A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 1, 2023 4:00 UTC (Sat) by notriddle (subscriber, #130608)
In reply to: A quarter century of Mozilla by Cyberax
Parent article: A quarter century of Mozilla

Measurable?

As near as I can tell, Firefox has been on a basically unaltered downward trend, leveling off around 1-5% (depending on whether you count mobile?)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f5...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/StatC...

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 3, 2023 5:55 UTC (Mon) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404) [Link]

Yeah, but harder to gather, and more interesting to me, is the raw totals over the years. They're are likely a lot more people on the web than in the early 2000s.. particularly if you count mobile.

Because if they have *enough users, and *enough contributors - we'll be fine. Web standards don't change like they used to, so the waning influence they have over that probably won't impact usability like it used to (e.g. "please download this ActiveX plugin.." ;) )

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 3, 2023 7:24 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (10 responses)

Yeah, it's measurable. The pattern is:
(1). Everything's fine.
(2). New redesign goes live in the main channel.
(3). The marketshare spikes for a couple of months.
(4). The marketshare falls _below_ the initial marketshare in point (1) by a significant margin.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 3, 2023 13:44 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (9 responses)

> (1). Everything's fine.

Point of correction -- Unless you consider "steady loss of market share" fine, everything wasn't "fine".

> (4). The marketshare falls _below_ the initial marketshare in point (1) by a significant margin.

...This completely ignores what the competition was up to, and its effects on Firefox.

For example, the corporate world shifting en-masse from IE to Chrome (and better locking down desktops to make FF non-installable), the rise of Mobile (and Chrome-first), and so forth. And unlike MSIE, Chrome was perfectly usable on a day-to-day basis, so why not use the same thing at home as well as at work, with all your bookmarks etc synchronized with the gmail account you're already signed into anyway?

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 3, 2023 15:51 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (8 responses)

> ...This completely ignores what the competition was up to, and its effects on Firefox.

This has happened multiple times, including the fairly recent UI changes that happened long after the rise of Chrome.

Also, mobile is a case in point. Firefox was a pretty good browser on Android, with plugin support and a better UI than mobile Chrome. Guess what Mozilla did to address this oversight?

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 4, 2023 13:03 UTC (Tue) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link] (2 responses)

I've used Firefox Android every day for years. And, I very much disagree with your comment. Firefox Android is a LOT better now than it was in the past.

It's faster, and it has stopped crashing periodically. And the UI has been progressively improving as well (imo). I feel like Firefox/Gecko is an actually viable alternative browser for Android, in a way it was not when I was first using it.

I am occasionally disappointed that about:config doesn't exist in the stable branch (which is what I use), but not bothered enough to switch to the beta or nightly releases.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 4, 2023 13:15 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

> It's faster, and it has stopped crashing periodically. And the UI has been progressively improving as well (imo). I feel like Firefox/Gecko is an actually viable alternative browser for Android, in a way it was not when I was first using it.

This mirrors my experience, and I've been using Android Firefox since before it was called Firefox.

Unfortunately Chrome is deeply embedded into Android (==System Webview) so Firefox doesn't get used as much as I'd prefer.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 14, 2023 18:14 UTC (Fri) by asammoud (guest, #151640) [Link]

I have to agree with this .. I only use Firefox on Android CalyxOS. I have zero issues with it.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 4, 2023 23:56 UTC (Tue) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

The android firefox ui churn is tedious, and their constraining of addons to a tiny set is infuriating, but the bar is so low that it's still much better than the default. But I won't be surprised if the limited set of addons die off for various reasons of churn in the APIs, firefox, and the addon ecosystem.

Because of the sheer amount of work put in addon support to mobile chromium, it's not going to happen in any of the chromium -alikes, sadly.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 11, 2023 8:45 UTC (Tue) by gabrielesvelto (guest, #83884) [Link] (3 responses)

> Also, mobile is a case in point. Firefox was a pretty good browser on Android, with plugin support and a better UI than mobile Chrome. Guess what Mozilla did to address this oversight?

Fenix (aka new Firefox for Android) has picked up a lot more market share than Fennec (aka old Firefox for Android) ever had. So mobile shows the opposite trend you're claiming, with constant growth over the years. In addition to this the modules Fenix is built from (GeckoView & friends) are now used by several other mobile applications outside of Mozilla's perimeter: https://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/details/geckovie...

Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla though I haven't always worked on Firefox

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 11, 2023 23:55 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

Sure. And do you know what would have been even better? Not neutering mobile Firefox in the first place. I understand not porting certain features to mobile, but Mozilla went ahead and _removed_ functionality for no discernible reason.

Also, I've just tried Fenix and there's nothing in my Play Store that remotely looks like Firefox with that name. I've re-installed FireFox and it's the same old: no about:config, limited plugin selection.

I really don't understand WTF is Mozilla doing.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 30, 2023 16:58 UTC (Sun) by sammythesnake (guest, #17693) [Link] (1 responses)

If I've not got the wrong end of some stick or other, "Firefox" in the Android store *is* Fenix (and previously was Fennec) - "Fenix" and "Fennec" are just code names for the Android variant, and are "marketed" as Firefox just like the desktop variant.

Fennec apparently struggled with stability & performance and Fenix replaced it in 2020 to be less demanding (in development work and CPU/RAM) but got that in part by omitting some add-on APIs and support for dead mobile platforms.

According to a bit of googling, there's wider support for add-ons coming. The curated list of add-ons seems to be expanding incrementally, but more interestingly, the "Firefox Beta for Testers" and "Firefox Nightly for Developers" streams have support for your own "extension collections" and there's work apparently going on to support more of the add-on API. Time will tell how far/quickly this goes, how well it works, how much of it reaches the stable stream and how easy it'll be UI-wise to install arbitrary add-ons...

Access to add-ons that give *me* control of *my* browsing experience is a "killer feature" for a web browser, IMNSHO (and the #1 reason Firefox is the only contender at the moment) so I hope this work bears bounteous fruit quickly!

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 30, 2023 20:51 UTC (Sun) by malmedal (subscriber, #56172) [Link]

As a user of both Fennec and Fenix, I will dispute that Fenix is less resource intensive or less buggy.

Fennec runs well on my old Nexus 9, Fenix is painfully slow.

Unfortunately Cloudflare has started blocking Fennec because of its age, I suppose I'll just have to give up on that tablet.

Fenix runs mostly fine on my current phone, but still has not implemented the tab queue feature.
it also has an annoying bug where a tab will hang, not making progress. I can unblock by killing another tab.

While Fenix Nightly finally after an interminable wait allows me to develop extensions I find it quite annoying that the extensions only work while the USB cable is plugged in. To have it available untethered I have to sign and upload.

I haven't found any websites which work in Fenix but not in Fennec, various features that I would like to use, ServiceWorkers, WebAudio do not work properly in either.

Most featureful Android browser is Kiwi browser, it used to have some stability issues, but has been fine lately.