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
I’ve been using Firefox for probably 7 or 8 years as my daily browser for persona stuff. For work related things right now I use Edge since it is Mac/Windows compatible and that’s what we support in my workplace and my workplace has two main separate institutions we use resources from that also use Microsoft infrastructure.
My workplace on the medical institution side has disabled installation or use of Firefox due to DoH DNS since they use DNS for security. But they only do this for Windows devices in the domain, so Mac users can still use it on any of the networks they operate (I still use it on my work machine for anything personal).
I have tried others. Chrome is a slug for me as cross platform user. I loved Vivaldi, but it is very problematic with my work environment and some things just straight up do no work in that environment. Brave I use strictly for my financial personal stuff only.
I have never understand exactly what it is that people need/desire/require out of Firefox that they find missing but which a Chrome based browser is providing them. That said, I am not remotely as interested in spending all my days and time outside of work doing a whole lot of IT work. That’s not to say I’m not interested. It’s to say I am only interested to a small degree, but not to the degree which I would say the majority of Lemmy users browsing a Firefox sub would be interested in.
The ability to log into any computer on chrome and load my profile, which gives access to my bookmarks and passwords.
As someone who has 4 chrome profiles due to work remote managing 3 of them that I use daily, Firefox will never be able to handle that.
if Firefox had some sort of cloud sync that wasn’t oh hey you need to have multiple devices to make it work and just gave you a way to do it through the browser properly with even a paid option that would help.