The entire Android app was overhauled a while back, dropping functionally and decreasing stability, and has since been pretty much ignored even though it is still missing features and is still painfully clunky and prone to crash. The developer tools on the desktop app were ahead of Chrome but have stagnated, and they're slow to adopt new standards, but they somehow find time to add things no one asked for like Colorways and a VPN.
I want Firefox to get its traction back, but it's hard to cheer for Mozilla or blame Google when I see them twiddling their thumbs like this.
I don't think this will happen. I think they will just fade away. They are completely dysfunctional now.
Some say it is due to the whole woke movement, and it may be, but really, I see it as due to politics.
By that I mean, politics is nothing but divisive, and if you introduce it into a company, as a corporate culture, you're going to regret it.
IMO, work is where you leave religion, and politics(the other religion) at home.
And Mozilla is paying the price for letting it in.
yes, and forcing out there reasonable CEO for a purity test, long ago.. HELO BRAVE
Eich is not unproblematic, of course (in addition to the anti-gay marriage issue, there is/was also issues of 'covid-scepticism'[1]). And the cryptocurrency stuff in Brave is uninteresting to me (fortunately it's opt-IN though and not opt-out).
And I still think, on the desktop at least, Firefox still has advantages over Brave (and even more so over other Chromium-based offerings).
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230104010454/https://www.nytim...
And yet it's the only mainstream browser for android that support, natively, ad-blocking. Using chrome on mobile is a joke.
All of that didn't just happen because of advertising. It happened become Chrome offered very compelling benefits over its competitors.
For many users, Chrome was faster, lighter, more secure, and offered a better all-around user experience than its competitors did. Even now, that's still largely the case.
Advertising alone can't make that happen.
From a sysadmin perspective, Firefox having its own cert store instead of relying on system store was an extra hurdle for corp IT people.
Then there is the fact that Chrome goes out of its way to integrate with Google's other properties which they market to corporations to replace Office.
So I'm saying, I believe FF would have done better if they tried harder to integrate with corporate environments without compromising on their capability and independence. Name recognition is a big thing.
Google for years installed Chrome using installers of other applications, like malware. I am talking of 10 years ago, that was common practice for google, on windows. So a lot of users found themselves using Chrome without even knowing they were using chrome.
I'm in this camp. I had used Firefox for 20 years, literally since it was just a zip file called Pheonix/Firebird.
I switched to a Chromium-based browser kicking and screaming, but it came down mostly to speed for me, and some website incompatibility (which I can't blame wholly on Firefox).
I'd obviously tried Chrome since day 1, and was impressed and checked back in from time to time, until I decided it was time to finally switch over. I still support Mozilla and Firefox and don't want to see less competition in browser engine space. As long as Google continues to fund it (mostly out of anti-competitive concerns I'd imagine) I don't see them going anywhere.
Things like releasing features for firefox users first, because devs like firefox and it had better devtools, would have kept the firefox userbase afloat.
Instead the mozilla devtools have been allowed to fall behind, web apps are no longer developed firefox-first, and mozilla lost it's opportunity.
The irony here is that the billion dollar corporation (Google is who OP is referring to) actually funds Firefox's development. We looked into this in one of our recent podcast episodes called "How Does Mozilla Make Money?": https://pnc.st/s/kopec-explains-software/bdecab32/how-does-m...