Firefox is open-source and has less than 6% market share

Software & Operating Systems
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Every Linux installation defaults to Firefox as the included browser because it’s open-source. It would seem that this forum would be an excellent area to discuss why it should be chosen over other browser choices:

  • Respects user browsing privacy by blocking THOUSANDS of online trackers. Don’t believe me? Install it and click the shield icon in the far left of the address bar or maybe it’s located in the settings. Either way it’s available to check. On my Linux install, Firefox has blocked over 6,000 trackers and I don’t use it much.

  • Unique “Gecko” web rendering engine that’s different from EVERY other browser (including microsoft’s edge and the brave browser using Google’s “webkit”.)
    On this note, last I checked, iOS (apple) does NOT allow the firefox app to use its own open-source gecko engine but instead uses the webkit engine!!

  • Support Mozilla in desperate need of awareness and funding–it struck a deal with Google to keep Google’s search as the default in exchange for funding. Imagine if all the people, using Firefox, gave just 25 cents to the foundation… better than receiving money from an ad business.

  • Reduce your reliance on a company that mines your data in exchange for a “free” service, what does Google do with this data? Target you with ads. In fact, recent studies seem to point out targeted advertising isn’t much better than non-targeted adverts, regarding money returns.

If you value advertising privacy, open-source code, and a healthy Internet then start showing Mozilla that these points mean a lot to you by using their web browser full-time and ditch the come-up Google browser that stole the show because nobody sees Firefox when they “google” something–they see “Install chrome, it’s fast and free”.

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Nope.

Lots of other software uses Gecko.
Icecat, Thunderbird, Tor browser, Waterfox, Seamonkey, etc

As far as I know, webkit is not, and was never Google’s. It has always been Apple’s project, although Google did use it for a while.

Chrome, edge, and brave (really anything Chromium) all use Blink. Yes, Blink was forked from webkit, but it’s been long enough that they are two entirely different things now.

Then use a Chromium browser that does not send stuff to google.

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And to this point, their stance in the past few months seems to be in favor of more censorship of speech, which for me conflicts with the healthy internet checkbox.

re: We need more than deplatforming - The Mozilla Blog

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Unfortunately at this point Firefox’s days are numbered. Even if they managed to get Servo implemented I don’t think it would help their cause. Every other major browser at this point is based on Webkit, or Google’s Blink fork. Because of this most web development is built with chromium based browsers in mind.

Another reason for Chromes success in particular is its integration with Google’s product ecosystem. Mozilla has been attempting to create such an ecosystem, but I don’t think they’ll have much success in the endeavor.

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This, not only does firefox have a bad case of “the kitchensink… and the barn too” combined with hiding more and more options but Mozilla itsel has for a while now chosen to hold political takes that I don’t happen to like and while it likely endears them to some people it will also repell people equally.

They also spawned rust which is a minus just for the accolytes it spawned lol

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I wish Firefox the best, but I think Brave landed on a more sustainable business model.

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Webkit began life as KHTML, which was invented by KDE, not Apple.

https://marc.info/?m=104197092318639

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Every other major browser can be redefined as the unholy trinity: Apple, Google and M$.

  • Apple: strongly favours it’s own browser, instead of offering people a choice
  • Google: strongly favours it’s own browser, instead of offering people a choice
  • M$: strongly favours it’s own browser, instead of offering people a choice

Gee, how did Mozilla get market share at all in the first place? :roll_eyes:

Seriously, had Mozilla gotten a fair chance instead of being 7-0 down at the start of the match, it would have gained more market share as the quality of their “product” is fine. But the big players had vested interests in making sure users DO NOT venture outside their carefully guarded cash-cow sorry, eco-system, to preserve their shareholder value and screw their customers for every last penny they’ve got.

So, as a long-term Gecko user, I refuse to use anything by this unholy trinity, at least on my own systems.

PS: Seamonkey is the old Mozilla Suite, which was broken up into FireFox, Thunderbird and some other parts that have now faded away as nobody uses them anymore (Web 1.0 tools, at best :stuck_out_tongue: )

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Ah, I forgot that.

I’m mainly just being pedantic about names, since OP had everything in quotes.

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Respects user privacy by phoning home about usage.

Yep, okay.

See above.

Maybe stop donating their money to other organizations then. Mozilla spends millions a year finding projects that I haven’t seen a whole lot of good out of. If they need money, maybe they should keep what they have in the first place.

Firefox pushes a political agenda on you by default. I don’t want to be a part of their skinner box experiments in radicalization.

Firefox is a necessary evil, less so than chrome, less so than edge, but evil nonetheless.

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I do agree that Mozilla has a few distasteful political stances that I’ll never respect, but I don’t want the web to be dominated by Google. I even sent an email to Mozilla about their views regarding “de-platforming” and I haven’t gotten a response yet–I’d really like to know.

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Making it sound like Firefox did not get a fair shake at things.

I used to use it right around when chrome was becoming a thing. Firefox looked like everything else and functioned, that was about it. They followed the trend rather than make theirs stand out from a user perspective and it was not an amazing I will never use anything else style experience, it just, literally just, worked.

Chrome was nicer to look at and smoother. So I used what worked better.

I also don’t use Google any more for my search, instead DuckDuckGo. Chrome still shows up top as correctly fast and free so eh, not all googles doing if it is simply correct.

Firefox had a chance, they wasted it.

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Quite honestly I think the biggest issue is that for the longest time (not sure if that ever changed) it was not easy to build third-party browsers based on Gecko, which is why Chromium is so popular. Every browser that is not Firefox or a Fork thereof is based on Chromium, not to mention stuff like Electron which of course is also Chromium based.

That led to more and more browsers popping up due to just the support being there, but there is no equivalent for Gecko.
So essentially people are stuck with Firefox and its forks and not everyone likes the way Mozilla does things.

Yes I’ve seen similar things like Chromium for Gecko before, but they don’t seem to be nearly as accessible.

Just as an example: Something like Vivaldi is just not possible using Firefox or Gecko in general as a basis.

Firefox was once at what… 40% market share? I do think that counts as a fair chance.

They just didn’t innovate for the longest time and the rewrite of their engine and browser extensions took years too long. Then when it finally happened all their third-party stuff broke so people jumped ship (understandably). That is JUST because they took way too long to do that. If they had done that when they were still at 20-30% market share, extension developers might have actually followed and re-written their extensions. But for a small market share like that for many it was not worth it.

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Been a Firefox user since version 2.0, which says a lot. I stopped using it when Google Chrome first launched, I don’t remember when (2009? maybe earlier), but what I do remember is that Chrome back then had both Firefox and IE BTFO in terms of speed. Seriously, how did Chrome get from such a simple and fast browser to the clusterΦuck that is today? But at least we got all the memes about Chrome eating all your system RAM and crashing Windows.

I don’t remember when, I think 2013, I got back to Firefox because Chrome slowed down a lot after lots of browsing, back when I was a normie. Didn’t have Firefox for long, then I discovered the new Opera (for the first time, after I discovered Opera Mini on my dumb smartphone). That thing blew Chrome and Fiirefox out of the water. But after a while, I got an Android tablet and got Firefox on it and was pretty satisfied with it. After around 2 years on Opera, I moved back to Firefox and stayed with it since, because I was getting into free software and was becoming wary of proprietary software (for the most part).

I remember when I was jumping between Firefox 4-5, IE 7-8 and the last version of NetScape Navigator (not sure how tf I discovered that, but I remember that I kinda liked it, but being deprecated, many sites stopped working after a while). Firefox 3 was my favorite because of it’s theme and I think it was back when IE 6 was a thing, Firefox was blazing fast back then.

No, FF lost its market share because they weren’t innovative. And up to this day, instead of making their browser SIMPLER and faster, they just fill it with trash like Pocket, Sync and VPN. Just why? They should stop investing in poor decisions and flipping throwing politics in our faces. I had issues with Firefox long before the “more than deplatforming” thing, I posted around 3 years ago on Gab, back when I used that platform, ( before too many nazis took over), I should probably find that post, it was about a built-in add for Andrew Yang in the history side-bar of all places. I still use Firefox, but I don’t trust either Mozilla, nor Brave. I only use Firefox because it’s the last browser engine that is not Webkit or Blink and because it’s easier to find in Linux than Brave is (I use Void, so I don’t have it in the main repo and I refuse to use snaps or flatpaks - well, I can’t use snapd even if I wanted, because it only works on systemd systems, nothing wrong with it, but I don’t have it in Void).

I would move to IceCat, but I didn’t bother to test if JS works on all platforms as I expect (I still have NoScript and uMatrix, but I do enable some JS for sites like Leve1Techs :heart: even if I wish it would be using PHP or anything else server-side and no JS, but I can understand, Discourse is quite good forum software). Seriously, if Mozilla doesn’t get its sh*t together, then it deserves to go under. I don’t have any hope from Chrome to become simpler, because it’s just simply spyware, it’s made to be bloated and grab as much data as possible, but Firefox has no reason to be bloated. Mozilla should look into ways to make it lighter, faster and deprecate things that you can use a preferred program for, like pdf viewing (not that such a small feature would lighten up the browser noticeably).

Sorry for the rant.

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Unfortunately, on a long enough timeline (in todays society) all apolitical organizations get infiltrated by marxists.

Either way, I don’t see Mozilla as a good in the world, and haven’t for a long time. Well before the infiltration started to bear fruit. Prior to that, firefox was a freaking mess, they had no direction, thunderbird was a mess and they just seemed to have no direction.

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In response to this, it didn’t take long to find.

image
image1658×806 120 KB

Pic taken in Jun 3, 2019. The post was just asking if others had the same issue (with pretty vulgar language towards Mozilla, not fit for this forum). Political off-topic rant; I visited Yang’s website because I wanted to test something regarding the website when changing the date to next year and donation bar getting filled, then setting the year back and the donation bar decreasing back to normal (pretty shady stuff, wanted to check if it was true). It was, but that doesn’t matter. Since then, for a few months before this pic was taken, whenever I opened the history bar, I would get the first 2 “Last Visited” websites to be those 2 above, like, as if either I kept visiting the website (I wasn’t smart enough to check any http connections to actblue), or it was a built-in add, made to keep showing me that link to go there and donate. Very strange behavior if you ask me. It only happened on Windows. I tested on Linux and it didn’t happen there. The way I got rid of that was by deleting the history entry, but why in the world would Firefox show me the last visited website to be a website that I had visited a few months prior and since then, never again? Judging from Mozilla’s political leaning, I could only determine that it was either a hidden ad only for people who visited the website (otherwise people would be upset, as they should be, which is also obvious why it didn’t appear on Linux), or they made the website appear to be more visited than it seemed in order to mask the actual number site visits with bot visits from legitimate users and IPs.

Too bad we can’t audit the actual code that was running on my PC back then. In a linux repo, you have a maintainer that packages Firefox, but on Windows, Firefox can deliver any modified version of Firefox to users without people actually noticing it’s not the same as the open source version. Since then, I moved to brave on Windows for personal stuff, but not long after, I went full time Linux and kept using Firefox.

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I don’t know… Mozilla wants to amplify certain world views and censor other world views.

link to my political rant

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for example …

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how?

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please enlighten me!!!