If that was true, we'd expect to see forks like Pale Moon be _way_ more popular.
There's no reasonable chance that such a project could ever build a user base to register as even a blip on the market share graphs.
Some people avoid it precisely because of this doomed factor. Personally, I can't rely on nor trust that a project of that scale is able to navigate the security minefield that modern browsers are, and fix all the routinely discovered issues, let alone those that remain hidden and unreported. So choosing to use it is a conscious acknowledgement that you're sacrificing security for those other features, and very few people are willing to make that sacrifice.
The only way this can be true, but for Pale Moon and similar to have almost no userbase, is if the majority of people are leaving FF for lack of XUL support and going to Chrome/Safari, which makes little sense to me.
Mozilla has made a number of obvious mis-steps, but not only is there virtually no acknowledgement of the negative impact of these mis-steps, but they are often falsely lauded as successes, when they are obviously massive failures.
The user is then confronted with language typically associated with emotional abusers, such as "We know how much you love Firefox!". Googling the words "you love" against Mozilla's website turns up hundreds of bizarre examples.
Security: as soon as it starts it connects to e100.net.
Configurable: say what ? (configurability died with the XUL).
I only use it as a Chrome replacement, when webpages don't play nice in PaleMoon or Seamonkey.
I need to set up a PiHole to make it behave but a minicomputer with ethernet interfaces and a resonable price is hard to find.
I would disagree.
Many other changes together lead to this outcome.
Many by Mozilla, some not by Mozilla, some you could say Google actively abusing their power to sabotage them.
AFIK the amount of people stopped using Firefox because of XUL isn't to big, you could say a vocal minority.
The problem is compatibility with websites in aspects unrelated to XUL, mostly due to it being way to hard to be bug and feature compatible with chrome and even back then most web applications being written for chrome only.
Two major pain points which make people stop using Firefox would be 1) media support, which partially is the fault of stupid patent issues and partially because programs relaying too much on non standardized aspects 2) CORS, mainly due to Chrome last minute deciding not not implement the standard as standardized and forcing an exception into the standard to still be compliant.
The 2nd point is I think the most common reason I run into cases of web sides not working at all. While I very well do understand that Mozilla devs don't want to make their browser less secure, I don't think they have any other choice and should have done so years ago.
The 1st point is complicated as it involves patents to codecs and the pain of video codec drivers as well as companies like Slack or Teams refusing to even _try_ to work with Firefox when it comes to video calls even through it should work in most cases. This is a major problem and against all best web practices (also a lot of smaller companies which have way less resources have Firefox support for such use cases....).
But IMHO the web needs a cut, it's unacceptable that it's way easier to write a production ready new OS from scratch then a browser which is an essential tool.
The amount of Firefox's entire userbase isn't "to big" either, that is part of the problem. They can't put out a good web browser to give the silent majority something they want, they can't make in interesting web browser to give the vocal minority something they want.
Why are they building this web browser? Who is supposed to use it? The only argument I've heard is from people who want to support an open rendering engine, which has to be a smaller group than people who want support for weird extensions. And the Chrome-based engines are open already making the whole thing a bit moot.
The Mozilla corporation turns out not to have an interesting plan for Firefox. So cutting extension developers out from trying new things was a massive blunder that has basically doomed them to their current path - they don't know how to make an interetsing web browser and they've locked anyone else out from using their toys. Konqueror of all browsers spawned this massive ecosystem of successful spin-offs [0]. Mozilla failed to do anything useful.
Thank goodness the KDE devs were on their game, I suppose. Turns out in hindsight they were building the OSS flagship and foundation of the modern internet.
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Timeline...
The vocal minority is making the mood for the silent majority. Of course are there multiple reasons for the drop of Firefox, but public awareness is probably the strongest for this. If the laymen hear how much Firefox sucks now, instead of the praise of how secure and awesome it is, they will have no reason anymore to cope with the flaws.
Throwaway since I used to work at Mozilla:
You are 100% wrong in your analysis, metrics have shown over and over again that people didn't use XUL addons (even if you add the people disabling telemetry).
The real culprits to Mozilla's market share downtrend are:
1. Google started advertising Chrome on every single property they own (e.g. Google search) and made deals to pre-install Chrome on new computers. On mobile devices with Android it's even worse: if the default is good enough, why change?
2. During that time Firefox was playing catch-up: for a long time it was multiple times slower and crashier (and still is to a small extent) due to its older architecture. Meanwhile, Google with 2-3x more engineers on Chrome can deliver a better browser and pump out new w3c standards every month.
3. The Mozilla leadership reacted too late, too slow and with the failure of Firefox OS they've become risk averse and they'd rather become irrelevant than dead.
In the time before Chrome, Firefox market share grew in part because of how aggressively Google and the rest of the web advertised for them. However, that market share peaked and shrunk after Chrome was released; Google shifted _all_ of their advertising from Firefox for Chrome.
There is nothing wrong with having an irrelevant share of the market. Most software I use has a market share in the 0-2% range.
However, Mozilla screwed up quite badly because their response to being pushed out of the mainstream was to gut everything that would have made them an interesting niche player. Their niche could have been "OK, this isn't Chrome but you get an IRC client and a bunch of crazy capabilities that are fun at lan parties. We'll train the next generation of devs by giving them cool capabilities to experiment with!". Instead, the niche is the worse version of Chrome.
> metrics have shown over and over again that people didn't use XUL addons
Now the metrics show people don't use Firefox. Funny thing, life. I think it was a bad time to make a metric-driven decision.
I'd be happy with a Firefox that didn't have stupid UI mistakes like making it impossible to tell which tab is selected. Or which didn't lose all my tabs in a crash. Getting the basics right matters.
How do you know?
And yet, the anecedata here on HN suggests that you are probably surrounded of those people that did use them. Deciding that suddenly the longstanding demographic of Firefox users - tech people - are no longer relevant to the company strategy was a shitty move, and it drove them away.
I am aware there is some mucking around that I could perform to maybe get it working, but it probably involves changing some settings that I'm not sure I should.
Like what?
Mozilla accepted Google's framing on what a web browser should be, and ended up in a world where it only makes sense to use chromium-based browsers since they better implement that vision. Firefox was always going to be a niche browser once Google got serious, but at least it could have been an interesting niche. Possibly it could be compared to Emacs - some people just love it because it was that customisable but it doesn't get a lot of love in the mainstream.
Now it is just unimpressive. Which is remarkable given the wide range of impressive things it could do up to 2016 that it cannot do today.
[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/worldwid...