Why Firefox Is Dead (The Many Mistakes Of Mozilla)

Firefox used to be one of the most popular web browsers. Now, barely anyone uses it. What happened to this once great free and open source browser?

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[Malik-]

firefox is not dead, i am currently using firefox,

[Strings]

I use Firefox (librewolf) because I don't like how big of the market Chrome has.

[centralintelligenceagency]

Don't care, still using firefox.

[galen__]

Long time Brave user here, but recently started using Firefox as my daily for the first time in over a decade. On my POS Intel MacBook, Firefox doesn’t stutter when scrolling or watching YouTube unlike Brave. I tried so many ways to fix this that I almost started compiling my own version of Brave to start debugging what was broken. Instead, I installed Firefox and it’s actually amazing 😅

[rawbeartoe_AK]

That is why I use LibreWolf, it is to Firefox what Brave is to Chromium.

[ufrxihv]

I think your criticisms of Mozilla the company are quite valid.

It's worth pointing out that Firefox is two things, it's the browser engine Gecko and an interface to it, which is Firefox proper. Similar to how Chrome is the Chromium engine + Google spyware.

Keeping the above in mind, when you say Firefox is a bad product, you probably mean that the whole application is bad? How is it bad? From a user perspective, it has the same UI as Chrome and similar extensions, better extensions even. As for additional features like password management, history and sync between devices, it's excellent. It's better then Brave for sure. It also has good security features.

Perhaps you had a bad experience with performance? For me, running Firefox vs Chromium I have similar loading times, with a few millisecond difference in favor of Chrome, but not always. The way I was running this test was probably not ideal, and it's just my computer so I do not want to make the false conclusion that Firefox and Chrome run the same on every machine, I just want to say that at least for some users, Firefox is very performant.

What I will say it that Firefox has had difficulties with Google and Microsoft products. Teams was broken for a while, Google docs don't work great. Is this a direct sabotage from Google specifically, YES! Microsoft said as much, Apple also had many complaints. Let's give Google the benefit of the doubt and assume their competitors are just bad mouthing them. Why then is every other service work well, except Google products on non Chromium engines. Every service on the web I've used was fixed to work with Firefox eventually. Yet Google products always have problems, non stop.

For a product, Firefox is a decent offer. I personally use something called Floorp, which is based on Firefox, with a UI I find very convenient.

As for the ideology part of things. Let's say we don't like Mozilla and want our own new browser as a community. How would be build that? Web browsers are extremely complicated, you don't just make one from scratch and expect it to do anything. People have tried and people have failed. It's way better to build off of something, and that something is Gecko. It's not a perfect engine by any means, but I believe that it's build with solid designs in mind.

You say Chromium is free and open source. You can delude yourself in thinking that, but in reality it's all a farce for Google to control the internet. They decide adblock is not allowed, Chromium wont allow adblock, it's that simple. Google decides some features of the internet are not OK, those features become extinct. Microsoft (one of the contributors of Chromium) will support them because they want to spy also. Brave is not going to save you. That's why the ideology has always been to have competition on the browser engine side.

[Gerdoch]

"I need some clickbait. Let's just say Firefox is dead!"

[DJSammy.]

April Fools was months ago! It has been said that Firefox is dead for years. It ain't going no were.

[lightningx]

Gotta disagree on Brave being "focused on just being a good browser". Have you seen the amount of crap they pile on top of it? Who needs a janky crypto wallet in their browser with ads on the homepage? Frankly out of the box Brave is just as unusable as Firefox if not more so.

I agree that Mozilla as a company should probably cut down and focus on software.

I hope somewhere down the line that Google does actually lock down chrome and break things, maybe it will trigger people into realising that this is another internet explorer and we need diversity in the browser engine space.

I don't know why you don't give a hardened Firefox fork a go, it will be slower than chrome granted, but it will respect your privacy and is actually open source. The "open source" nature of Brave is a bit dubious imo.

[greendblink]

Strongly disagree. My entire company uses Firefox and we do a lot of work with the government and every time I'm at a government engineering facility, everyone is using Firefox.

[TheSynrgy]

*watches video via firefox, daily browser on every device for the last 20 years.

[TheDrunkenAlcoholic]

firefox might be loosing users in the windows community, but its definitely not in the Linux community, that chart you mentioned is very much a indications of the user base mostly consumed by windows users. maybe talk statistics within the linux community and you will see it a lot more than 2%

[AaronStarkLinux]

Firefox is dead according to you. But it's pretty much alive.

[eliasjachniuk]

DT: "you can't live in imagination. I'm just a realist"
Also DT: "Maybe somebody with deep pockets that really deep pockets who loves Foss. We'll probably get some alternatives in the near future."
Bruh

[nviewers]

Man for a dead Web Browser it still ships as the default for almost every Distro I have ever installed.

[danielalvesldiniz]

hm, if "firefox has 2% of market share" is a reason not to support firefox, why support linux at all? when it comes to personal computers (not talking about servers here), is linux that much better than 2%?

[JeffreyBodenstein]

Still using Firefox - Plugins still are active development so it is not dead. Problem is safari and chrome are defaults in the OS wars and made to be a pain to change. Normal people just sigh and use that is there. But dead nope.

[m-danya-]

Supporting chromium is not a good idea considering Google's plans to slowly wipe all adblocks. Firefox on mobile maybe is slow, but it has extensions! An adblock on a phone!

[BloodblayeGaming]

Tried using Brave, did not like the design and the shitty cryptocurrency. I much prefer Firefox because its simple and familiar.

[bluecat-]

I use Firefox, ad blocking works better here than in Brave, I like the containers and the default privacy values ​​can be easily changed, and the performance is almost the same as Chrome