The only browser that's been losing users for years is Firefox. That already tells Google all they need to know. (It also tells Mozilla what they need to know; pity they are deaf.)
Mozilla annoys me. Truly it does. However, it's the organisation.
Firefox as a browser, especially dev tools, seems better in every day use than Chrome does. I am really not sure why they keep losing users. I do remember being massive performance issues in the past, but that's really not the case today (at least in my experience)
Because, number one, they keep constantly making radical UI/UX changes that frustrate and alienate their long term users who would rather they keep the "older look" which they got used to and works just fine for them, and number two, most websites are lazy so their devs only optimize for Chrome, even going the extra mile to explicitly state that "For best experience use Chrome" <face_palm>
Edit: changes in tone and corrections after getting off the bus
> Because they keep making stupid UI)UX choices than alienate their users
Cannot overstate this enough. They keep randomly changing their UI constantly, and it's especially frustrating when you have a bunch of custom CSS. I'm a bunch of versions behind & dreading updating because I don't want to spend the hours it'll take to fix my shit for their new version. I honestly hate this browser so much at this point, but everything else (i.e. Chrome) is so much worse that I'm stuck....
I don't want to update, when the update is to something that looks horrible. (Last update I spent hours googling for scripts to reverse the appearance changes. Seems there were 1000s of people looking for the same thing!) But in FF preferences there are only 2 choices.
1. Automatically install updates (recommended)
2. Check for updates but let you choose to install them
You would think I'd choose option 2, since I don't want updates, but I tried that, and I got a popup several times a day saying INSTALL UPDATE NOW OR LATER—no way to say "No I don't !%$@ want to update!" ... so after putting up with that for a while I changed to option 1 to avoid the neverending update popups. Not at all what I want though. Talk about a dark pattern. "let you choose to install them" indeed! Not "choose whether to install" but "bombard you with update popups until you crack and choose to install".
Not wanting to install browser updates is no different to asking "how do I turn this yellow light in my car's dashboard? I know! I'll put tape over it!". Granted, the update might come with UI changes. Changing oil in your car won't do that. That can be annoying, but whether something looks "horrible" is completely subjective. That's fine. You can rely on userChrome.css[1] to customize things more in Firefox than in any other browser.
Personally, I've gone from "customize every last pixel" to just using things the way the designers wanted me to use things. I like having flexibility and configuration toggles, that I use often, but I'm much happier now without trying to customize things for customization's sake.
I take issue with almost everything you said. Sorry my reply is too brief. It's "no different to"..what?! I don't agree that whether something looks "horrible" is completely subjective. I've never tried to customize things for customization's sake, if you're implying I do? Not sure. I used userChrome.css once I think, and as I didn't know about its existence beforehand, it took me hours to fix FF.
Having an out of date browser is as "dangerous" to you and those around you as driving in a car with flat tires. Declining to upgrade software because of aesthetic changes seems shortsighted to me.
> I don't agree that whether something looks "horrible" is completely subjective.
Let's agree to disagree.
> I've never tried to customize things for customization's sake, if you're implying I do?
I'm not saying you have, I'm saying I have customized things for change's sake, and since I stopped doing that and being overly annoyed and fighting changes "forced" on me, I adapted to most of those changes. I dislike when customization options are taken away. But I also understand that customization comes at the bottom of priorities of developers, and that is likely the right call to make for most applications.
It is a problem that upgrades aren't always an improvement on every axis, but staying on old network connected applications is manifestly not a reasonable solution.
> Having an out of date browser is as "dangerous" to you and those around you as driving in a car with flat tires. Declining to upgrade software because of aesthetic changes seems shortsighted to me.
If the browser designers think it's so important for people to update, then perhaps they should stop driving people away with relentless, needless, irritating aesthetic changes! They're the short-sighted ones here.
I have also given up tweaking the interface, long ago. I wish Mozilla's devs could learn the same lesson.
You might tape over the warning light on your car's dash too, if you knew there was a good chance it would come back from the shop painted a different color and having had a racing spoiler bolted onto the trunk.
I had exact same experience. changed the registry settings in windows and am fine. Didn't have the nerves to find how to do on my mac and am just clicking discard every time. Annoying indeed. i wonder most of this shit is probably from the mozilla funding requirements to nerf the browser.
For eg. why tf would you put a separate scroll menu on tab right click to close tabs on left or right, it saves literally 1 row. and increases every single tab change to two clicks. UI disaster!!
i hope some group forks firefox and i will happily donate. But, due to current mozilla ceo siphoning money, not gonna donate a penny.
Sniff your browser traffic to figure out which url they use to poll for updates and block that on your router or firewall. If that doesn't work, maybe you can redirect it in hosts file, and spoof the response to say there's no new updates.
FWIW forums like reddit's r/FirefoxCSS usually have solutions as soon as changes roll out on Developer Edition, which is months ahead of the release. It was like that for the ugly new tabs, for instance, which I never had to deal with.
Have you considered their extended support release (ESR)?
> Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR) is an official version of Firefox developed for large organizations like universities and businesses that need to set up and maintain Firefox on a large scale. Firefox ESR does not come with the latest features but it has the latest security and stability fixes.
You can create a policies.json file with these contents:
{
"policies": {
"DisableAppUpdate": true
}
}
Place it in the platform specific place:
"On Windows, create a directory called distribution where the EXE is located and place the file there. On Mac, the file goes into Firefox.app/Contents/Resources/distribution. On Linux, the file goes into firefox/distribution, where firefox is the installation directory for firefox, which varies by distribution or you can specify system-wide policy by placing the file in /etc/firefox/policies."
EDIT: alternatively, you can install the ESR version for 91, use the userchrome link in the sibling comment, and forget about it for 18 months, wich is what I'm currently doing. And good thing too, apparently 92 broke some UI again, because of course it did.
> but you recognise you are in likely a sub 0.5% of users with custom css?
People don't want to do custom CSS, they have to in order to get the workflow back that they had last week. It's annoying and a lot of work. Firefox changes probably cause >3% user attrition every single release.
Not anymore. There are github lists documenting everything you can do with css in firefox these days. And I don't think the answer to your workflow being disturbed is to nuke the entire thing from orbit and built it back up on another platform, that sounds a lot harder than skimming these github pages.
I've heard this justification numerous times. Yes, there might be only 0.1%-5% users relying on any given UI feature, but with a constant stream of poorly thought out changes and feature cuts Mozilla will keeps pissing off more and more users until none are left.
Honestly at this point I just miss the api that let you get tab-specific history which enabled MouseGestures to show a context menu on right-click scroll-up/down to go forward-back in current tab. It seems like such a minor thing that there's no reason not to support, and such a huge QOL to keep around. I feel the lack of it on a weekly basis like a decade (?) after it was removed, I'm never gonna get used to not having it.
Sure! I use a single toolbar at the top that contains back/forward, refresh/stop, menu dropdowns (which are all hidden except for History/Bookmarks/Tools), the address bar, my bookmarks toolbar buttons, and all addon buttons. Below that is my tab toolbar. This setup is accomplished by CSS with a bunch of position:absolute; and negative margins and stuff, because it's impossible to truly have all of these things in the same toolbar physically. Every single time they change stuff, it gets screwed up.
Prior to their rewrite of everything in version fifty-whatever, I could just drag-and-drop all this stuff into a single toolbar, but when they decided they knew better than me how I want my browser to look it all got 100x harder to get the layout I want.
In addition to this single-toolbar layout I have some easy stuff like highlighting the background color of "View background image" and "Copy link location" and I think 2-3 other things in the context menu a dark purple so that I misclick less often (this particular change is actually amazing and I highly recommend it!).
And I make the URL dropdown suggestions constrained to the width of the URL bar, not 100%, because I find the context switching of hiding the entire webpage too jarring when they're that wide. And I also hide a bunch of random buttons here and there that I find useless; I'm not sure what they are at this point because they've been hidden for so long...
Oh! And my highlight color (in URL bar, etc) is bright magenta (otherwise my theme is dark mode). Just because I like it. :) I use that in Sublimetext too, though I don't do that in every text editor/IDE.
From the description, it looks like they unfucked the layout, then firefox refucked it.
A decade ago it was very easy to make Firefox look like you wanted, even without extensions (if you weren't opinionated about aesthetics, just position and functionality.) Every UI change since Chrome was released has been a regression, and more obnoxiously, each change has been locked in with user adjustment actively prevented or made prohibitively difficult, even for programmers.
They could at least offer a consistent interface to change the UI. Instead they demand the flexibility to make UI changes without having to maintain an interface, while using that flexibility to claw back more and more flexibility from their users.
People like you editing their userChrome.css should never be taken into account when it comes to UI changes. It comes with dozens of warnings that it is not an officially supported thing to do so, it's just left accessible should you want to at your own risk, and when said risks happen, you blame Mozilla for it? Get real.
I have come to dread that little firefox update notification because of the relentless, pointless UI churn. I wish they would just leave well enough alone. There's no way I would use Chrome, though, so I'm stuck with it.
i dont think it's merely marketing budget, thought that helps.
People who got marketed to convert, and hence, the product is indeed good based on this metric.
Firefox does seem to lag behind in terms of performance, esp. on mobile. Firefox also has poorer video rendering speed i think - i get more skipped frames than chrome. I tolerate it, but many users don't.
Firefox has some difficulty being deployed in an enterprise environment (aka, an organizationally managed profile, which chrome has). This has led to enterprises adopting chrome as a primary browser (over firefox), and this may lead to familiarity which causes them to also use chrome at home.
There's a myriad of issues with firefox, and it is rooted at the organizational level, rather than the technical level, but these issues bleed down into the technical level.
>Firefox also has poorer video rendering speed i think - i get more skipped frames than chrome. I tolerate it, but many users don't.
I do not have this problem in Firefox anymore. I used to but i updates fixed it.
>Firefox has some difficulty being deployed in an enterprise environment (aka, an organizationally managed profile, which chrome has). This has led to enterprises adopting chrome as a primary browser (over firefox), and this may lead to familiarity which causes them to also use chrome at home.
GPO exists for Firefox now and works great, I have implemented it.
But what I actually see for enterprise customers is a move to MS Edge. The Windows account integration, control and the fact that on Windows 10 it has really good performance means there is no need for Chrome or FF unless Edge breaks (have had some issues with antivirus breaking it)
On Android Chrome has to be installed as preferred browser or the phone manufacturers get blocked from Googles other services. As much as I like to bash Mozillas leadership, Google has taken every shady (and sometimes illegal) shit 90s era Microsoft pulled and turned it up to eleven.
One thing where I've used Firefox devtools instead of Chrome is when debugging font usage (which is not very often).
Chrome tells you the used font for a single element on a pretty generic level, e.g. "Lato — Local file" or "Lato — Network resource".
Firefox Inspector has a Fonts tab that lets you list all the fonts used on a page. It tells you a more specific font name, e.g. "Lato Regular", the relevant @font-face rule and also the font URL if it's a network resource.
> Mainly: editing and saving directly in the debugger!
Hum... Firefox does that. I know because every time I mistakenly start saving I ask what is the point of it. But well, looks like it's useful for somebody.
The Firefox developer version¹ has a full file menu on its code viewer, with save, open, refresh, etc.
I believe you can activate it on the main build too, but I don't know how. Anyway, if you are debugging code, I highly recommend the developer version.
1 - That is a different configuration of the same code as the main build, for web developers. It's not for developing Firefox itself.
Chrome's devtools have been superior (faster, more reliable, more featureful) for years near as I can tell (and everyone I work with). I am curious what makes you feel firefox's devtools are better.
Alternative take: [dev]tools are only as powerful as how well you know them. I'd like to think both firefox devtools and chrome devtools as highly capable, but you'll get way more out of the one you're used to, whichever it is.
The two devtools purport to do almost the exact same things, with a practically identical interface. The details are where the usability differences lie, such as chrome's vastly superior formatting/debugging story. I only moved to Chrome after working with firebug (!) for years and then working with firefox's builtin devtools. If anything, I should hate Chrome's devtools the most because I know them least well.
compared to chrome, firefox no longer has an edge. Chrome's restrictive addons is what made firefox stronger.
But ever since firefox removed the old XUL style addons, their utility has drastically dropped against chrome. I was very angry at their poor choice, as some really excellent, but unmaintained addons no longer work.
I put up with firefox, just so i can give them some boost (whatever that might amount to), but obviously not that many users would sacrifice their browsing experience for such purposes.
Firefox should be the premier customizable browser, with more addons than chrome. Instead, firefox chose to copy chrome. Thus, it is forever relegated to being second.
Those aren't good reasons from the user's perspective. Those reasons were good reasons from a technical, and maintenance perspective (which, as a software engineer, i understand). Those reasons are what engineers give to product management in order to get a green-field rewrite.
But firefox's value add is their addon system - even if it is old, and difficult to use. It enabled some really great addons that weren't possible in the new replacement (as a simple example, the DownThemAll was rewritten using this new api, and it's shadow of their former self).
Firefox should have paid the cost to maintain the old legacy system, and replace it only when the webextensions api is sufficient to replace _all_ functionality (which, of course, won't because webextensions evolved from google trying to kill off addons https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/ ).
Not to mention XULRunner/XPCOM was Electron before Electron. I remember using the Songbird app, as well as an IM client whose name I can't recall now, across Windows and Linux back in the 00s. So They literally decided to cede the cross-platform browser-based desktop software framework du jour to Chromium.
On Android it's freaking fantastic. Everything feels snappier and I can utilise uBlock Origin to block all of the BS. I've set this up for family, friends etc and none have gone back to Chrome. I think the biggest issue is marketing.
The total rewrite might have given some performance boost and if that's worth it for you then I'm glad for you, but unfortunately it also caused loads of bugs and features that have gone missing, and now that the big push for the rewrite is over, tackling those remaining bug fixes and missing features is again happening at a rather glacial rate.
And the frustrating thing is that this used to be a problem even with the previous iteration of Firefox on Android, i.e. it seemed somewhat understaffed and had some surprising bugs (e.g. under memory pressure it would suddenly and silently stop remembering your current tabs) and missing functionality (it didn't remember your scroll position if the app was killed, you couldn't reorder tabs in the tab list) that were only fixed after years, and even then quite a few times only through outside contributions.
And now the rewrite means that all of this has been thrown away and judging from the current development speed it'll take once more years until we sort of get back to where we used to be.
Also, Firefox 79+ on Android (August 2020) performs significantly better than older versions, despite having lost many features in the rewrite. The current version might meet your expectations.
Yes. They did a rewrite of the android UI layer that released last year, and since then the scrolling is on par with chrome. If you install ublock origin then Firefox now has the best android browser experience by some way.
Not only is it not bad, it’s pretty good. I have been using it for a decade and its fast, superior privacy above Chrome, devtools do everything I need.
I test on Chrome, and I personally don’t think switching is that big a deal that some commenters make it out to be. It’s just as fast as Chrome or faster, the UX is similar enough not be stalled for long if you need to switch. It’s really worth a shot!
What does it tell Mozilla that they need to know? Because I certainly don't understand, but I'm a happy Firefox user so obviously I'm not part of any exodus.
They don't have any coherent marketing strategy, most people still think that Firefox is this sluggish browser that don't support anything.
Also, most non-technical people use the default browser that's installed on the OS whether that's Safari or Edge.
When manifest v3 kicks in and we'll see the true ad horror that's the Internet today without ad blockers, maybe then we'll jump to a more privacy first browser. Until then nothing will happen.
