edited the heading of the question. I think most of us here are reasoning why more people are not using firefox (because it was the initial question), but none of that explains why it's actively losing marketshare.
I don't agree ideologically with Firefox management and am somewhat of a semi-conservative (and my previous posts might testify to that), I think Firefox browser is absolutely amazing! It's beautiful and it just feels good. It has awesome features like containers. It's better for privacy than any mainstream browser out there (even counting Brave here) and it has great integration between PC and Phone. It's open-source (unlike Chrome) and it supports a good chunk of extensions you would need.
This was about PC, but I believe even for Mobiles it looks great and it allows features like extensions (and I hear desktop extensions are coming to firefox android?), it's just a great ecosystem and it's available everywhere unlike most FOSS softwares.
So why is Firefox's market share dying?
I mean, I have a few ideas why it might be, maybe correct me I guess?
- Most people don't know how to use extensions well and how to use Firefox well. (Most of my friends in their 30's still live without ad blockers, so I don't think many are educated here)
- It's just not as fast as Chrome or Brave. I can't deny this, but despite of this, I find it's worthy.
- It's not the default.
- Many features which are Google specific aren't supported.
- Many websites are just not supporting firefox anymore (looking at you snapchat), but you would be right in saying this is the effect of Firefox losing it's market share not the cause (at least for now) and you would be right.
But what else?
I might take time (a lot of it) to get back at you, thanks for understanding.
occasionally I’ll find websites that don’t work 100% because they were coded primarily for chromium based browsers. FU Google
Entirely to my system, but for me startup of Firefox takes 40 seconds and up to a minute and the UI feels very slow and unresponsive. No other application behaves like that and I have no idea how to bugfix because Firefox seems not to create any usable logs or prints anything useful to the terminal it's started from.
Me too, but I have at least a dozen of firefox windows and hundreds of tabs combined, all of which are restored on starting it (because I want it this way, I could also just disable restoring them if I wanted).
Also don't forget that there are addons that make the browser waiting before continuing to start up, and with a good reason.
One such is uBlock Origin, which needs some time to load it's filters into memory, especially if you have enabled more than the defaults. If it wouldn't do that, it couldn't do filtering for the tabs that get loaded right at startup, and that would be quite bad.
On chrome, addons can't make the browser to wait with the first network requests (but also can't do efficient filtering anymore thanks to Manifest v3 changes, brought to you by your favorite advertising company), so chrome will inevitably be able to start up faster, but with a huge cost on your privacy, because uBO and such firewalls can't do their job properly.
Happens to me after fresh installation without any extensions or configuration.
Oh, that's weird. What is your configuration? (OS, hardware)
Kernel: Linux 6.4.10-arch1-1 x86_64
Firefox: 116.0.3
Openbox: 3.6.1
Nvidia: 535.98
Xorg: 21.1.8
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4790K CPU @ 4.00GHz
GPU: NVIDIA Corporation GP104 [GeForce GTX 1080]
16 gigabytes of RAM, barely used when testing
4K display, but should not be relevant here
Well, I was thinking of the RAM and swapping.. firefox is regularly slow for me (along with a lot of other programs!) because dumb windows starts swapping out everything at 22-25 GB usage out of 32. Apparently there's no such thing here as swappiness. Blood boiling.
But I don't have an idea now, sorry