edited the heading of the question. I think most of us here are reasoning why more people are not using firefox (because it was the initial question), but none of that explains why it’s actively losing marketshare.

I don’t agree ideologically with Firefox management and am somewhat of a semi-conservative (and my previous posts might testify to that), I think Firefox browser is absolutely amazing! It’s beautiful and it just feels good. It has awesome features like containers. It’s better for privacy than any mainstream browser out there (even counting Brave here) and it has great integration between PC and Phone. It’s open-source (unlike Chrome) and it supports a good chunk of extensions you would need.

This was about PC, but I believe even for Mobiles it looks great and it allows features like extensions (and I hear desktop extensions are coming to firefox android?), it’s just a great ecosystem and it’s available everywhere unlike most FOSS softwares.

So why is Firefox’s market share dying?

I mean, I have a few ideas why it might be, maybe correct me I guess?

  1. Most people don’t know how to use extensions well and how to use Firefox well. (Most of my friends in their 30’s still live without ad blockers, so I don’t think many are educated here)
  2. It’s just not as fast as Chrome or Brave. I can’t deny this, but despite of this, I find it’s worthy.
  3. It’s not the default.
  4. Many features which are Google specific aren’t supported.
  5. Many websites are just not supporting firefox anymore (looking at you snapchat), but you would be right in saying this is the effect of Firefox losing it’s market share not the cause (at least for now) and you would be right.

But what else?

I might take time (a lot of it) to get back at you, thanks for understanding.

occasionally I’ll find websites that don’t work 100% because they were coded primarily for chromium based browsers. FU Google

  • olympus@kbin.social
    93·
    1 year ago

    For me, until all below are supported Firefox can’t be my primary browser.

    1. PWA not supported and only possible with FirefoxPWA. I can’t rely to anything but native, Mozilla could break FirefoxPWA any time they want.
    2. I use my browser for my multimedia needs and I use my own Emby Server. Firefox doesn’t support mkv container and the most important it desn’t support HEVC. Please do not tell me about HEVC royalties and how much Mozilla would have to pay MPEG-LA. Chromium based browsers have enabled hardware HEVC decoding and they pay nothing to MPEG-LA because the royalties have been already payed by my graphics card. Mozilla simply doesn’t care.
          • sip@programming.dev
            1·
            1 year ago

            pehaps.

            I mean I even developed a few for my previous employer. I think chrome is just more permissive with the config and people settle when chrome works. Since I dev on firefox, maybe that’s why my apps worked.

            • kier@lemmy.world
              1·
              1 year ago

              hmm, maybe were area talking about different things

              I’m talking about “installing” any website as an app, and your OS treat it like an independent app

              • sip@programming.dev
                1·
                1 year ago

                pwa it’s just a browser shortcut without the toolbar and you install it from the browser if the page provides info about that.

      • olympus@kbin.social
        2·
        1 year ago

        First of all jpegxl was an experimental flag and option in chromium, it never made it as a “real” feature in chromium based browsers. Find a better example, that ain’t it.
        About your other comment, you have no idea how popular Plex, Jellyfin and Emby are. In desktop if they use Firefox they are stuck at re-encoding their videos on the fly to h264 and waste resources and quality. Many of them have no idea that chromium based browsers now support directplay on hevc. Everyday many of them are informed and leave Firefox.

          • olympus@kbin.social
            2·
            1 year ago

            Yes, mv2 is a good example. But not a deal breaker for me because most chromium based browsers have a NATIVE adblocker on them. NATIVE adlocking, you know… ablocking that will never break because Chrome, Edge or Firefox don’t have NATIVE adbloking on them and you have to rely on extensions for that.
            There is demand for hevc. Just have a look at Jeffylin, Emby or Plex forums. No, Mozilla doesn’t care, they have been mulitple requests and they close them all with RESOLVED WONTFIX. People won’t keep begging Mozilla, they are just switching to another browser.

              • olympus@kbin.social
                1·
                1 year ago

                They are focused on AV1. Good, I will focused on it in future, I hope it beats MPEG-LA’s VVC.
                That’s not the point, in case you don’t know everybody is focusing on AV1 including Google.
                Google is actually the main developer of AV1.
                Nobody asks from Mozilla to include software HEVC decoding. They would have to pay a lot of money for it and honestly they shouldn’t give to MPEG-LA a single dollar.
                They could do what Chromium has done and include ONLY hardware decoding support.
                Chromium pays nothing to MPEG-LA for that because they use our own hardware, our graphics card, and the manufacturer of the graphics card has already paid for it.
                I also don’t see any issue coming from it with widevine, if there isn’t any issue from it in Chromium, I don’t see why it would cause issues only to Firefox.
                They proparly don’t have the resources to include support for it. Totally understandable. But I will be selfish on this, my choice of my primary browser would be based on my needs…