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

Software & Operating Systems
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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.

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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!!!

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radicalization is strong word.

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i have seen few comments without sufficient related data :heart_eyes:. hence my opinion.

i use ff if website breaks completly, otherwise tor. all my life i have choosen according to my personal tastes and beliefs. period.

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I just want a reasonable opensource browser than doesn’t melt down my 5 year old laptop when I want to have a video conference and 100+ tabs open at the same time (undoubtedly some of them pointlessly trying to fetch data in the background)

Is that too much to ask?

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There was plenty of links and related info up there, you seem not to have read the replies properly, you could also have replied to all of them with only 1 post rather than spamming 6.

They literally linked it below that, you just didn’t read so here it is again for you:

Again, you just didn’t read so here it is again for you:

Again, you just didn’t read so here it is again for you:

Again, you just didn’t read so here it is again for you:

At this stage I will just relink the entire topic and let you rework your way throigh it a little slower this time.

Back to the topic.

Linus is open-source and has less than 2% desktop market share

Is not to dissimilar of a statement yet there is not the same concern about it, is that because it is easier to see why that is the case? After all windows may not not always be acting in our best interests but it does its job well so people use it anyway. Why the focus on Firefox?

This is not intending to start that whole argument just pointing out that in other similar situations the reasons are easy to see.

Firefox has its failings and the market share reflects that.

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Yes. That’s why I used it.

Don’t get me wrong, I think that Firefox is a good tool. I am just extremely cautious about the direction Mozilla may take it due to the fact that they’re pushing agendas that seem to be counter to internet freedom. (the “we need more than deplatforming” blog post is really the prime example of what’s wrong with Mozilla lately)

If you’re not familiar with the US (and European, for that matter) social climate, you might not recognize the issues, but it’s gotten to the point where families are being torn apart by political agendas pushed by tech companies like Facebook, Twitter, Spotify and Mozilla. Mozilla pushing articles to your launch page about how bad Trump is, for example, is not going to be met with happy thoughts by anyone. If you like Trump, you’re unhappy that it’s on your page. If you dislike Trump, you are reminded of something bad in the world.

At the end of the day, Mozilla should provide a browser, not be a gatekeeper for what’s good or what’s true in the world. If they return to that, I’ll be very happy to advocate for them again.

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I had included a link to the Mozilla blog where the CEO commented as such, but I had it wrapped in spoiler tags so it was blurred out.

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i think every giant money sucking corporation is going to act in self interest, especially for money. i wonder if they work with china to keep information about the communist party hidden like microsoft and google

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I can guarantee this will be the case in China, and in countries in their immediate sphere of influence. These companies will do anything to get in to that market.

For me (in the UK) though, they had a BBC article about the rape and genocide of Uighurs. Surprising, because most of the articles I get shoved down my throat by Firefox/Pocket is crap like “How to make PERFECT cupcakes!”, some weeks out of date articles that are by then irrelevant, and mobile game ads.

Pocket was a fucking dumb purchase by Firefox.

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Mozilla keeps doing dumb shit. If they’d knock off the social events and all that crap and just pushed their products they’d do fine.

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Lol do you really expect FF to stay out of social when they have a CEO with a hair like that. They want to make use of their power.

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Edna from the incredibles whose losing it after covid?

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