The inclusion of Pocket and Hello.
* Sponsored tiles.
* Users who report experiencing poor performance and high memory usage.
* Disruption caused by requiring signed extensions.
* The removal of support for OSes or OS releases that are moderately older, but still do have active users.
I'm sure there are others that I'm forgetting.
Even if they seem minor, those are the kinds of things that can cause users to switch away from Firefox, or not even start using it in the first place. Losing a small number of users for a variety of minor reasons can add up very quickly, as well. Furthermore, those issues don't really have anything to do with Google or Chrome.
[+] [-] nu5500|8 years ago|reply
Late last year, after many years on Chrome, I gave Firefox another serious look and I have switched back. Firefox has improved tremendously and I would prefer to give my support to Mozilla from a philosophical standpoint (the Chrome team does a lot of good work with regards to pushing forward the features of the web and its security but at the end of the day, Chrome is still a strategic piece of Google's business machine and not a philanthropic effort)
While I have my reasons for using Firefox, I don't see a compelling reason for most users already happy with Chrome to switch back. The average web user that I know doesn't really understand where web browsers come from and isn't very interested in learning about it. They just care whether the browser runs better or worse for the tasks that they do. (Except many still hate IE and will not even try Edge because the logo looks similar enough - that's a branding issue that Microsoft has)
What irritates me now are more and more sites that only work with Chrome (where they literally throw up a page that blocks access and says go download Chrome). These are sites that are not Google properties so I'm not blaming Google for this bad behavior, but again, I would like to support the diverse browser landscape that has existed to this point. I guess my main complaint to Google is to please stop popping up dialogs about Chrome across all of your properties. The browser I'm using works perfectly fine thank you, and you should be supporting the open web with your products anyway.
[+] [-] cannam|8 years ago|reply
But performance. Firefox very often outperforms Chrome in microbenchmarks and computationally-intensive code in my tests, but in the real world an awful lot of sites really are much more responsive in Chrome.
For me as a user, most recently an update to the FastMail web UI a couple of weeks ago made it lamentably slow in Firefox -- just mousing over the folder tree caused CPU spikes and lag in updating -- and in the end I switched to opening FastMail in a separate Chrome instance while continuing to use Firefox for everything else. I've just switched it back to Firefox as I type this, to see whether anything has improved.
The web app I'm working on as a developer just now also has problems updating as smoothly in Firefox as in Chrome, and I'm not at all sure whether we'll be able to do anything about it.
I can't think of an example at the moment of a site that feels faster in Firefox.
I believe I have come to think of Firefox as a web browser, and Chrome as a platform for web apps. Things written to be web apps are almost always more responsive in Chrome, even though many of their components (number-crunching work) really do run measurably quicker in Firefox.
[+] [-] ashark|8 years ago|reply
Reasons:
- Firefox got bogged down with just a few tabs open, and caused beachballs (OSX/macOS) systemwide. Chrome was snappier and didn't harm my system's overall responsiveness with several times as many tabs open. This was the main reason.
- Dev tools. Liked Chrome's better.
- Profile handling was, at the time anyway, better.
- IIRC Firefox didn't do per-tab crashing at the time, while Chrome did, which aided overall stability.
Advertising had nothing to do with it. Chrome was just way, way better, especially its (apparent, which is mostly what matters) resource footprint.
Now I'm mostly on Safari, even though it's the worst mainstream browser, just because I gain 1-2hrs of battery life using it over Chrome or Firefox.
[+] [-] Animats|8 years ago|reply
Firefox is about to shoot itself in the foot again. Soon, all old add-ons will stop working, as Firefox tries to get add-on developers to change to their new WebExtensions API. (Which is almost, but not quite, compatible with Google's add-on format.) Many developers are not bothering, and will drop Firefox.
[+] [-] Pxtl|8 years ago|reply
I stopped using firefox because of performance. Nothing more, nothing less.
[+] [-] bigbugbag|8 years ago|reply
But the issue here is that mozilla do not listen to user feedback and just push whatever they feel like pushing with an attitude and some hostility towards unhappy users. or as pointed out in the mozillazine forums: they're " making far-reaching and very short-sighted decisions in a vacuum. "
It seems inside mozilla they're convinced that firefox is great and answers users' needs, while users feels that firefox is not that good and getting worse. There's quite a gap between mozilla marketing and the reality, which shows that firefox fails to deliver on its promises.
[+] [-] qovv|8 years ago|reply
All that said, it's the least-worst in the browser world, for now. It seems pretty clear that they have some technically brilliant people as well.
Edit: seems that I need to learn how to write lists...
[+] [-] Dirlewanger|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] allengeorge|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] muppetman|8 years ago|reply
It's understandable they have to find ways to make money, but those experiments alienated users. Once you've started down that path, there's no returning in a lot of users eyes, mine included.
[+] [-] frik|8 years ago|reply
Firefox become unusable - shut down Firebug replaced by half-assed new DevTools, removed XUL based API, multi-process support that's still not working like Chrome1+/IE8+, still dog slow, can't handle more than a few tabs, Addons-website got useless as most addons aren't working anymore.
Sad, but Chrome is so much better, and Firefox is digging in a bigger rabbit hole with every new release. Would be great if we keep another open source competing browser around. Servo based browser could be a fresh start, but they need to focus now, in a year it can be too late.
[+] [-] pishpash|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NewEntryHN|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wutbrodo|8 years ago|reply
I switched to Chrome a lot later than most of my friends, and actively try to switch to Firefox every once in a while, for literally the last 7 or 8 years. There has yet to be a single time where a couple days of usage didn't reveal the browser as far inferior, in ways that affect my day-to-day life materailly (multiprocess support being the biggest, most basic issue for a long time). I spend a LOT of my time in the browser, and I'm a very heavy user (usually about 100 Chrome tabs open total at any given time, with fairly high turnover). The performance and quality penalty I pay when using Firefox just isn't worth it.
I don't disagree with the article's claim that Google's advertising is having a big effect on a drop in FF usage; it's just bizarre for them to act like this is the only possible reason why people are switching.
[+] [-] eikenberry|8 years ago|reply
That's why I switched. It broke most of my extensions every time it upgraded. After the 3rd or 4th time it wasn't worth dealing with anymore. I switched to Chromium and I don't remember it breaking an extension.
[+] [-] jhasse|8 years ago|reply
* Restore the old settings. They copied Chrome's settings-as-a-tab with the UI just being HTML. But in Chrome I can at least search the settings. Why did Mozilla waste their time on copying the HTML-settings without also implemented the most useful feature? It was just a huge regression, because the UI is now non-native, many things aren't resizeable anymore and some other minor bugs where introduced, without any apparent benefit. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1325286
* When you start Firefox two times in a row, the dialog "Firefox is already running, please close the running instance" or something like this pops up. Chrome doesn't have this problem, maybe just because its startup time is SO much better. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=489981
* On Linux: Integrate the tabs into the titlebar like Chrome does. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=513159
* Way too easy to quit the whole browser with Ctrl+Q (Chrome uses Ctrl+Shift+Q) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52821
* Encrypt passwords with the keyring (like Chrome does) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=309807 (btw: that's the second most voted bug of the "Toolkit" product according to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=productdashboard.ht... )
* No hardware acceleration on Linux (playing HD YouTube videos lags for me in Firefox out-of-the-box, perfectly fine in Chrome) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1280523
* Speed and responsiveness of the UI in general are much better in Chrome. (no bug report link, sorry)
Notice how that there's no complain about the look of the main UI, still Mozilla decides to redo it yet again with project Photon ... Did I miss the bug report with lots of votes for that?
And regarding the bug reports (most of them reported years ago): There was a comment on Reddit a while ago where a GNOME (!) developer said something along the lines "We're not Mozilla, we're actually reading and answering our bug reports". That says something.
[+] [-] emn13|8 years ago|reply
Pocket? Hello? Really?
Firefox memory usage has for years used less memory; basically since its inception. Apparently it's no different now: https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/03/whos-winning-the-browser-...
e10s? Come on, give me a break. I bet the vast majority of users have never heard of it, and of the others, most don't know what it's about to any useful degree, and of those that understand this feature, most probably wouldn't know the details of how the various multiprocess implementations actually compare. A vanishingly small proportion of the user base know of this feature, understand it enough, can compare this to other browsers, and then have a strong enough opinion to affect browser choice (and frankly, it's not obvious multiprocess is actually that great of an idea in the first place if you really do know what you're talking about - not one of the browsers actually separates every tab into a separate browser - for a reason!)
As to OS support - firefox still is the last browser to support XP, so I'm not sure what you're referring to. Version 52 was the last one; but that's on an extended support cycle until june 2018, which AFAICT is more than two years later than chrome's last v50. Microsoft hasn't "supported" XP with any reasonable browser... well, not ever (the highest IE version was 9!), and it hasn't supported the OS at all even with security patches for years (with certain notable exceptions).
As to disruptions caused by signed extensions - so that's why the appstore has failed and nobody is using windows anymore? I get it's annoying, but this is a pattern that's recurring all over the industry, and has for many years before FF made this step. If anything, I think it's more plausible FF is being punished because it was too slow to ban unsigned extensions! Because poor experiences based on bad or even malicious extensions do reflect on FF. And for that matter, signing isn't the real issue, it's add-on sandboxing/threading. Chrome got this "more" right, in that it's less likely for an novice extension author to accidentally bring chrome to a grinding halt. But precisely this feature is still causing lots of addon breakage because FF has not yet completely dumped the old, problematic add-on API, presumably because users really hate losing their cherished extensions (and for a reason). I've witnessed several addons that have chrome+FF equivalents where perf issues occured only in FF - which may have been the addon author's "fault" - but that's a really poor excuse.
Poor perf, and the expectation of poor perf sound like more reasonable guesses, but even there I'm not convinced this actually matters as much as you'd hope. Still, that's at least something. But then, the number of people you see working with unworkably slow setups for all kinds of reasons that apparently don't care enough to switch products suggests that even abominable perf isn't necessarily very impactful. Maybe this matters indirectly; in that power users that care influence others in their choices.
[+] [-] wodenokoto|8 years ago|reply
Almost everything you list are things that happen around a certain time and we don't see those events manifest in the graph.
The reason of course being that the vast majority of Firefox users are not expert and don't care or know about those advance features.
Maybe if you can link to a user satisfaction report...
[+] [-] Markoff|8 years ago|reply
Meanwhile Chrome just works. It's even worse on Android, they don't have in FF even pull down to refresh and it's the slowest browser I tried.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] f4rker|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ssivark|8 years ago|reply
Privacy is the one problem that Mozilla/Firefox can address, which Google and Microsoft will be fundamentally conflicted about addressing. It is also a growing market; that is the market Firefox should be aiming for!
It seems to me that Mozilla/Firefox folks don't appreciate this at a deep level. They are eroding user trust in the attempt to gather data for engineering better features. Eg. see the recent controversy regarding Firefox's usage of Google Analytics: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14753546 .
I made some comments on that thread, on how Mozilla/Firefox could try to win the privacy market. I don't want to repeat those comments, so I'll just link to them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14754672
[+] [-] dhekir|8 years ago|reply
I've also seen other (somewhat badly-designed) websites where using Chrome leads to less issues, probably because its developers are only testing with it and using non-standard or legacy features/plug-ins. Because of those issues, I am forced to recommend family members to try Chrome when things seem broken, to the point that some have now switched to it by default. I really hope this will not become another IE-like situation...
[+] [-] dannysu|8 years ago|reply
For example, Hangout. I can no longer use Hangout using Firefox.
Or I think Gmail Inbox, which also came out only working on Chrome initially.
It's the sum of all these things that look very much like "best viewed with internet explorer" type stuff. I don't ever want to go back to such a world.
[+] [-] carussell|8 years ago|reply
> looks like the site requires a login now. It used to be available publicly for years and was public until a few days ago
I'm no longer a Mozillian, but stuff like this is really, really weird. I'm referring in general to things being hidden or locked up—Mozilla as an organization operated more openly than anything else I can think of, which is part of what used to make it so beautiful (and successful)—but specifically, I'm talking about sign ins.
I stopped touching stuff on developer.mozilla.org 5+ years ago (or even consulting it, really), but I was reading some docs on the site last week and saw something that was so outright wrong that I felt it had to be fixed. I tried to, and it turns out that you have to use GitHub to sign in. The idea of requiring a social media sign in for a Mozilla web property is one of the most un-Mozilla things possible and really blew me away.
[+] [-] blunte|8 years ago|reply
Another factor could have been Mozilla's defaulting to Yahoo for search (and the difficulty some people had with changing and keeping the change to another search provider). For quite a few years Yahoo has not been very good at search, and Mozilla's insistence on teaming up with them probably brought Mozilla's name down.
[+] [-] Touche|8 years ago|reply
And then they pivoted to Firefox OS. At a time when WebOS had already failed, Nokia had already failed, and the writing was on the wall for Blackberry and Windows Phone. It was already well known that the market couldn't support another mobile OS, and that was the moment they decided to build one, totally bizarre.
I firmly believe that if Mozilla had gone all-in on Firefox for Android at the time when Android's browser was just atrociously bad, they could have been the hip option there, and had a leg-up on Chrome for Android.
To everyone that says "people don't install 3rd party browsers on mobile", that's 100% wrong. Chrome for Android was a 3rd party browser for several years and was popular.
[+] [-] osoba|8 years ago|reply
The vanilla installation of Firefox lacks basic UI components (mouse gestures for example), lacks session management, and the bookmark and history interfaces look like they were made in 1995.
When you click an old entry in History I don't understand why it's so difficult for the selection to stay near the formerly clicked item, instead of it selecting the top most entry forcing you to scroll all the way down again if you want to open another entry that's near the previously clicked entry.
Why can't Bookmarks employ a simple logistic classifier? OK I've stopped using Firefox's bookmark system a long time ago (because its so shitty) but if I were to be still using it I would expect the browser to be smart enough to figure out that if all my bookmarks from a certain site are in a specific bookmark folder that most likely means this new bookmark from that same site should go there and should be offered as the 1st choice.
Now, yes, of course you can add all these features in a slow JavaScript-based addon which will eat your memory and cpu time and allow the Firefox team to blame the addons when something goes wrong with Firefox, but at some point you have to reconsider if this is such a good idea.
Sure very few people use mouse gestures in Firefox and adding them out of the box could be interpreted as bloat, but maybe if more users even knew what mouse gestures were and how useful they are, they would start considering them a fundamental aspect of a browser's interface and not just a fancy knick-knack.
I miss the old Opera so much :(
[+] [-] cpeterso|8 years ago|reply
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2016/12/23/firefox-s...
[2] https://hardware.metrics.mozilla.com/
[+] [-] shmerl|8 years ago|reply
What I worry about, is the increasing situation of "best viewed in Chrome" and sites starting to break in Firefox. That's going to be very bad.
[+] [-] rossdavidh|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blauditore|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notatoad|8 years ago|reply
I'd much rather use a Mozilla product than a Google one, but chrome is simply a better browser.
[+] [-] owly|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] norea-armozel|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FollowSteph3|8 years ago|reply
These however there is no really big advantage to using Firefox over chrome, and when the difference is that close marketing and convenience will win. In other words if Firefox would've been on or with internet explorer years ago it would never have gained the market share it did in the first place.
It's not just a marketing issue but a combination of a marketing and engineering issue.
[+] [-] moocowtruck|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jchw|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swiley|8 years ago|reply
Everyone who doesn't care about control is just going to use chrome, edge or IE so going after that market is probably not a good use of resources.
I don't quite get the whole performance thing, chrome eats memory constantly and trashes the machine which is something firefox doesn't do. It's single threaded though so shitty pages will hang it.