Firefox users down 50 million since 2018

[Chris Pratt]

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

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.

 

I just can't even with this. So much misinformation, paranoia, and just plain wrongheaded thinking to even unpack. The web of today is so much better than any time before, it's beyond even question, and having a mostly apples to apples experience in the actual rendering and behavior across browsers, platforms, and form factors is a gift beyond measure. There's no arguing with insanity, though.

[RejZoR]

I frankly don't understand why people hate Firefox so much and why they dump it so much. Sure, they've done some seriously dumb shit in the past and recently too, but even despite all those cockups, it's still the best browser because at the end of the day it's still the only browser where you actually have choice and control over features.

 

It was passable before I made Firefox Tweaker, but you had to dig through about:config by hand, but after it's easily best browser hands down as you can quickly select and apply bunch of tweaks at once through relatively nice GUI. It's also the only browser that has actually functioning sync on all platforms, so if you're on iOS particularly, Firefox is the only option. I mean, sure Chrome and Edge have functioning sync too, but those browsers are just useless locked down crap and Chrome is just straight up data hoarding spyware at this point.

[Guest willies leg]

I use and love firefox, not sure what all the hubbub is about. Works fine for me.

[flibberdipper]

Not surprising to be honest. I used Firefox from probably 2016 to 2019 after switching to it from Chrome, only to go back to Chrome out of boredom, just to realize that it was notably faster while somehow using the same amount of RAM with more extensions, and in the case of my laptop quite a bit better battery life (which is pretty important since it's got shit battery life to begin with).

 

I still keep it around on my laptop for uh... Legal research purposes... But man oh man does that new Proton UI blow ass. Hopefully they keep the flag around to revert to the old UI (or just scrap the new one), otherwise I don't think it'll even get to stay on my laptop.

[BuckGup]

It's because everyone is jumping ship to brave

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, Chris Pratt said:

I just can't even with this. So much misinformation, paranoia, and just plain wrongheaded thinking to even unpack. The web of today is so much better than any time before, it's beyond even question, and having a mostly apples to apples experience in the actual rendering and behavior across browsers, platforms, and form factors is a gift beyond measure. There's no arguing with insanity, though.

 

The web of today is so much worse because the company driving it, GOOGLE, is making features to destroy your privacy and sell it to advertisers.

 

Ad block would not be a thing if Google hadn't bought doubleclick and all the invasive nonsense. Or do you sincenerely believe google analytics was for the end-user's experience? Because it was for profiling websites to sell ads on.

[Curufinwe_wins]

10 minutes ago, Kisai said:

 

The web of today is so much worse because the company driving it, GOOGLE, is making features to destroy your privacy and sell it to advertisers.

 

Ad block would not be a thing if Google hadn't bought doubleclick and all the invasive nonsense. Or do you sincenerely believe google analytics was for the end-user's experience? Because it was for profiling websites to sell ads on.

Trying to pretend that adblock started with google is disingenuous and falsifiable. Google bought doubleclick in 2008, ABP as we know it today came out 6 years earlier, for firefox as it happens.

 

In fact, that was one of the reasons I first moved to FF was the much earlier adblock support back in the mid to late 2000s, and the arrival of similar quality adblockers on chrome was actually one of the final reasons I left FF back in the day (FF changes and arbitrarily breaking things randomly over the years has been truly a nightmare).

 

Plus these days Google doesn't even have 30% US market share in ads... 30%.... less than it's had in over a decade, but continue to blame google as being the one ruling the world there. It has been continuously decreasing in market share quite literally since that purchase.

 

Ads as non-stop malware has dramatically reduced, which is great.

[Stahlmann]

6 hours ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

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

The chromium based edge is the best one imo. It has a lot of the privacy features of FF and the speed and compatibility of chrome. With edge even being the W10 standard i don't see any reason to go and download FF or Chrome.

 

6 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.

I've had over a dozen monitors now and none of them ever even had 1 dead pixel from what i remember. It seems you got really unluck there. But i've heard of quite a few QC problems with Samsung's Odyssey monitors.

[wall03]

Makes sense. I moved to Edge mainly because Firefox can't keep up with what I want. Mozilla needs to step up its game.

[Zodiark1593]

4 hours ago, Blademaster91 said:

 

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.

 

Unlike what Microsoft attempted to do with IE, this would be a potential example of a Natural Monopoly, where it occurs when all other competitors are no longer financially viable or are objectively worse. IE, the competition is killed off by virtue of the product simply being superior to the competition. 
 

If a monopoly occurs naturally, there’s nothing to sue or prosecute, as no laws have been broken. It’s only a legal problem if the owner actively abuses the monopoly. 

[Kisai]

34 minutes ago, Curufinwe_wins said:

Trying to pretend that adblock started with google is disingenuous and falsifiable. Google bought doubleclick in 2008, ABP as we know it today came out 6 years earlier, for firefox as it happens.

 

The original adblock simply looked for ad units of fixed sizes and then changed the CSS elements to prevent their loading using greasemonkey. Prior to google buying doubleclick, it was rolling out text ads which could not be blocked by adblock that way. Look at how long that lasted. That came out in 2000.

 

When google bought doubleclick, suddenly we were crushed by all these garbage javascript+flash ads. Which have now been replaced by javascript WASM trash.

 

I've been on the other side since like mid 2000's. The web back then was "better" because websites were static or driven by backend processes that produced static pages that didn't take 30 MB per load. They were measured in KB's and took 200ms to load. Now you can't visit any website without waiting, sometimes minutes, for all the ads, widgets, video boxes, and whatever miserable user experience tracking widgets the site or the advertisers chained into it.

 

Ads, literately ruined the web, and all these changes in the web browser that google put into chrome, was to keep their advantage as long as possible.

 

Quote

In fact, that was one of the reasons I first moved to FF was the much earlier adblock support back in the mid to late 2000s, and the arrival of similar quality adblockers on chrome was actually one of the final reasons I left FF back in the day (FF changes and arbitrarily breaking things randomly over the years has been truly a nightmare).

 

Plus these days Google doesn't even have 30% US market share in ads... 30%.... less than it's had in over a decade, but continue to blame google as being the one ruling the world there. It has been continuously decreasing in market share quite literally since that purchase.

 

Ads as non-stop malware has dramatically reduced, which is great.

Ads have rarely been malware, in them itself. Java, Flash, and WASM are what turns them into malware, cryptocoin miners, and so forth. Tracking these things down easily wastes hours to days of engineers time, and we would all be better off if websites in-housed their ad systems to only be image+anchor tag like they used to be in 2004 rather than the multi-MB mess it is now with frameworks for video players and anti-adblocking tech thrown in.

 

It takes... oh 4MB just to load the forum front page and 900ms before you can interact with it, and was still loading things 14 seconds later.

 

Load up any site with multiple third party ad units, and the objects being loaded will just never end.

Notice that blob of activity at the 6 second mark. Yes the page loaded in 2 seconds, but stuff on the page continued to be loaded and change as late as 130 seconds later. 

 

You know what would improve the web substantially? Blocking access to third party domains without a user-initiated action.

 

 

[Kilrah]

Saying "ads are because of Google" is a fallacy, they were going to come regardless even if it was through them or someone else. Google bought doubleclick and developed on that, but had they not doubleclick and others would have evolved and ended up consolidating by merging with/buying out each other the same way anyway because the obvious, it makes money.

[NotTheFirstDaniel]

I personally stopped using Firefox because it felt a lot slower back in the day (early 2010s), and Chrome felt fresh. This was before Google completely dominated the web scene though.

 

I was tempted to try it again with Quantum, but I heard that they really didn't fix Firefox's power usage, and I was mainly on a laptop at that time, so I just stuck with classic EdgeHTML Edge, which was slower than Chrome (due to Google playing bad though, not to discredit EdgeHTML), but gave better battery life and energy usage stats. And I've been with Edge ever since, even now that it's switched to Chromium, because at the end of the day, I'm more in line with the Microsoft ecosystem than the Google one, so a browser that I can log into multiple Microsoft Accounts with is better for me.

 

But what's after Firefox? Safari? I mean, I think Apple could actually have a chance at re-entering the Windows scene by pushing a privacy focused web browser, but there's no monetary incentive to do that, so there's no point for them. So then I guess chromium controlled everything by 2030?

[Chris Pratt]

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

 

The web of today is so much worse because the company driving it, GOOGLE, is making features to destroy your privacy and sell it to advertisers.

 

Ad block would not be a thing if Google hadn't bought doubleclick and all the invasive nonsense. Or do you sincenerely believe google analytics was for the end-user's experience? Because it was for profiling websites to sell ads on.

Things can have more than one purpose. Is GA completely altruistic? Of course not. Google is a company with shareholders and they like money, like all companies do. However, my organization and countless many others rely on GA to get insights into their visitors and metrics, that we ultimately use to provide a better user experience and more relevant offerings to our customers and users in general. The data collected does serve a public good, and you're just ridiculously jaded and blinded by your own paranoia and nonsensical thinking if you don't see that.

 

OMG! There's ads? On the Internet?! Clutch my pearls....

 

Get over yourself. Ads are shoved in your face virtually all day, in everything you do, online or offline. Welcome to planet Earth. Do you have to like it? No. But, that's life. I'd much rather get paid to stay at home and watch cartoons, but darn if I don't have to get up every day and go to a job, where I have to actually expend energy and effort for hours on end. God life just sucks so much doesn't it?

 

Finally, I'm am so stinking sick and tired of people tilting at windmills with the whole privacy this and that nonsense. Here's a quick life lesson for you: you have no privacy. You never did. If you want privacy, unplug and go live in a cabin in the woods, eating only what you can grow or hunt. Otherwise, STFU.

[Fasterthannothing]

The problem is that now that the Edge browser uses the chromium engine much of Microsoft's software which is now in the cloud works so much better on chromium based browsers. In our company we push everyone to use Chrome because it just works compared to Firefox which isn't terrible compatibly wise but still not amazing and then there is Safari and other browsers which are just junk. I personally use Firefox occasionally but mainly use Brave which is basically Chrome with more privacy.

[Franck]

35 minutes ago, Kisai said:

 

The original adblock simply looked for ad units of fixed sizes and then changed the CSS elements to prevent their loading using greasemonkey. Prior to google buying doubleclick, it was rolling out text ads which could not be blocked by adblock that way. Look at how long that lasted. That came out in 2000.

 

When google bought doubleclick, suddenly we were crushed by all these garbage javascript+flash ads. Which have now been replaced by javascript WASM trash.

 

I've been on the other side since like mid 2000's. The web back then was "better" because websites were static or driven by backend processes that produced static pages that didn't take 30 MB per load. They were measured in KB's and took 200ms to load. Now you can't visit any website without waiting, sometimes minutes, for all the ads, widgets, video boxes, and whatever miserable user experience tracking widgets the site or the advertisers chained into it.

 

Ads, literately ruined the web, and all these changes in the web browser that google put into chrome, was to keep their advantage as long as possible.

 

Ads have rarely been malware, in them itself. Java, Flash, and WASM are what turns them into malware, cryptocoin miners, and so forth. Tracking these things down easily wastes hours to days of engineers time, and we would all be better off if websites in-housed their ad systems to only be image+anchor tag like they used to be in 2004 rather than the multi-MB mess it is now with frameworks for video players and anti-adblocking tech thrown in.

 

It takes... oh 4MB just to load the forum front page and 900ms before you can interact with it, and was still loading things 14 seconds later.

 

Load up any site with multiple third party ad units, and the objects being loaded will just never end.

Notice that blob of activity at the 6 second mark. Yes the page loaded in 2 seconds, but stuff on the page continued to be loaded and change as late as 130 seconds later. 

 

You know what would improve the web substantially? Blocking access to third party domains without a user-initiated action.

 

 

using Brave there third party domain are right away cut off. Last action end at 1.61 seconds and also data transfer is therefore cut a little bit at 1.5 transfer / 2.8 resources. There must be some tools on Chrome that block all these things too.

[Imapancake15]

8 hours ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

Summary

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

 

Quotes

 

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)

I gave up on FF and ended up moving to brave back in 2019 or 2020

 

[Franck]

2 minutes ago, Imapancake15 said:

I gave up on FF and ended up moving to brave back in 2019 or 2020

 

pretty much the same. How much bandwidth saved so far in ads ? i'm at 23.7 gb at home and 800k+ tracker blocked

[Imapancake15]

6 minutes ago, Franck said:

pretty much the same. How much bandwidth saved so far in ads ? i'm at 23.7 gb at home and 800k+ tracker blocked

It says 13.7 gb bandwidth saved

 

[Mark Kaine]

8 hours ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

acceptance by many of a Google controlled internet,

I mean… i bet most people using firefox still end up using google search? Everyone i know, including myself, does so at least. So its not going to do much against googles dominance i wager.

 

while firefox is an alternative for sure (i use it on my laptop which is 99% offline admittedly) and it does work well enough, if i use it, i still have the feeling like its really just a "middleman" and lacking some features, compared to the "original".

 

 

Just saying, as long people use google services, choice of browser is more or less irrelevant imo.

 

[Curufinwe_wins]

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

 

The original adblock simply looked for ad units of fixed sizes and then changed the CSS elements to prevent their loading using greasemonkey. Prior to google buying doubleclick, it was rolling out text ads which could not be blocked by adblock that way. Look at how long that lasted. That came out in 2000.

 

When google bought doubleclick, suddenly we were crushed by all these garbage javascript+flash ads. Which have now been replaced by javascript WASM trash.

 

I've been on the other side since like mid 2000's. The web back then was "better" because websites were static or driven by backend processes that produced static pages that didn't take 30 MB per load. They were measured in KB's and took 200ms to load. Now you can't visit any website without waiting, sometimes minutes, for all the ads, widgets, video boxes, and whatever miserable user experience tracking widgets the site or the advertisers chained into it.

 

Ads, literately ruined the web, and all these changes in the web browser that google put into chrome, was to keep their advantage as long as possible.

 

Ads have rarely been malware, in them itself. Java, Flash, and WASM are what turns them into malware, cryptocoin miners, and so forth. Tracking these things down easily wastes hours to days of engineers time, and we would all be better off if websites in-housed their ad systems to only be image+anchor tag like they used to be in 2004 rather than the multi-MB mess it is now with frameworks for video players and anti-adblocking tech thrown in.

 

It takes... oh 4MB just to load the forum front page and 900ms before you can interact with it, and was still loading things 14 seconds later.

 

Load up any site with multiple third party ad units, and the objects being loaded will just never end.

Notice that blob of activity at the 6 second mark. Yes the page loaded in 2 seconds, but stuff on the page continued to be loaded and change as late as 130 seconds later. 

 

You know what would improve the web substantially? Blocking access to third party domains without a user-initiated action.

 

 

Java/flash based ads and applets came out and were dominant long long before google got to it. I was playing RS in 2002, and plenty of other 'addicting games' (or math4kids) style pages existed and were ad/malware ridden years before google took over. Now if you mean ads on sites that normal people visited, in an era of barely functional webpages by businesses that were incompetent, sure I guess it's fair to say that the reach expanded substantially under google, but the problem existed long before. Your average gradeschooler ran into it in 2003 onwards, so I don't think using the demarcation of google buying doubleclick in '08 is appropriate.

 

The comments on slowass pages and the bloat that follows is totally fair though. I just don't think claiming it is 'just' or even necessarily mostly 'google's fault' is accurate.

[BondiBlue]

I don't plan to stop using Firefox. I've been using it for a long time now, but I switched to Chrome when it was released. I still happily run both browsers on my computers. 

[Mark Kaine]

2 minutes ago, Curufinwe_wins said:

The comments on slowass pages and the bloat that follows is totally fair though. I just don't think claiming it is 'just' or even necessarily mostly 'google's fault' is accurate.

What gets me is how slow most "company pages" aka manufacturers websites load compared to more 'normal' sites…

 

 

[DeScruff]

Am I the only person in the world who didn't really notice the UI redesign?
Like okay yeah things look a bit different. But I fail to understand how it take more then 5 seconds to get used to. Unless you did some super heavy customization that literally any sort of change would cause it to break, but at that point who's fault is it really?

- A BIT different! The Tabs are no longer connected to the URL bar! the Horror!!!! The Icons... they are rounded!  Things are so spaced out! (You mean the removable "Flexible space" parts if you go into customize toolbar?)

[Taf the Ghost]

Though related, what really did Mozilla in was when they didn't support Brendan Eich. It meant the rest of the leadership was weak and wasn't strong enough to tackle tough decisions. The results were pretty straight forward. The entire development of most of their major projects went everywhere. FF got super bloated and slow. Then, they kept breaking things. 

 

At this point, I use a host of browsers for different things. Typing this on Opera (though been thinking of moving off it for a while). I've got Vivaldi, Brave and Iron (striped down Chrome) for different purposes. Have PaleMoon on a few systems. (This thread reminded me to update a few things, lol) There's actually a lot of options. Oh, I do have FF for a single website, so I guess I'm still using it.

 

But, at the end, FF's biggest problem became FF. There was a world of Add-ons they kept busting. "New Update" shouldn't mean "damn it, why did my add-on break?". Every FF update really became a gacha roll of suddenly losing utility.