<story><title>Firefox marketshare revisited</title><url>https://andreasgal.com/2017/07/19/firefox-marketshare-revisited/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nu5500</author><text>From my experience, the reasons why people switched to Chrome have been because it renders pages much smoother and everything generally looks better. These were the original reasons that they moved over to Firefox from IE as well. I personally helped a number of relatives and friends make these switches.&lt;p&gt;Late last year, after many years on Chrome, I gave Firefox another serious look and I have switched back. Firefox has improved tremendously and I would prefer to give my support to Mozilla from a philosophical standpoint (the Chrome team does a lot of good work with regards to pushing forward the features of the web and its security but at the end of the day, Chrome is still a strategic piece of Google&amp;#x27;s business machine and not a philanthropic effort)&lt;p&gt;While I have my reasons for using Firefox, I don&amp;#x27;t see a compelling reason for most users already happy with Chrome to switch back. The average web user that I know doesn&amp;#x27;t really understand where web browsers come from and isn&amp;#x27;t very interested in learning about it. They just care whether the browser runs better or worse for the tasks that they do. (Except many still hate IE and will not even try Edge because the logo looks similar enough - that&amp;#x27;s a branding issue that Microsoft has)&lt;p&gt;What irritates me now are more and more sites that only work with Chrome (where they literally throw up a page that blocks access and says go download Chrome). These are sites that are not Google properties so I&amp;#x27;m not blaming Google for this bad behavior, but again, I would like to support the diverse browser landscape that has existed to this point. I guess my main complaint to Google is to please stop popping up dialogs about Chrome across all of your properties. The browser I&amp;#x27;m using works perfectly fine thank you, and you should be supporting the open web with your products anyway.</text></item><item><author>epoch1970</author><text>I think the &amp;quot;Why?&amp;quot; section&amp;#x27;s conclusions are off the mark. It basically blames Google&amp;#x27;s advertising of Chrome for Firefox&amp;#x27;s decline, and even goes so far as to say &amp;quot;Firefox’s decline is not an engineering problem.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;While I don&amp;#x27;t doubt that Google&amp;#x27;s advertising of Chrome has drawn away some Firefox users, I also don&amp;#x27;t think that we can ignore or deny the many controversial changes to Firefox that have likely had an impact, too.&lt;p&gt;Just off of the top of my head I can think of things like:&lt;p&gt;* Frequent breakage of extensions when first switching to the more rapid release schedule.&lt;p&gt;* Frequent and disruptive UI changes that didn&amp;#x27;t bring users much benefit, such as Australis.&lt;p&gt;* Removing the ability to easily disable JavaScript.&lt;p&gt;* Taking many years to get multiprocess support working. (Not that I&amp;#x27;m suggesting they should have rushed it, of course.)&lt;p&gt;* The inclusion of Pocket and Hello.&lt;p&gt;* Sponsored tiles.&lt;p&gt;* Users who report experiencing poor performance and high memory usage.&lt;p&gt;* Disruption caused by requiring signed extensions.&lt;p&gt;* The removal of support for OSes or OS releases that are moderately older, but still do have active users.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m sure there are others that I&amp;#x27;m forgetting.&lt;p&gt;Even if they seem minor, those are the kinds of things that can cause users to switch away from Firefox, or not even start using it in the first place. Losing a small number of users for a variety of minor reasons can add up very quickly, as well. Furthermore, those issues don&amp;#x27;t really have anything to do with Google or Chrome.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>snthd</author><text>For me the compelling features of Firefox over chrome are&lt;p&gt;* better search&amp;#x2F;address bar behaviour (particularly in finding relevant bookmarks. Chrome wants to turn everything into a Google search)&lt;p&gt;* Integration with Firefox on android (which I need because it supports ad-blocking extensions)</text></comment>
<story><title>Firefox marketshare revisited</title><url>https://andreasgal.com/2017/07/19/firefox-marketshare-revisited/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nu5500</author><text>From my experience, the reasons why people switched to Chrome have been because it renders pages much smoother and everything generally looks better. These were the original reasons that they moved over to Firefox from IE as well. I personally helped a number of relatives and friends make these switches.&lt;p&gt;Late last year, after many years on Chrome, I gave Firefox another serious look and I have switched back. Firefox has improved tremendously and I would prefer to give my support to Mozilla from a philosophical standpoint (the Chrome team does a lot of good work with regards to pushing forward the features of the web and its security but at the end of the day, Chrome is still a strategic piece of Google&amp;#x27;s business machine and not a philanthropic effort)&lt;p&gt;While I have my reasons for using Firefox, I don&amp;#x27;t see a compelling reason for most users already happy with Chrome to switch back. The average web user that I know doesn&amp;#x27;t really understand where web browsers come from and isn&amp;#x27;t very interested in learning about it. They just care whether the browser runs better or worse for the tasks that they do. (Except many still hate IE and will not even try Edge because the logo looks similar enough - that&amp;#x27;s a branding issue that Microsoft has)&lt;p&gt;What irritates me now are more and more sites that only work with Chrome (where they literally throw up a page that blocks access and says go download Chrome). These are sites that are not Google properties so I&amp;#x27;m not blaming Google for this bad behavior, but again, I would like to support the diverse browser landscape that has existed to this point. I guess my main complaint to Google is to please stop popping up dialogs about Chrome across all of your properties. The browser I&amp;#x27;m using works perfectly fine thank you, and you should be supporting the open web with your products anyway.</text></item><item><author>epoch1970</author><text>I think the &amp;quot;Why?&amp;quot; section&amp;#x27;s conclusions are off the mark. It basically blames Google&amp;#x27;s advertising of Chrome for Firefox&amp;#x27;s decline, and even goes so far as to say &amp;quot;Firefox’s decline is not an engineering problem.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;While I don&amp;#x27;t doubt that Google&amp;#x27;s advertising of Chrome has drawn away some Firefox users, I also don&amp;#x27;t think that we can ignore or deny the many controversial changes to Firefox that have likely had an impact, too.&lt;p&gt;Just off of the top of my head I can think of things like:&lt;p&gt;* Frequent breakage of extensions when first switching to the more rapid release schedule.&lt;p&gt;* Frequent and disruptive UI changes that didn&amp;#x27;t bring users much benefit, such as Australis.&lt;p&gt;* Removing the ability to easily disable JavaScript.&lt;p&gt;* Taking many years to get multiprocess support working. (Not that I&amp;#x27;m suggesting they should have rushed it, of course.)&lt;p&gt;* The inclusion of Pocket and Hello.&lt;p&gt;* Sponsored tiles.&lt;p&gt;* Users who report experiencing poor performance and high memory usage.&lt;p&gt;* Disruption caused by requiring signed extensions.&lt;p&gt;* The removal of support for OSes or OS releases that are moderately older, but still do have active users.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m sure there are others that I&amp;#x27;m forgetting.&lt;p&gt;Even if they seem minor, those are the kinds of things that can cause users to switch away from Firefox, or not even start using it in the first place. Losing a small number of users for a variety of minor reasons can add up very quickly, as well. Furthermore, those issues don&amp;#x27;t really have anything to do with Google or Chrome.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>unethical_ban</author><text>&amp;gt;These aren&amp;#x27;t Google properties so I&amp;#x27;m not blaming them for this bad behavior,&lt;p&gt;No, they should very much be blamed for it! Proper web design should follow cross-platform standards and implementations. They are part of the problem if they force users to choose one or the other.</text></comment>