Comment by LunaSea
2 days ago
> what exactly are the complaints with Firefox?
If you are a (the) leading browser like Firefox once was, the "what are the complaints?" is the right question.
If you are a minor browser like Firefox currently is (~2.5% market share), the "what is it doing better?" is the correct question.
Supporting a proper ad blocker makes it automatically superior than any of the more popular browsers. The fact most people don't mind being fuel for the machine is another issue.
There was a long period of time during which firefox users weren't sure whether they were going to follow chrome (like they did on every single other thing.) They're still user-hostile and their values are inscrutable; I have no trust that they won't kill ad blocking next year, or the year after. Requiring add-ons to be signed was a more radically hostile leap than moving to ManifestV3 would be.
The people still complaining about firefox are its most faithful users. The reason some are vicious is because they are trapped - they'll consider cutting their use of the internet before using an non-FOSS browser. 90% of firefox's users left. People who could stand a closed browser have already decided to use one. You're in an extreme minority if you even know anything about firefox to complain about. This year the Linux desktop, of all impossible things, has become more popular than firefox.
Yet there's still this confidence and attitude about even the remaining users that comes from being spoon-fed cash by your direct competitor in return for nothing.
The Firefox market share was eaten largely by the enormous and legally dubious marketing campaigns by Google and Microsoft. Hard to see how Mozilla could compete with constant forced nags and defaults in the most widely used websites and operating systems.
It was a big factor, but so were things like the way they treated their mobile browser for years and years, which is the platform 2/3 of browser traffic now originates.
According to statcounter's stats, Firefox never cracked 1% of monthly mobile traffic any month from when stats started in 2009. Even Opera and UC have more than double Firefox's average for the last year and they are just Chromium forks users are downloading off the stores.
For context, I recall that for years and years, Firefox was the highest ranked mobile browser. Mozilla invested a lot in mobile, Firefox devs had to rewrite the Android linker, invent new ways of starting binaries on Android, etc. just to make Firefox work (all of which were later used by Chrome for Android).
It still didn't make a dent in mobile browser shares.
Sure, Mozilla could have invested even more in Firefox mobile, but at some point, this would have come at the expense of Firefox desktop, which was the source of ~100% of the funding.
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The Firefox market share was eaten by being worse than Chrome, especially around the developer tools and extensions market places at the time.
It was eaten by Google flexing their search and mobile monopolies, to advertise it on one of the most visited websites in the world, and coming pre-installed on over a billion devices. Distribution lock in leading to market share dominance is a tale as old as computing to the point that we now have decades old case law specifically on the issue of software monopolies being the cause of browser market share dominance.
Interestingly the most recent anti-trust case against Google, one proposed remedy was spinning off the Chrome browser into its own company, but that option was judged to be unrealistic, because how would a browser survive on it's own without distribution advantages and all its costs subsidized by other revenue drivers? A great question.
There's a lot of opinions and anecdata in that. Firefox was almost never as bad as it was marketed to be (by its competition), and Chrome was certainly never as good as it was marketed to be (by an evil ad company pretending to be a good, well adjusted internet benefit company).
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No, Chrome was genuinely better than Firefox back then. Firefox didn't have multiprocess until many years later and Flash constantly crashed the browser.
> what is it doing better
adblock is the single most important feature of a web browser to me. Firefox has the best adblock support.
I agree, although Chrome has extensions like uBlock Origin Lite and Privacy Badger which are decent enough for most people and uses.
> decent enough for most people and uses.
Except for the very big use case of mobile browsing, where only Firefox allows extensions.
I’d argue they aren’t, but the number one threat actor in the privacy space is Google.
I occasionally have to use Chrome to test with it. Can someone explain concisely how it manages Google logins? They clearly bolted it in at some low level to help violate privacy, and or shove dark patterns.
Also, the out of the box spam and dark patterns are over the top. It reminds me of Win 95 bundled software bullshit.
That’s to say nothing of their B-tier properties, like Google TV or YouTube client:
When the kids use this garbage it’s all “Bruh, what is this screen?”, or “I swear I’m not touching the remote!”
(The official YouTube client loses monitor sync(!!) as it rapid cycles through ads on its own now. I guess this is part of an apparent google-run ad fraud campaign, since it routinely seems to think it ran > 5-10 ads to completion in ~15 seconds. We can’t even see all the ads start because each bumps the monitor settings around, which has the effect of auto-mute.)