I don't think the quality factor is the _most_ significant factor in the decline of Firefox's market share - though it might be a significant factor. Firefox simply lost out to Google doing all they can to push Chrome onto people. Its advertised on their pages, its pushed onto organizations using google tools, etc etc. Even if Chrome was marginally worse than Firefox, it would have a similar market share.

I disagree, though that was certainly a big factor, particularly in speeding up the pace of user loss.

In any case, it's probably not a healthy perspective for Mozilla or its community to just write this off as Firefox being the victim of a big ad campaign for another browser. Mozilla had real problems and missed opportunities, and that's where their focus rightfully should have been.

I'm ex-Netscape, and have been using the various Mozilla browsers primarily since around 2000. The browser has always worked fine in daily use.

I also use the developer tools, and they're also adequate for vanilla-js development.

So based on 2 decades of experience with Mozilla, I'd go with Chrome surpassing it in market share as more to do with promotion than Mozilla not being good enough.

I consider myself concerned enough about Google, and supportive enough of having Firefox as an alternative, that I feel somewhat guilty for giving up on switching to Firefox about once a year (at least). And yet I keep doing so, because for whatever inexplicable reason I prefer Chrome enough, or dislike Firefox enough, to keep switching back to the former.

While your comment prompts me to try again and figure out why this is the case exactly, Google's marketing is not the reason for me (and, unfortunately, others too).

If I had to guess, I'd say it usually boils down to a feeling of clunkiness and weird hogging of memory/processing, whether true or just perceived. I've read some threads that indicate this is a problem for Mac users in particular, but I don't know if this is actually true.

The Mac/Linux Firefox ports have never been good, their success was unearned and they were quickly replaced when a competitor came along.

Been using Linux Firefox for over a decade - five years on a toshiba Core 2 Duo laptop with 2 GB ram and a harddisk. Never had any performance complaints even though I sometimes opened >20 tabs.

Could you elaborate on the contents of those tabs? I often have more than 20 tabs open, but even in Chrome this can cause some issues. Nonetheless Firefox seemed worse at it, and perhaps this has to do with the nature of the tabs I have open?

As a university student back in the day I would perpetually have gmail, facebook, university email, youtube open - all js heavy websites. Others tabs were links from HN, wikipedia and/or pdf class notes. Even developed a website for my department at some point, all on firefox.

That's been my experience too, I've never actually noticed the performance problems people are talking in the years I've used it. I mean, I heard ones like 'It bogs down after 100 tabs', but that to me is an extreme edge case and more a personal problem than the browsers fault (bit tongue in cheek, I'm sure there are plenty of valid use cases).

Other developers on teams I've been on certainly pushed it hard (mostly for the dev tools, which I admit I went to Chrome for at times), so there was 'grassroots' support there if I've used that word correctly, whether that came from being hoodwinked by The Great Advertiser I don't know.

Lately, I've had a lot of performance issues with Firefox.

I can pop open Task Manager at random times and see Firefox in the 2GB range (this on an 8Gb machine running Slack, Chrome and PHPStorm at the same time, so it's a little cramped for RAM at the best) and I'm running 20-30 tabs. Even chopping down to a handful still keeps you well over 2Gb.

It won't seize completely the way it used to prior to multiprocess, but you get this weird situation where you get a spinner just switching tabs.

For many years, I defaulted to Firefox because of an extension I loved (FireFTP) which could never make the leap to WebExtensions. I can recall developing on Firefox then patching things to make IE6 happy. But on my home machine I switched to Vivaldi entirely.

Well closing tabs still keeps some tabs (I think 10) in memory for the reopen recent tabs feature. You can always go to about:memory and click clear memory and that should help - though I have never had to do that.

Browser user here. Chrome was way better. Everybody else copied its UI for a reason.

Exactly. People seem to forget the effect it has when Google promotes something on their search engine as well as Youtube (where they also forced you to get a Gmail-account eventually after taking over) etc.

> Mozilla's biggest mistake is simply that after Firefox 3, Firefox was significantly surpassed in quality for many years by at least Chrome, maybe also Safari. Luckily Mozilla has closed the quality gap and is shipping a great browser today, but that painful period is probably going to continue to haunt them for a long time.

There is a surprising amount of parallel here to how IE was surpassed in quality by Mozilla/Firefox after IE 6, and that painful period is still haunting IE/Edge.

Not saying it's exactly the same situation, but history rhymes.

I was glad they included DRM. I was one of those who switched to other browsers to watch Netflix etc.

Regardless of user count, adopting EME was a terrible move for Firefox. Does this mean that whatever terrible idea corporations push, Firefox must adopt? I'm glad that Firefox used to simply not implement things that were not a good idea.

And in the long term, I think that by legitimizing DRM like they have, they will still be at a disadvantage, because they've helped give the green light to this class of technologies, where Mozilla will always be at a disadvantage.

The biggest mistake that Mozilla is making is adopting the for-profit paradigm that their competitors have. Mozilla is not a business, and they don't need to convince people who don't care about web browsers or privacy to use their web browser. It would frankly be better if they just used Chrome. Mozilla's vain obsession with their brand and with being popular with people who don't care is frankly toxic to them.

We need to stop using the term marketshare when talking about Firefox, because that implies that there is a market, and there isn't. There might be differing levels of usage between browsers, but comparing usage of Firefox to Chrome or Safari is apples and oranges, because Mozilla's goal is not to open an app store and build a monopolistic for-profit closed platform, as Google and Apple's are. And I think that this pseudo-capitalist mentality is causing them to overcompensate in harmful ways.

Imagine if other staples of OSS started acting this way (some of them already do). Imagine if Ubuntu adopted a Microsoft-style forced updates model. I could honestly see them doing that.

And I bring this up in many of my comments, but I'm so glad that when Firefox first came out, they didn't worship at the feet of Microsoft and try to emulate IE6 the way that they worship at the feet of Google. I'm glad that a decade ago they didn't consider themselves failures because they couldn't win over the AOL users.

> Before Mozilla added DRM directly, it supported Flash, which almost everyone had installed, and that was DRM plus a myriad of stability and security nightmares.

Yes, exactly. I think DRM is conceptually incompatible with an open web browsing ecosystem, so of course it should require ugly hacks to pull off. If a company wants to introduce closed and hostile code to their users, they should be on their own. It is not our job to facilitate them doing bad things.

> Mozilla's biggest mistake is simply that after Firefox 3, Firefox was significantly surpassed in quality for many years by at least Chrome, maybe also Safari. Luckily Mozilla has closed the quality gap and is shipping a great browser today, but that painful period is probably going to continue to haunt them for a long time.

That's highly subjective and I strongly disagree. Chrome's UX is AWFUL. It is constantly doing things behind my back, and I can never rely on it for anything. And thanks to Chrome popularizing forced destructive updates, interfaces have become very unstable, and you cannot rely on a feature in your browser even being there when you wake up in the morning. It could just be silently erased.

Their app store is so terrible and filled with so many misleading low quality or outright hostile extensions it is barely useful. And even if they were better, I couldn't rely on them not dissapearing.

Soon, we won't have address bars and URLs will mostly be used for internal use. Ads will be rendered server-side and stitched into content. Our computers will be completely out of our control and run whatever code Google feels like. And Chrome will be an accomplice.

We are truly entering a dark age of technology.

>legitimizing DRM like they have

By this logic they had already long legitimized it through their grudging support for Flash. But don't let that stop you from trying to act like it's magically different.

>where Mozilla will always be at a disadvantage

They were always at a disadvantage in the fight against DRM. They never had any real control over it to begin with, and had to constantly be at a disadvantage while it was Flash-based. The fact that they adopted EME changes nothing at all, except that some people on the Internet took it personally because they wanted to.

>the way that they worship at the feet of Google

Suuuure they do. Just like they worshiped at the feet of Yahoo before.

>The biggest mistake that Mozilla is making is adopting the for-profit paradigm that their competitors have

Some hard evidence for this shift in their mentality would sure be nice. Simply owning a corporation doesn't mean you're suddenly driven by a profit motive. Nor does the fact that you may earn some revenue from things that some people love to hate.

>Mozilla is not a business, and they don't need to convince people who don't care about web browsers or privacy to use their web browser.

They have always been a business. A non-profit organization is legally a type of business. And even by non-legal definitions they are still a business. A business does not mean "a profit-driven venture".

Just like their mission has always been to make products for everyone, whether or not they happen to hold strong beliefs about privacy or DRM or even web browsers.

>We are truly entering a dark age of technology.

I've been hearing that since I was just a kid. I'm sorry that Mozilla didn't win your DRM war for you (and me), but that doesn't mean they've given up on all attempts to avert your "dark age" prophecy. But they're just a couple of thousand people. They won't be able to avert every disaster.