Previously: http://insurgencymod.blogspot.nl/2015/03/slashdot-firefox-sucks-slashdot-quotes.html

http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/05/22/1318215/ads-based-on-browsing-history-are-coming-to-all-firefox-users

Firefox 37 Released
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7182329&cid=49380931

Why doesn't Moz acknowledge the market share issue (Score:5, Interesting)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 31, 2015 @03:54PM (#49380931)
As a Firefox user, I'm very concerned when I see its market share dropping month after month.

These stats from US gov't websites [usa.gov] show Firefox's market share at 11%.

Other global stats [caniuse.com] paint a very similar picture.

Globally, I suspect that Firefox's share of the market is only about 10%. That's pretty abysmal, especially for a browser that was so popular once. It used to hold well over 30% of the market at one time.

Chrome for Android alone now has a greater share of the market than Firefox on all platforms does. Even IE 11, by itself, has about as many users as Firefox does in total.

Why aren't trends like these scaring the living hell out of Mozilla, as an organization?

Don't they realize that Firefox is the only reason they have any sort of influence over the web? Nobody really cares about any of their other projects, I hate to say.

Why don't we hear more from Mozilla about this market share issue? The number of Firefox users keeps dropping month after month, probably because so many Firefox users are unhappy about the awful UI changes, and about how its memory usage and performance continues to lag Chrome and even IE. I want to see real results, not just unrealistic benchmarks showing mythical improvements that I don't actually get to experience as I browse the web!

Nobody will care what Mozilla thinks if the number of Firefox users continues to drop each month. This trend won't continue forever. At some point there will be a negligible number of Firefox users around, and Mozilla will be powerless at that point. Google already has enough power as it is. In that situation, they'd have almost full control over the web. That scares me a lot, and it should scare Mozilla, too!

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Re:Why doesn't Moz acknowledge the market share is (Score:5, Insightful)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 31, 2015 @05:42PM (#49381779)

As a Firefox user, I'm very concerned when I see its market share dropping month after month.

These stats from US gov't websites [usa.gov] show Firefox's market share at 11%.

Other global stats [caniuse.com] paint a very similar picture.

Globally, I suspect that Firefox's share of the market is only about 10%. That's pretty abysmal, especially for a browser that was so popular once. It used to hold well over 30% of the market at one time.

Chrome for Android alone now has a greater share of the market than Firefox on all platforms does. Even IE 11, by itself, has about as many users as Firefox does in total.

Why aren't trends like these scaring the living hell out of Mozilla, as an organization?

Because the Firefox devs think their browser should pander to the tablet-interface loving users, with advanced features hidden and the GUI dumbed down - while a large part of their user base specifically wants an "advanced" browser with lots of addons which does NOT look like Chrome. So lots of users are leaving, and the Firefox devs in their ivory tower wonder why nobody likes their "vision" of the perfect browser and why the users do not "get" that the devs KNOW what's best.

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Re:Why doesn't Moz acknowledge the market share is (Score:5, Insightful)
by nmb3000 (741169) <nmb3000@that-google-mail-site.com> on Tuesday March 31, 2015 @06:51PM (#49382237) Homepage Journal

Why aren't trends like these scaring the living hell out of Mozilla, as an organization?

I think they probably do. At least, that's the reason I've always felt explained the Chromification of Firefox. That dumbing-down and relative takeover of the project direction by "UX designers" and "social media engineers" was allowed because the powers at the top felt that it was the only way they could try and recover some of the userbase lost to Chrome.

What they don't realize is that Firefox was created to "take back the web" [mozilla.cz] from the stagnating Internet Explorer 6. It was never about replacing IE as some overbearing dominant beast.

And Firefox succeeded! Development on IE was revitalized by Microsoft, Google released Chrome, and work was renewed on web standards (a whole 'nuther can of worms there, but a separate topic). How did Firefox accomplish this? By being fast, lean, developer-friendly, power-user friendly, absurdly extensible, and with simple and clear design goals.

If Mozilla had simply stuck to these principles, Firefox user share would still have gone down -- it was a certainty due to the additional options for reasonable browsers, mobile usage, Google bundling Chrome with everything they can get their hands on, etc. However, I think it would have gone down less, and maybe even a lot less if they'd remained the browser they were rather than turning into the little puppy following Chrome around.

People who left Firefox for Chrome because they liked Chrome's design better would still have left. But with ChromiFox, people who don't like Chrome are leaving too, because if you're stuck with either Chrome or Chrome Light, you may as well go for the real deal. Sure, there are projects like Ice Weasel and LucidFox which attempt to bring some of that back, but they're relatively niche and don't have the visibility or word-of-mouth needed to take off.

In short: Mozilla abandoned their primary design goals and principles, the same ones that made Firefox great, and the result is user loss, stagnation and, probably, eventual obscurity. As someone who used Firebird, this make me very sad.

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http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7182329&cid=49382613

Re:Why doesn't Moz acknowledge the market share is (Score:5, Funny)
by amicusNYCL (1538833) on Tuesday March 31, 2015 @07:46PM (#49382613)

You might be right, Firefox does seem to be experiencing a certain level of feature creep and bloat these days. Perhaps Mozilla should think about a new browser, one that is specifically designed to be fast and high-performance, while still adhering to the standards. They could call it Phoenix.

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http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7182329&cid=49381047

Too late (Score:3, Informative)
by ArchieBunker (132337) on Tuesday March 31, 2015 @04:12PM (#49381047) Homepage

I dumped Firefox when they changed to the hipster bullshit minimalist interface known as Australis. For a while Waterfox and Palemoon were doing a decent job. One day I decided to try Chrome to see how 60fps video looked on Youtube. Talk about night and day. Chrome is so much more responsive and doesn't use as many resources. Grab the usual essential addons (uBlock, Flashblock, etc) and you're good to go. No wonder Firefox has a dwindling user base. Instead of improving whats already there I get a video chat client and a paper airplane button to alert people on social media? Is this like email forwarding of the 90s?


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