Firefox users down 50 million since 2018

[WolframaticAlpha]

Summary

Firefox has lost 50 million users since 2018, according to Mozilla's latest report. 

 

Quotes

Quote

As per the official stats, the reported number of active (monthly) users was about 244 million at the end of 2018.

And, it seems to have declined to 198 million at the end of Q2 2021.

So, that makes it a whopping ~46 million decline in the userbase.

 

My thoughts

This is really concerning. I switched back to FF because of the 89 redesign. I will also never understand the acceptance by many of a Google controlled internet, when so many (rightfully) fought against MS back in the day with IE. I have been guilty of this earlier(talking trash about ff). 

 

FF is a vital part of the net. Mozilla may not have been the best of the companies in recent times, but we need it to survive, else we might not see any more innovations in the web space, as well as in other places(rust etc)

 

Sources

Firefox Lost Almost 50 million Users: Here's Why It is Concerning - It's FOSS News (itsfoss.com)

[JuliusW]

if im not using firefox, what should i use, since I dont like chrome?

 

[WolframaticAlpha]

Just now, JuliusW said:

if im not using firefox, what should i use, since I dont like chrome?

 

Firefox is the only choice. Else you can use a chromium based browser, but FF is not that bad, and looks beautiful. It has many of the extensions I use(ublock origin, sponsorblock, grammarly etc) and works well-ish

[TimeOmnivore]

Ironically, a large portion (75%-95%, depending on the year) of why Mozilla/Firefox is still in business is the deal they have with Google to make Google's search engine the default - $1.2 billion as of the most recent deal.

 

One of the main things Firefox does that nearly pushes me away is the constant redesigns that either break functionality or look awful. For example, in a recent update, they made bookmark folders take up nearly triple the vertical space they used to. A small annoyance, and one I eventually solved with about:config and CSS changes (which they also regularly break), but it's a frustrating, recurring problem that increasingly nearly drives me away. I still use Firefox and prefer it over Chrome, but Mozilla aren't doing themselves much of any favors, and I mainly stick with them out of spite for Chrome rather than a love for Firefox.

[bob.blunderton]

Firefox die-hard here, I've been using it since Windows XP's prime days.  I'd reckon there were only a few tens of thousands of downloads at that point, it was pretty early  (03~04?) as I really did NOT like IE and even ended up removing it from the system (and thwarting the system updates putting it back by making a folder with the same name, which did the trick in XP days).

I believe some spyware I couldn't route out of the system was an initial reason for the switch, which still popped up, so I renamed the iexplore dot exe to F*** dot YOU and the OS kept asking me once every hour how to open F***.you.  It was pretty priceless.  Stupid file linking, take THAT!

I did eventually get the spyware out - was so busy with work I think the computer was off for many days until I truly fixed it when I had the time.

 

Good times!

 

Never stopped using firefox for the same reason I still use Winamp, it WORKS.  I'd be on Windows 7 here if they didn't make it so difficult with a Ryzen 3950x/x570 setup... absolutely cannot stand Windows 10 one bit, nor the modern web browsers or google-everything (I don't even have a google account).

"Would you like to show Windows how to open F U ?"   --priceless

[tikker]

Shame, I like the browser. I don't particularly like the most recent UI redesign though. Everything is so spaced out. It's also never 100% stable for me. Random bits and pieces of websites just keep breaking especially when not constantly running the latest version.

[Murasaki]

I switched to FF earlier this year and not even a month after using it the UI changed and took me hours to adjust to. I can imagine if some were new to the browser and didn't care enough they'd just nope out of there .

[LWM723]

The latest Proton UI sucks. I have it disabled, at least you can do that,for now. I wish they would stop the new stupid "Improvements". Time for a change of leadership at Mozilla before they kill off a good browser.

[Stormseeker9]

Firefox did not lose 50 million customers, they lost approximately 46 million. 4 million is a big difference  

[admkhalid]

1 hour ago, Eviljuche said:

It's mostly Mozilla's own fault. All those controversial changes in Mozilla's policies (remember Mozilla VPN, huh?) and in the browser itself resulted in such enormous user runoff.

I, personally, switched to SeaMonkey which is literally the good old Firefox I knew and love.

What's the problem with Mozilla VPN?

[Chris Pratt]

It's not a Google controlled Internet. There's plenty of other browser choices. They're all based on Chromium, but that's an open source project and not controlled by Google.

 

Personally, I'm all for it. I've been saying since the beginning that there should be a shared rendering engine. It doesn't make sense to have different implementations of how HTML, CSS and JavaScript get rendered to a web page. Where browsers can and do differentiate themselves is the UI and features of the browser itself. The core functionality of rendering works better when everyone works on and contributes to a common source so behavior is both predictable and all browsers benefit from any enhancements and bug fixes.

[leclod]

2 hours ago, Nacht said:

Firefox lacks HDR support oh well wont matter soon my Samsung g9 with 15+ dead pixels and more dying will be picked up and i probably never buy another one again and become even more depressed as life is unfair and only reviewers are entitled to pixel perfect screens, while im being treated as second class citizen.

Dead pixels aren't so bad. Ok, 15 on a FullHD screen is a lot

Most screens have some dead pixels even reviewers screens probably have some.

Who checks for dead pixels, except for me and you (I've got 3 dead red subpixel on my Oled) ?

[leclod]

3 minutes ago, Nacht said:

Im not accepting anything less then perfect

Do you have 15 dead pixel out of 5120*1140=7 million or 15 subpixel out of 21 million ? which is pretty close to perfection

[LAwLz]

What makes things even worse is that those 50 million users were not just random uneducated people who just switched to Chrome because Google's website said "download Chrome, it's fast". The people who switched were informed users who had gone out of their way to use Firefox before, but switched for some reason(s). 

 

Personally I switched to Edge. Mozilla spent too much time and money on giving their executives massive bonuses and "woke" campaigns and not enough on actual development of their browser. They started constantly falling behind on new features and performance. 

When they laid off all the people on the MSDN team, the dev tool team and the people working on their new engine I felt like it was time to abandon ship as well. They were already behind before, but with less developers they would just keep falling behind even more. 

 

Doesn't help that their horrible CEO said that she wouldn't cut C-suite salaries to 500K a year because it would put too much burden on those people. Imagine paying yourself 2.5 million dollars a year, publicly saying other leaders within the company deserve more than 500K a year (because a 500K salary would apparently be a "burden" to live on), and then firing a large portion of your programmers because "Boo hoo the pandemic has lowered our incomes". 

[Blademaster91]

37 minutes ago, Chris Pratt said:

It's not a Google controlled Internet. There's plenty of other browser choices. They're all based on Chromium, but that's an open source project and not controlled by Google.

 

Personally, I'm all for it. I've been saying since the beginning that there should be a shared rendering engine. It doesn't make sense to have different implementations of how HTML, CSS and JavaScript get rendered to a web page. Where browsers can and do differentiate themselves is the UI and features of the browser itself. The core functionality of rendering works better when everyone works on and contributes to a common source so behavior is both predictable and all browsers benefit from any enhancements and bug fixes.

Google is still the owner of Chromium, so every browser that uses Chromium is still pretty much Chrome, and usually follows what Chrome does, like reducing the amount of rules ad blockers can have to block ads or limit tracking.

Only having one choice of browser would be very limiting, and Microsoft got sued for IE, not sure how Google hasn't been sued for a browser monopoly.

5 minutes ago, Nacht said:

Im not accepting anything less then perfect

I agree, the display should be perfect for a $1000+ gaming monitor. Although I can deal with 1 or 2 dead pixels, 15 dead pixels seems unacceptable for anything IMO.

[LAwLz]

38 minutes ago, Chris Pratt said:

It's not a Google controlled Internet. There's plenty of other browser choices. They're all based on Chromium, but that's an open source project and not controlled by Google.

Chromium is controlled by Google. 

Just because something is open source doesn't mean it's the wild west. 

Chromium is owned and controlled by Google. They have complete control over what is and isn't implemented in Chromium. 

[Chris Pratt]

2 minutes ago, Blademaster91 said:

Google is still the owner of Chromium, so every browser that uses Chromium is still pretty much Chrome, and usually follows what Chrome does, like reducing the amount of rules ad blockers can have to block ads or limit tracking.

Only having one choice of browser would be very limiting, and Microsoft got sued for IE, not sure how Google hasn't been sued for a browser monopoly.

No they aren't. Chromium is maintained by Google, Apple, and Microsoft, along with smaller companies and many individuals. Google doesn't have veto power or anything like that, so control is shared by the community.

[linkboy]

I wouldn't mind running Firefox, but the Android version is freaking awful. 

 

Sync is a huge feature for me, and I've tried various browsers on both Android and Windows. 

 

That's why I'm not running Firefox (I'm currently using Vivaldi). 

[Franck]

3 hours ago, JuliusW said:

if im not using firefox, what should i use, since I dont like chrome?

 

use Brave. Open source, secure, blockchain hops, no tracking plus paired with brave search (which is available for all major browser too) you get no search tracking at all unlike duckduckgo that still have some. Oh another small this is that it also block most popup, ads and you gain cryptocurrency by using it and you can tip your go to places in that cryptocurrency.

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, Chris Pratt said:

It's not a Google controlled Internet. There's plenty of other browser choices. They're all based on Chromium, but that's an open source project and not controlled by Google.

 

The fact that they're based on Chromium makes them not a real choice.

 

Microsoft's abandonment of Edge is one of those cases that made me go "OK but that's cedeing control to google in a big way"

 

Opera, was understandably never competition because it never did something different that other browsers did other than an integrated vpn system... WAY late in it's life after adopting the chromium engine.

 

Firefox has always been a #2, an alternative to being controlled by Google, but then they kowtow to google things and it's like ... what is even the point?

 

These companies are too big for their britches and keep trying to get their users to do things they don't want to do:

- The incomplete H2 upgrade that resulted in pretty much nobody turning it on in their servers

- The forcing of HTTPS everywhere that was unnecessary, and spreading FUD about 

- The removal of FTP support that was mean-spirited and makes access to a lot of legacy systems impossible.

- Constant changes to require cloud accounts for absolutely awful privacy-destroying reasons

- Making the disgusting change to enable WASM by default, thus re-introducing every flaw we got rid of Java and Flash for. The malware/webminers took advantage of it, and it's a constant problem now.

- Changes to EMCAScript (JavaScript) that make it difficult to maintain legacy code.

- Attempting to depreciate cookies for alternatives

- Attempting to depreciate javascript API's to make it harder to block ads

 

Meanwhile:

- Still no h264, h265, VP8/VP9, AVC or AV1 support across devices

- Still no uniform AAC, Ogg Vorbis, MP3, or Opus support across devices

- Inconsistent support of animated PNG's, GIF, WebP, WebM

- No content-protection mechanisms, instead relying on "app"'ification of webapps.

 

You literately can not build a website that works on everything... the problem we've had since 1995. It's getting worse, not better.

 

Websites are getting super-bloated with garbage because of things like javascript and WASM being used to create the site rather than actually using the HTML5. At least when pages were server-side generated, the client was only sent the code they needed. Now it seems like every website needs you to download MB's of framework/libraries and if you turn javascript off, the site doesn't even load.

 

That is where we are at. We're basically overdue to abandon "the web" for something that isn't controlled by google, but people don't want to give up convenience.

 

[fUnDaMeNtAl_knobhead]

54 minutes ago, Franck said:

use Brave. Open source, secure, blockchain hops, no tracking plus paired with brave search (which is available for all major browser too) you get no search tracking at all unlike duckduckgo that still have some. Oh another small this is that it also block most popup, ads and you gain cryptocurrency by using it and you can tip your go to places in that cryptocurrency.

You can't really hide webrtc in any chromium based browsers except for a vpn but then whats the point of choosing a browser ? Also ublock origin is better than brave's ad blocker.

[da na]

4 hours ago, JuliusW said:

if im not using firefox, what should i use, since I dont like chrome?

 

Opera? Edge?

[da na]

I don't use Firefox as my main browser, I use Edge primarily, but there are certain things that run better on Firefox, and it's definitely more secure than Edge. I'd hate to see it go. 

[fUnDaMeNtAl_knobhead]

8 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

Opera? Edge?

Isn't that still chromium and unless you use the degoogled version there still is as far as i know google in it even if it is opensource.

[da na]

7 minutes ago, linux fanboy said:

Isn't that still chromium and unless you use the degoogled version there still is as far as i know google in it even if it is opensource.

Yeah, Edge technically is still Chromium.