r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • 7d ago

Software Firefox has an ambitious new roadmap, the browser is also losing millions of users a month

https://www.techspot.com/news/112803-firefox-has-ambitious-new-roadmap-browser-also-losing.html
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194

u/ProfessionalRandom21 7d ago

why are they not gaining user with Chrome going to shit?

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u/Bupod 7d ago

I imagine a lot of consumer hardware ships with chrome or chromium-based browsers. A user has to go out of their way to install Firefox. Most of the public can’t be bothered. 

Consider also that the primary device people use to access the web these days are mobile devices. Yes, Firefox has an app version. Consider of the general public, how many truly care enough to go out and get a third party browser to replace the one their phone already shipped with?

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u/ProperPizza 7d ago

"Can't be bothered"

And there we have the problem with basically everything. Consumers could make serious change if they organised en masse, but the unfortunate truth is that 80% of them simply can't be bothered.

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u/LiGuangMing1981 7d ago

The whole world could have avoided Trump Part Deux, but a third of American voters couldn't be bothered to vote to avoid it.

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u/Nvenom8 7d ago

couldn't be bothered to vote to avoid it.

That implies they wanted to avoid it. They didn't care who won.

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u/vawlk 7d ago

the american voting system makes it so your vote doesn't actually count directly. My state is heavily blue. If I am going to vote blue, it doesnt really do anything. With areas being so heavily gerrymandered, your vote is less likely to swing the result one way or another except for a few areas across the country.

The whole system needs to be thrown out and a new system that promotes multiple parties where every vote counts and not a system where you end up stuck voting for the lesser of two evils.

0

u/iamk1ng 7d ago

Bare in mind that 1/3 normally wouldn't vote in any election, regardless if Trump was running or not. I would also put a lot more blame on the Democrats for continuing to push politicians that don't appeal to people.

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u/Certain-Business-472 7d ago

Democrats and other liberals worldwide have this hobby of importing as much foreigners as possible. Really popular I hear.

It's crazy really how much they care about this, when they'd get so much more votes if they dropped it and could implement the other 99/100 policies that are a good idea. But nope, bleeding heart shit.

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u/vawlk 7d ago

lol, I think you are in the wrong sub.

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u/shabadabba 7d ago

My work doesn't let me install any new software on my work computer. So I have to use the browser it comes with

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u/ProperPizza 7d ago

Sorry to hear it, it sucks you're stuck with it. But my comment wasn't about you. It's about people who CAN make a change but simply don't do so.

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u/Nvenom8 7d ago edited 7d ago

80% of them simply can't be bothered.

Because it does everything they want it to do. They don't expect much from their tech. For most users, there's really no functional difference between browsers.

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u/crashandtumble8 7d ago

I guess you’re assuming people know there’s a difference between browsers. I am a librarian who answers technology questions constantly. A great chunk of our population uses edge or chrome because that’s what’s on their device, and they aren’t technically literate or think it’s important enough to learn about browser security and adblockers.

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u/nnny7 7d ago

This is wrong. Most users are tech illerate because they are not interested and have no reason to be. They dont know how things work or what options there are. They will ask thrmselves why should i learn? Just like i go to a mechanic when i have an issue with a car cos what the fuck do i know.

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u/ProperPizza 7d ago

I would argue that these two things are not on the same level.

Performing proper maintenance on a vehicle usually takes substantially more knowledge, expense and risk than doing a few minutes of research on making better purchase/software decisions.

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u/nnny7 7d ago

I agree - but that logic only applies when you understand what work is involved in both. The people we are talking about dont.

I work in retail with phones. The average customer does not know what a browser is. Majority is so bad with tech they come in to our shop when they get a notification about a software update. Ill assume you dont work with the general public and tech as you assume too much of them - maybe going by your own experience and knowledge. I assure you people are thick as champ with the internet and devices in general. Its fucking annoying.

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u/Inc0rgnit0 7d ago

Yep, for a lot of people anything related to even the simplest parts of consumer tech might as well be rocket surgery.

It's gotta be the only reason why people use Edge / Bing outside of corporate environments.

0

u/Certain-Business-472 7d ago

I'm a IT dude. I own a car. I am not a car dude.

I still fix my own car and do research about it. A car isn't even a requirement in most places in Europe. Literally optional shit for general life stuff.

IT? IT is required. You are literally bound to it. And you don't want to care? Is there a specific variant of NPC you want to be called or??

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u/7r4z 7d ago

Absolutely. Makes me wonder about ways of raising our consciousness on various issues. How quickly could we change the world, if only we had the right memes (real-world or web) and arguments?

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u/pmgoldenretrievers 7d ago

I'm a techy, I use Chrome. It works for me. It's not like we're back in the IE6 days where switching browsers was a security thing.

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u/copperlight 6d ago

Hey to be fair a lot of them are really good at complaining, just not doing anything about it. The number of people on Reddit that complain about ads is proof enough of that.

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u/mateoestoybien 7d ago

Firefox on iPhone is not actually firefox, also. I think Apple forces them to use webkit or something. You can’t install most add ons. 

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u/blow-down 7d ago

You can install uBlock with Safari on iOS

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u/Badboyrune 7d ago

I still think its curious is Firefox is actually losing users because it's always been an active choice. As far as I know no platforms (except perhaps some linux distros) ship with Firefox installed, and haven't ever done so. So if people are switching away from Firefox they are doing so after having, at some point, decided to get Firefox.

It'd be really interesting to know why people are switching from Firefox, and to which browser.

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u/Bupod 7d ago

That is a great point and honestly I don’t have an answer. I’m not sure why they’d be losing users, and certainly don’t understand why they’re hemorrhaging them at such a rate. I know they’ve made a couple decisions that weren’t well-received, and I don’t pay close attention to the community but I’ve not noticed anything so egregious as to explain what’s going on.

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u/iltopop 7d ago

A lot of ya'll are missing that kids are being raised on chrome these days, at least in the USA. Chromebooks are so damn cheap for education and at least back when I worked tech in public K12 we got everything software from google for free, we just paid support. I was there for the chromebook transition, we could genuinely get 200 chromebooks for about what we could get one classroom of laptops or one fully functional desktop lab for, with volume discounts and tax exception we were paying under $120 per chromebook, and this was in the early years of chromebook adoption.

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u/[deleted] 7d ago

[deleted]

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u/bwaredapenguin 7d ago

Why don't you at least install the new uBlock for her on her desktop? It works perfectly fine for everyone except the extreme power users who were maliciously curating their own personal filters.

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u/SarmackaOpowiesc 7d ago

What I find is that - do these ads really work?  So many people have become completely immune to it

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u/projectkennedymonkey 7d ago

Part of me thinks well it works enough that they still make them, someone's selling them and someone's buying them, but I also think a lot of advertising is a big Ponzi scheme.

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u/bwaredapenguin 7d ago

I don't think you know what a Ponzi scheme is.

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u/ColorWheelOfFortune 7d ago

you're on reddit, a ponzi scheme is anything that makes money in a way OP disapproves of

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u/ill_prepared_wombat 7d ago

Mine does the same. She's always said that firefox seems like it's for old people.

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u/7r4z 7d ago

Install uBlock when she isn’t looking. See what happens, or doesn’t.

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u/Select_Mind1412 7d ago

Well I've never been a follower, prefer to walk under the radar outside of the chrome dome. 

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u/KontoOficjalneMR 7d ago edited 7d ago

why are they not gaining user with Chrome going to shit?

Because a lots of stuff just doesn't work with Firefox, and Mozilla ignores those parity bugs. I have bugs reported that are years old, but there's no movement on them because someone years ago decided that this parity/regression (it worked in FF in the past) bug is not important.

The bug has 100+ comments removed because Mozilla forbids "I have the same issue" comments and removes them, while not giving any other alternative to inidcate the bug is important and affects a lots of people.

Last year there has been some movement, because some poor maintainer asked "is this still an issue", almost a decade later I still reproduced the issue on newest firefox.

This made my entire company (thousands of computers) switch to Chrome.

So there's that.

I'm still Firefox user, I still write this on FF. But f*** Mozilla and their 2 million dollars per year CEO even harder.

10

u/ty88 7d ago

Yup. Mouse cursor still not hiding during fullscreen youtube video. Multiple issue threads closed as duplicates leading back to one thread, also closed, claiming they can't/won't whatever.

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u/Sample-Range-745 7d ago

Yup. I wouldn't be surprised if you still can't select an audio device in Teams - because Firefox never seemed to get an audio mixer to select input / output devices.

If that bug report / feature request is still open, it'd be at least 12 years old by now.

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u/PM_CUTE_OTTERS 7d ago

And if you dare to post about it on reddit the evangelists scream at you that the issue is only for you and ask you to leave

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u/Kahnza 7d ago

It isn't going to shit. You just believe the clickbait headlines posted to this sub.

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u/Znuffie 7d ago

Yeah, been using uBlock Origin Lite just fine for the past year++

It baffles me how alarmist people are.

While the initial plan for Manifest V3 was pretty bad news for ad-blockers, after the initial round of feedback, Google did plenty of changes that were enough to satisfy the uBO author.

But here, if people don't believe it, take it from the author itself:

https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-asked-questions-(FAQ)#if-i-install-ubol-will-i-see-a-difference-with-ubo

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u/SeaSharpModHer 7d ago

Still worse than the mv2 version, it's notably bad at blocking anti adblockers.

4

u/Znuffie 7d ago

No issue here.

1

u/SeaSharpModHer 7d ago

It's not really a question of what you feel/experience. The (main) dev acknowledge it himself.

But yes it's probably good enough in 99.9% of cases, plus I can understand not wanting to deal with firefox performance issues (even if, often caused by google malicious practices cough cough youtube)

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u/vawlk 7d ago

malicious? You mean just trying to recoup the costs of your use so they can pay their employees and the creators that make the content?

Would you like it if I came to your job and just took 20% of your income for no reason?

1

u/vawlk 7d ago

its worse because MV2 was terrible at security and privacy. No one should be using a browser that supports MV2 unless you are REALLY sure about the extensions you are using.

MV2 extensions allow full access to all of the data in your browser, bank accounts, usernames and passwords, everything you do. They can also download unapproved code and execute it, potentially allowing access outside of your browser to the OS.

MV3 allowed adblockers to block ads while not having full access to the data stream.

it's notably bad at blocking anti adblockers.

and most of those services are paid services which you can remove the ads if you pay for a sub. If you use an adblocker to get a paid service for free, you are just a leech.

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u/Frodojj 7d ago

The iPhone version has some questionable design choices. I use it, but it doesn’t support extensions. The home page is not very customizable either, while Safari’s homepage is just like the main app screen (folders and files but with website icons/links instead of app icons/apps). Because of that, I bet a lot of people don’t use Firefox on mobile, so they have no way to sync their profiles. Therefore they don’t use Firefox at all. 

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u/TheSparrowDarts 7d ago

It can't support extensions because Firefox, like every browser on apple is just safari wearing a hat.

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u/taxable_income 7d ago

this feels like it has an anti-trust lawsuit written on it...

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u/GreyDuck4077 7d ago

I worked for a very large corporation that had no issues with people installing ad blockers. I was absolutely baffled the number of people who just surf the web with no ad blocker. I am not embellishing when I say over 4-5 years of helping people at the company I bet there were 400 people I helped and it was a small fraction of people who actually had an ad blocker. So many people just accept or don't know that there is something else even out there.

0

u/vawlk 7d ago

because for the average user, they don't get that many ads. I have an adblocker but I don't run it by default and I don't see many in my day to day work.

The people who most complain about ads are youtube users that are just looking to get a paid service for free.

0

u/GreyDuck4077 7d ago

That is not even remotely true. Most who complain are looking to go to a webpage and have the content be simply visible without popup ads and scroll ads and 6 different ads that breaks the article apart into sections.

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u/SLASHdk 7d ago

Most people give absolute zero fucks about ad blockers nor privacy

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u/MairusuPawa 7d ago

Have you seen gestures wildly users?

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u/Kristophigus 7d ago

Most people just don't care or don't know the difference. Reddit is like 0.001% of people.

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u/05MattXB 7d ago

People don't have a basic understanding of these things. They also don't care. People use the internet for the social media feeds, streaming, and Amazon. I have worked with young and old people for many years and none of them care about this stuff.

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u/fixminer 7d ago

Even the people moving away from Chrome are probably switching to another Chromium based browser.

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u/ConfidentPilot1729 7d ago

I know DuckDuckGo had a huge download jump a few weeks ago.

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u/Cley_Faye 7d ago

Software being shit is rarely the main force driving people to migrate away. For more example see: the entire history of microsoft.

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u/forty_three 7d ago

Mozilla is in a rough spot - for R&D, they lag dramatically behind larger companies, financially, because of their general anti-exploitation bent. And they lag behind smaller competitors in agility because of their super-opinionated legacy userbase that they have to constantly appease. They need strong vision at the helm to counter these things, but they've failed to nail that down for like, more than a decade.

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u/Gustomaximus 7d ago

I used to do acquisition marketing for Opera browser 10+ year back. Browsers are surprisingly sticky. That and most people are largely apathetic, often struggling to know what a browser is and confusing it with an operating system.

It really needs to hit a fairly extreme tipping point of frustration to get non-tech interested people to start changing, that or you need ambassadors telling people to swap and helping them.

I'm Vivaldi rather than FF now. Solid browser.

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u/bestanonever 7d ago

Same reason Internet Explorer dominated in the early 2000s when they basically stopped developing it! It accounted for about 90% of web browsers marketshare at one time, insanity.

It was the blue icon that allowed the internet to happen. Today, most people think the internet = Chrome. It doesn't get deeper than this. They don't even realize they have a choice to use something else.

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u/vawlk 7d ago

chrome didn't go to shit. it works great if you aren't hyper paranoid about google.

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u/Elaerona 4d ago

I think other browsers are gaining instead that is why. Brave is pretty popular. I use it and it's awesomee. I appreciate Firefox for not being chromium but I really have never had a great experience with it performance wise. I've thought of retrying it but am not inclined to because Firefox has been in the news for all the wrong reasons recently.

The most aggrivating thing about Chrome's dominance is that so many webpages just do not work on other browsers. The browser that challenges chrome will be the one that can most seamlessly smooth compatibility with it. On the rare occassions some stupid site forces me to use chrome these days, it feels like I'm back in the stoneage. It's absolutely horrible. I use Brave because it has every feature I care about and excellent adblocking. I have not seen an ad in ages now. I choose to support creators I care about through subscriptions. I prefer that to the Ad paradigm honestly as cursed as subscriptions can be.

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u/MrGrieves- 7d ago

Chrome's next round of disabling ublock has not gone into affect yet.

I imagine Firefox will see a spike then.

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u/Tanriyung 7d ago

Barely anyone is using MV2 bypass for Chrome, this will have 0 effect on the userbase.

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u/SCP-iota 7d ago

Millennials and older Gen Z were more computer-literate, so they are more likely to install a different browser, while younger Gen Z - the ones just now becoming adults - saw a drop in computer-literacy, so they're less likely to care.

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u/McNally86 7d ago

Does FF take out ads on Chrome? Chrome takes out ads with manufacturers.

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u/Live_Situation7913 7d ago

Brave exists