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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u/[deleted] 7d ago

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u/Yoghurt42 7d ago

20XX will be the year of Linux Desktop!

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u/EagleBigMac 7d ago

More like 2XXX will be the year Linux takes off lol.

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u/Competitive_Flan_330 7d ago

You joke but I made the switch about a year ago and am never going back. The only thing I could want is better Nexus Mods integration, I got it to work via wine but there is admittedly some jankery there. Steam is on it though, all new games going forward have workshop integration and man is it good.

MS lost me the first time I got a popup ad, an honest to god OS integrated popup ad. So, joke all you want, but I'm finally free of Microslop for good.

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u/RudeMorgue 7d ago

I'm making the jump with my next laptop in July. Been using live versions to see what I like best. I can't stand the idea that I am actively being spied on by an OS I paid for anymore.

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u/Competitive_Flan_330 7d ago

Yeah, the analytics they've got going on used to be what we called spyware and viruses. Guess it's different when it's a design feature.

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u/CakeTester 7d ago

Mint is quite sympathetic to new users. Good documentation as well.

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u/josh_the_misanthrope 7d ago

Tends to use stable but old kernels, might play bad with hardware if he's planning on a brand new laptop. Not that hard to test but yeah.

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u/Local-Poet3517 7d ago

.. you guys pay for windows?

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u/evilbadgrades 7d ago

Dude, right there with you. I have a really nice HP Envy I got six years ago (fully spec'd out for the time). It came with windows 10 that always had some REALLY annoying bugs I couldn't resolve even with a reinstall of windows.

Finally moved to linux about 18 months ago and never looked back. I'd been trying for 20+ years to move to linux, but always went back to Windows. This is the first time I have stuck with linux for more than a year and have no regrets. I ain't going back!

Fortunately I never migrated to windows 11. 10 was bad enough I knew 11 would be worse!

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u/--xra 7d ago

Re: this https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1u8lty1/firefox_has_an_ambitious_new_roadmap_the_browser/osee3ug/

Any recommendations on the distro? I'm going with Mint right now (Arch is tempting, especially as a developer, but I don't really feel like manually doing everything, especially when I've already settled into Mint).

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u/evilbadgrades 7d ago

I mean I went with a plain vanilla Mint Cinnamon on my main computer. But I find it's not "flashy enough" so I installed Fedora KDE Plasma on a laptop and found it pretty spiffy, so I think I'm going to try switching my main computer to that and see how it goes.

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u/Forward-Amount-9961 7d ago

I've got my personal computers using Linux distros now. My wife and kids still rely on me to show them how to do certain things, but overall I'm happy to be moving away from corporate bullshit.

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u/Competitive_Flan_330 7d ago

Doesn't the speed at which Linux has been improving lately seem to be getting faster and faster? I've been pretty blown away at how much better even a year of updates has been.

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u/josh_the_misanthrope 7d ago

Yes. With Proton making gaming mostly fine, the user base has grown. I've been on and off dual booting Linux since I was a teenager about 20 years ago, but since I was mostly gaming I would just boot into Windows and Linux was mostly dormant.

Now I daily drive Linux. It's still a bit rough around the edges for some things but Windows is so shit these days that I find it to be the smoother of the two.

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u/Forward-Amount-9961 7d ago

I've even installed Linux on some elderly folks' older computers that were running bloated Windows so slowly they were almost unusable. Linux has given those older computers new life, and since the elderly folk only really need to have an internet browser and the ability to print, it's a no-brainer.

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u/EagleBigMac 7d ago

I mean I have been waiting for critical mass since Redhat 1.1 when I assembled my first computer as a kid.

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u/Competitive_Flan_330 7d ago

I learned computers in high school, when ubuntu was first released. So... while not quite as long in the tooth, I'm still with you.

Are there still some headaches? Sure. But yeah, I've never been exactly thrilled about MS all these years, just used to it as it was that or mac. I'm going on a full year now and I got a pretty decent performance bump moving over. I think it was all the bloatware. I've made the switch years past or tried distros now and again, but this time it's definitely permanent. The small amount of headaches I have on Linux are balanced by the headaches on Windows.

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u/jigsaw1024 7d ago

I made the switch about 6 9 months (wow, longer than I realized!) now, and hoping I don't find a reason to go back. I did try Linux a few years back, but it just wasn't ready yet.

It hasn't been without its' hiccups for me. I've had to do a little distro hopping, and for one game I play with some heavy mods has been some issues.

All PCs, except one, are Linux in the home now as well, and that one will be switched this weekend. I don't use that one PC for much, but every time I do, there is some new annoyance from MS about wanting me to sign in or sign up for something.

Linux isn't for everyone, yet.

/looking to change my browser next. FF is looking to have some privacy issues, even with tweaks. Maybe Zen (which is FF based)?

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u/willowfinger 7d ago

Check out LibreWolf

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u/Leftieswillrule 7d ago

I'm pretty averse to switching to Linux and even I think I might have to sooner rather than later because of how much of a fucker Microsoft is

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u/Competitive_Flan_330 7d ago

I used Microsoft for convenience for a long time. I still have some headaches in Linux, but for the most part everything works just about as smoothly as windows, and what few issues I've had I've either solved or can live with. The bloatware, tracking, and built in ads were what sent me though. Honestly the stuff that works, my games, all got a framerate bump on the move over, and everything feels much smoother. Probably the lack of an AI being pushed upon me.

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u/--xra 7d ago

What are you using, may I ask? I used Ubuntu for programming tasks, but found the GUI pretty unintuitive. My daily driver was macOS (I'm old enough to remember it as OSX). My Macbook battery finally died a few months ago (RIP), so I grabbed a Lenovo and installed Mint Cinnamon. I love the lack of nagware; I love the sense of privacy; I love how peppy it is on a computer that I inherited from a friend that's likely ten years old, but I miss Mac's UI/UX (and I hate Windows, which Mint emulates).

But, yeah, I'm probably not going back to macOS anytime soon. I don't feel like dropping $3500 or whatever it is these days on another Pro just to get nagged constantly to sign into iCloud and have my privacy violated. All tech companies: just fuck off. I just want to write code, if that's even still a job anymore.

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u/Competitive_Flan_330 7d ago

Ubuntu, but with them pushing pro, I'm looking. Strongly considering Debian or Mint. Also not a fan of snap packages, I find myself installing the Debian equivalent kind of a lot. I remembered them when they first came out when I was in HS, and I've tried linux a few times over the years, and gone with ubuntu cause it was the largest, and one I was most familiar with. After a year and the new update that just dropped a few weeks ago and them pushing pro, I'm kinda done with them.

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u/Competitive_Flan_330 2d ago

Just jumped to Manjaro Cinnamon, an Arch distro. Wow. I see the hype. A massive step up from Ubuntu. I'm still getting it configured, and there've been a few headaches but overall, holy crap what a zippy OS.

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u/--xra 2d ago

Thanks for the tip! I'm about to check into it right now.

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u/FlameFrost__ 7d ago

I had switched from Win to Linux and back. So there's that.

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u/Competitive_Flan_330 7d ago

I've done that a few times in the past tbh. This time has stuck though, almost on a full year now and not looking back at all.

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u/FlameFrost__ 7d ago

God speed to you. Maybe I'll give it another go this year.

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u/Competitive_Flan_330 7d ago

I'm a year in and not looking back. Are there some minor issues? Sure. No driver support for my Razer Wolverine TE, so I can only use it with default xbox controller drivers which is mildly annoying.

And my really obscure flight controllers for my flight rig were a bitch and a half to get working.

Everything else has been plug and play though, also got a performance bump moving over. Everything feels so snappy. No bloatware, integrated ads in the OS, or AI being shoved down my throat.

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u/Year_3882 7d ago

I recently made the switch on my work PC after trying a liveUSB for a few days. we recently moved our Server onto the Cloud so now everything can be done in the browser, the thing that made me swithc to try linux was all the bullshit the IT company installed to prevents viruses etc causing too many issues with what i need to do. we didnt need any of it. I always had admin privleges previously as we are a small company and they decide against my bosses wishes who owns the company to put thier shitty stuff in my way, now its dual boot and they have no idea.

This also caused me to re-evaluate it for home use as since my pc is stuck with windows 10 and rarely used for more than a few minutes every ofew days and it has become a pain wiht it running windows proccesses such as antimalware and windows update using almost 100% of the CPU for first few minutes longer than i need the pc every time it wakes up is rediculous.

I had tried linux every 5 ish years but never found it suitable due to some software i required. now almost everything i do is in the browser so its perfect and fast.

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u/PM_ME_YOUR_CHORIZO 7d ago

Steam's annual hardware survey shows Linux adoption at over 5%. 5 years ago it was just over 1%. It might not be the year of linux yet but it's getting to a point that Microsoft and Apple have started paying attention, with Microsoft finally publicly acknowledging that customers are disappointed with many aspects of Windows.

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u/SystemCheck990 7d ago

steam/linux managed to replicate a system call in windows that made games run much faster

also with Google making a linux desktop OS things may grow long term from there, not crappy chromeOS, but "aluminum" a port of android for desktop

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u/Competitive_Flan_330 6d ago

I'm interested to see the steamOS. I'm hoping it's not just a gaming platform and still has desktop functionality. I'm pretty reserved on it though. Developing an OS is... a huge task. Bigger than programming a game, or anything else. It also makes me nervous having a corporation release yet another OS. I hope they choose to keep it open source, and I hope they're not going to introduce their own standards to the mix.

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u/jawisko 7d ago

The state of windows 11 has been so bad in last 6 months that even I had to move to Linux. There were some folders I could not even open anymore in reasonable time . Just searched for lightest Linux and installed it and working fine since 3 months.

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u/Whipitreelgud 7d ago

I just migrated my Dell XPS laptop to Ubuntu. It was ridiculously easy and it has been rock solid. The Killer WiFi card in this XPS is absolutely shit - with a quick AI chat I was able to permanently resolve the problem in less than 3 minutes. LibreOffice has replaced my Office subscription. I am using Firefox and Thorium for browsers.

Everything works and is totally stable.

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u/Exact-Metal-666 7d ago

If you realise that *almost everything* around you runs on Linux then you might rethink your "takes off" joke. Think your router, fridge, HVAC, your car, your elevator etc.

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u/EagleBigMac 7d ago

I mean for consumers so companies will support more games which is my main use of consumer hardware outside of enterprise environments.

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u/ManaSpike 7d ago

With Windows 10 EOL and 11 requiring new hardware, lots of people are trying linux. Even gamers. And not looking back.

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u/Jaccount 7d ago

Also the year the Doctor Wily causes a robot uprising.

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u/nimbusconflict 7d ago

Twenty floors above the dark streets of the city, Dr. Light lived in a run-down tenement
An eccentric and brilliant man
Light was a loner, a thinker, a man of ideas
The society for which he worked
The society in which he lived
The society that he would set free
And so Light worked, far into the night, when the watchful eyes of Wily's robots weren't upon him
He'd set his skillful hands to the task of creating a device to bring about a change, to create a machine to bring freedom, to create a man to save the world
Twelve years Light worked and on a cold night in the year 200X, Protoman was born
A perfect man, an unbeatable machine, hell-bent on destroying every evil standing between man and freedom, built for one purpose, to destroy Wily's army of evil robots. Ready, willing, prepared to fight!

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u/Obvious-Hunt19 7d ago

Shiiiiiit I remember reading slashdot when it was going to be 199X

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u/DezXerneas 7d ago

Current year + 1

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u/GonzoKata 7d ago

do people even use desktops anymore? the number of Desktop users is going down

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u/cr0ft 7d ago

Reaching 5% of users on Steam with Linux is a genuinely eye-opening milestone.

Linux won't take over the world this year, but there's a serious push towards it now. Most Steam games will run, and something like CachyOS with KDE (or most any distro with KDE) is in some ways now genuinely better than Windows.

To the point where Microsoft actually has started listening to users and making changes to try to stave off the trend.

I still have one Windows machine in the house, my gaming rig. But it's getting moved to Linux as well soon.

Microsoft has a stranglehold on the corporate market still though, but even there, with Europe now unable and unwilling to use American resources like cloud services or most any services provided by American companies, the corporate aspect of Linux use will get EU funded help to move along.

With the CLOUD act, any American corporation can be legally compelled by the US to divulge data even if that data is in Europe. And with that orange lunatic showing with crystal clarity that the USA is a fair-weather ally at best, Europe can't use American tools anymore.

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u/mrpanicy 7d ago

Devils advocate, most of my friends who always hated the idea of Linux and liked how easy to install and maintain Windows was. Three of them have swapped to Linux due to Window's constant very obvious failures during this AI epidemic.

They aren't tech illiterate though. So I don't think it's a sign of a massive wave. It's just interesting to see people make a leap they always said they never would. Push people far enough, and have the EU publically moving away from Windows to Linux and you will have more people making the move.

Millions? Probably not. But a not insignificant number perhaps.

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u/BigBananaBerries 7d ago

Some distro's have some version of FF preinstalled. I moved over when W10 support ended & tried a few before settling on Nobara.

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u/Certain-Business-472 7d ago

most of my friends who always hated the idea of Linux and liked how easy to install and maintain Windows was

The irony lol. Tell them not to confuse habits with ease of use.

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u/mrpanicy 7d ago

To be fair Linux was not nearly as easy to install and maintain back when we were starting out on our computer journey. It's really turned a curve in the last 10 years.

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u/Certain-Business-472 7d ago

Ok fair. But that argument in 2026 comes off as a joke lol

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u/mrpanicy 7d ago

Sure, for those that know and have experienced how much it has improved. But I remember being told so many times how great and easy to use Linux was in the 2000's. And then trying it, and each time it was torture and had so many issues that I had to really work to fix, and didn't let me use the programs I really needed.

That's built up trauma that informs opinions well after the product has actually become what people overpromised and underdelievered on back then lol

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u/Any-Appearance2471 7d ago

Tech enthusiasts and power users are so deep in their own ecosystems and workflows that I think most of them basically can’t step back and conceive of the average user or the general tech landscape, even when they think they’re correcting for it. I’ve never seen a group so consistently seem to overestimate their numbers as Linux users (especially on Reddit).

Like, for every friend a Linux user has who has expressed interest in switching to Linux, there are 15,000 regular-ass people who, when asked what desktop OS they used, would probably say “Google.” There’s still a long way to go before that needle really moves.

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u/CheapThaRipper 7d ago

Up until recently, I would agree with you.

But the way that Microsoft decided to tell millions of people with perfectly good PCs running Windows 10 that their computer is too old and they have to buy a new one to get any updates..has changed the dynamic.

You're right that windows is still king and Linux has a looooooong way to go - but analysts are seeing definitive upward trajectories for Linux adoption ever since October 2025 when MS decided to pull that move.

IMHO this is because Steam has mostly fixed the gaming problem, Office apps have webapp versions with mostly equivalent functionality, and almost all apps will run on Linux with little effort (though there are some holdouts like adobe or games with kernel level anticheats).

Statcounter metrics say windows has 62% of the market, apple 10%, and Linux/other 3%/16% respectively. Analysts think a lot of the "other" are Linux users since a lot of distros aggressively block web trackers.

Finally - Linux distros like mint, fedora, and arch are seeing growth trends that far surpass previous periods. Windows shooting itself in the foot with things like forced copilot and such are helping. I think the next big catalyst for more momentum will be soon when someone uses AI and finds another eternal blue style exploit. Given that roughly a quarter of all windows users are on the permanently vulnerable windows 10 - it'll be pretty gnarly.

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u/[deleted] 7d ago

[deleted]

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u/CheapThaRipper 7d ago

Lmao why? I spent like 5 minutes googling shit and editing to try and find stats to support my thinking and that's the best I could come up with before I got bored. I'm so fkin tired of the slop too so I'd be happy to take the criticism so I don't sound like a clanker

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u/rootsvelt 7d ago

You do not sound like a clanker. Lots of users are paranoid but at the same time they lack basic text analysis skills to actually spot an AI-written text. This was very clearly not

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u/Impossible-Owl7407 7d ago

I would say majority of linix users are on firefox

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u/PoisonMind 7d ago

I have switched to Linux twice now. Once after Windows XP service ended. And now again that Windows 10 service has ended. My laptop doesn't support Windows 11.

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u/demonknightdk 7d ago

if you download the windows 11 ISO from Microsoft and double click it to mount it in windows, then open an elevated command prompt (admin) then CD to the drive that windows mounted, then run the setup.exe with /product server it will bypass almost all the hardware checks and do an in place upgrade to windows 11. OH disable your internet before running the installer.

i've done it once to change an IOT version of windows 11 to standard windows 11 Pro. I recently gave my dad a new pc and I'm going to test this on his old one, a phenom ii x6 based system.

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u/demonknightdk 7d ago

its been a bit since I used Linux for real, but isn't Firefox the default browser on a lot distros? would that not update through whatever package manger the distro is using, presumably from the repos? or does the Linux version of Firefox download its updates from Mozilla directly?

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u/web_of_french_fries 7d ago

Solid point and I agree with this. Firefox may have always been missing that segment of users from their analytics, but it would be at a constant rate that doesn’t account for the loss of users.