this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
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Firefox usage has plummeted. To be fair, 2% isn’t a huge slice of the pie, but it’s still a pretty large number of users in absolute terms.
I use Firefox exclusively. It is fast, responsive, and works on all the sites that I visit. So I don't really understand why the share of users are so low. What sites are ya'll visiting that doesn't work on FF?
Nobody said a website didn't work on Firefox. Tough Microcock Teams doesn't work, I didn't find any other sites not supporting Firefox.
The market share is so low because of the same reason Linux's share is low: people use what most people use. When they get a new computer, they either don't know much and stick to Edge (which is Chromium) or install Chrome because that's what they are familiar with, and the reason they're familiar with it is because most people used that, so they also tried that. If they use other browsers, they just don't care enough to switch, no matter if it's much better or how easy switching is.
Pre-installs are also a reason, as I've said before about Edge. So if a well-known computer manufacturer put Linux on most of their laptops and a new computer user would buy one of them, they would just use Firefox cuz that's what pre-installed on most distros, and if more new users buy it who don't know about Chrome, Firefox market share becomes even bigger.
Most people just don't care enough to switch if their current setup works. Let it be Linux, Mac, Firefox or any less-used product.
Mobile browsing altered the landscape.
Yeah, I use FF on mobile but there are a number of sites that just refuse to work correctly on FF and for that I have to resort to Chrome 👿
I really don't find that, but maybe it's just because I don't know what "working properly" looks like. Everything is on Firefox for me.
I do sometimes get a site that won't work due to a plug-in, but that's different.
Usually don't work properly is like when the buttons don't work or the scale is fixed and everything is off-screen and the like. So you would've noticed 😅
What are these sites, so I can avoid them?
It usually was some local governmental stuff like trying to get an appointment at an embassy or request an issue of some documents.
No one ever seems to mention the sites when they complain about how Firefox doesn't work on those sites.
Its rare to hear someone actually name a site by name, which is unfortunate.
My doctor's weird video chat doesn't work in Firefox (and even in Chrome it's barely functional probably because it hasn't been updated since before the pandemic), but other than that singular example, everything else works fine. I think most people parroting complaints about Firefox just haven't used it recently enough to realize that it's fine in 99.9% of cases.
You may want to complain to your doctor if you haven't done so yet...
It's rarer than is used to be but I know Ive had issues in the past with firefox on some insurance websites, some banking websites, I know Ive seen sites where they block you from even entering but if you change the user agent it works. It's less common than it was 5 years ago though as there is a report website feature and they work hard to try and fix compatibility.
It wasnt firefox's fault though more the web developer. I dont have specific examples because I didnt save them and it's been a while. Its not as bad as during the ie6 days of the internet though. Now that was dark times.
Edit: Also sometimes it's addons and people mistake that for the browser and dont tweak their addons before blaming firefox.
Early chrome introduced a lot of features that attracted the tech crowd in the late 00s and early 10s like html5 video (replacing the need for flash plugins) as well as multithreaded tasks for better use of those newfangled multicore cpus people were buying.
Around the same time firefox was experiencing a memory leak and took too long to open(I switched over to linux at the time and didnt have the issue but it was a big complaint online).
Early on firefox was also slower to add a lot of the newer html5 stuff that was popping up around the web while chrome was more or less built from the ground up with it in mind which also lost it some enthusiast mindshare.
Along the same time google started a heavy chrome push. Of course the default browser on android was based on chrome, and google search results pushed people to download chrome, and youtube's html5 video ran better on chrome(firefox initially didnt have all the codecs they used due to licensing). Google used its web dominance to advertise, and push, and advertise, and push.
Eventually firefox got to a point where they mostly caught up but by this point chrome had gained a solid footing and lead and here is where dirtier. Firefox was constantly behind on webstandard and synthetic benchmarks but many of the things firefox was behind in on these benchmarks were things that google had just introduced. Also with the new google dominance came lazy developers who would instead of building a site for web standards and test on multiple devices, build their site to run on chrome and bugs on other webrenderers be damned. With other major competitors like opera and Edge switching to blink it meant that the devs were mostly covered.
So this gave the appearance that firefox was still technically behind even after having closed the gap. And by the time chrome started having its own PR issues and memory leak problems the fluid tech landscape has changed.
Firefox lost market share in an era when tech and software were still fluid. New social media could rise up any day myspace could get killed by newcomer facebook. There can be multiple video sites who will win? IOS, Blackberry, Palm, Winmo, Nokia, and Android were going head to head in the smartphone space. Internet explorer, firefox, netscape, opera, chrome and safari all had different engines.
Nothing came to knock facebook out and the social media that rose up after was just different, youtube is essentially a monopoly in that space, IOS and Android are all that's left of the smartphone war, and firefox still exists but chromium's engine Blink powers most alternative browsers and firefox's usershare is tiny now. Safari only has a marketshare because it's default on macs and the only game in town on IOS. Chrome will have to really really really mess up in order to actually shed significant mainstream user marketshare.