[HN Gopher] Firefox May Have Lost Up to 12% of Its Users So Far ...
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Firefox May Have Lost Up to 12% of Its Users So Far in 2021
Author : libab
Score : 30 points
Date : 2021-07-21 19:17 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fosspost.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (fosspost.org)
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| Now that Edge is Chromium based, is there still a good reason not
| to stick with the default browser?
| [deleted]
| seppoonbi2 wrote:
| 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.
| ipspam wrote:
| Not sure what's wrong with it. I use Firefox nightly and I love
| it. Admittedly, for mobile I use Brave browser.
| meowster wrote:
| If you're on an iPhone, I don't blame you, because Apple won't
| allow Firefox with add-ons. If you're using Android, you really
| should use Firefox with uBlock Origin.
| ledauphin wrote:
| this is the only reason I use Firefox on mobile. but I also
| use nightly, and it does support uBlock Origin.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| 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.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| 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.
| ricardo81 wrote:
| 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
| sprafa wrote:
| How did they manage that ?
| chmod775 wrote:
| 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.
| nonbirithm wrote:
| 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.
| climb_stealth wrote:
| 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.
| blibble wrote:
| 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
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| 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.
| merb wrote:
| 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.
| TAForObvReasons wrote:
| 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...
| dmitrygr wrote:
| 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_...
| [deleted]
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| 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...
| jsiepkes wrote:
| >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.
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| Their block list excludes Google which has trackers embedded
| in the majority of web sites.
|
| There is nothing really "private" about that.
| wmf wrote:
| Do you understand that safe browsing is an anti-malware and
| anti-phishing system that has nothing to do with tracking?
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| 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.
| wmf wrote:
| I agree that Firefox could do a lot more for privacy by
| default but let's be accurate in our criticisms.
| SahAssar wrote:
| The question was specifically about a feature that is not
| about privacy, but about malware and phishing.
| jatone wrote:
| so go use chrome if its clearly no different as you say.
| personally i'll stick with firefox.
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| In case you didn't notice, the article is about lots of
| people doing this.
| silvi9 wrote:
| 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!
| bcrl wrote:
| 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.
| _Microft wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| readflaggedcomm wrote:
| >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.
| jsiepkes wrote:
| 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.
| elmerfud wrote:
| I've switched to Firefox on mobile because Google keeps forcing
| the garbage tab layout on me.
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(page generated 2021-07-21 23:02 UTC)