Why are there less people using Firefox by the month?

[Evil Midnight Bomber]

I installed Firefox when it was one of the most popular browsers out there. It was great, it moved fast, I had my adons for different things and it was easy to use and secure.

Yet yesterday I saw a news how their usage dropped to less than 15%. So I checked. And indeed month by month their usage has been dropping little by little, from a point where they had more than 50% of the entire userbase a few years ago to this. What happened?

I still like Firefox so I don't understand why its popularity is dropping so much.

Firefox has never had over 50% of the market. The highest it has ever been was 25%.

[SodiumChloride]

With Firefox, I think their Hardware Acceleration is bugged - that or AMD drivers are bugged; I will not be surprised.

Either way, it works a lot more reliably when I turn off Hardware Acceleration in the Advanced Settings.

PS: Everyone seems to be having problems either with FF or Chrome if not both. JC. This is the PC world for you - in contrast to the console world or iOS world.

[Chain Chungus]

I use Firefox so I can run NoScript.

[Deleted]

Firefox has never had over 50% of the market. The highest it has ever been was 25%.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Ok, I was wrong, it had 47% the most. From 2008 to 2012 it had over 40% of the share though.

[Ciddy]

This is annoying as fuck. Not only YT but all Google websites suddenly stop to load for no apparent reason. Chrome is also bad at google images but at least it always work.

I've had that problem, but most of the time, it was just because of NoScript. I usually just "temporarily allow" on what I need, and YouTube clips stopped working one day. Found out something changed on that end, and I had to start allowing googlevideo.com for the YouTube stuff to play. Most problems I've had viewing things in Firefox were along those lines.

I don't really have any major problems with Chrome, but I'm just so used to Firefox because it's been my main browser for years, and I haven't had any problems with it that were bad enough to make me start looking seriously at other browsers.

[Alindra]

Chrome, in my experience, is more robust than Firefox is. It rarely crashes, and since it uses processes rather than threads, when it does, I don't lose my entire session. Its voracious use of memory doesn't bother me since I have 32gb of RAM. As ubiquitous as Google is, I don't want it to learn more about me than I can help or willing let it - which is one reason I don't use Chrome as much these days.

I almost always use Firefox. I like the fact it's open source and a couple extensions I can't live without (NoScript being the big one, but Ghostery / HTTPS Everywhere are also up there). The number of scripts, trackers, etc, pretty much everyone is horrifying. On the negative side, it's not as stable and uses threads. It's particularly unstable if I leave a lot of Youtube tabs open for a long period of time.


Note that I don't check extensions frequently once I get a setup that works (if it ain't broke...), so things could have changed since I last looked. Also, thanks @Remilia for mentioning 64-bit Firefox. I'll have to check that out.

[Dread Pirate Phayde]

I use Firefox on my laptop, it tends to be my preferred browser, I didn't care for Chrome, I used to like Safari, but Apple was so slow in updating website compatibility for it that I made the jump to FF. I still miss Netscape. I use Chrome on my tablet though, tried FF on there and it fell just a little short for me, if they fix a couple of things I'd switch there as well.

[Artorius]

@Remilia for mentioning 64-bit Firefox. I'll have to check that out.

You can activate e10s at Firefox Aurora (developer edition) or Nightly to get multi-process support at it, although it only creates 2 processes. One with the main UI and things like JS and the other with content. x64 is not exactly new though, but I guess Mozilla failed to properly communicate when they finally released it.

Alternatives compiled with performance oriented flags are Waterfox (SSE2, SSE3, MMX) or pcxFirefox (which has even AVX enabled as far as I know).

One of Firefox problems, well not really a problem, is that it's still made to be fully compatible with ancient CPUs like Pentium IIIs which by default disable a lot of newer things that could be used, Chrome is better at this.

[Alindra]

You can activate e10s at Firefox Aurora (developer edition) or Nightly to get multi-process support at it, although it only creates 2 processes. One with the main UI and things like JS and the other with content. x64 is not exactly new though, but I guess Mozilla failed to properly communicate when they finally released it.

Well I downloaded the 64b installer, but I guess it must have been automatically updated from 32b to 64b at some time in the past:

User Agent 	Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/45.0

Which is quite puzzling, considering I've never seen FF exceed 2gb of ram. Hell, even 32b applications can access 4gb if linked with LARGEADDRESSAWARE. (Of course, it's not perfect.)

Interesting tip on Firefox Aurora, but I'm not sure I'm quite ready for daily builds. I tend to leave my browsers open for extended periods of time.

Alternatives compiled with performance oriented flags are Waterfox (SSE2, SSE3, MMX) or pcxFirefox (which has even AVX enabled as far as I know).

While those are Mozilla / Firefox derivatives, do they support FF addons? NoScript is a big reason I still use FF.

[Artorius]

Well I downloaded the 64b installer, but I guess it must have been automatically updated from 32b to 64b at some time in the past:

User Agent 	Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/45.0

Which is quite puzzling, considering I've never seen FF exceed 2gb of ram. Hell, even 32b applications can access 4gb if linked with LARGEADDRESSAWARE. (Of course, it's not perfect.)

Alternative ways to check is going at about:buildconfig or seeing if it says "Firefox" or "Firefox (32 bit)" at the task manager.

Interesting tip on Firefox Aurora, but I'm not sure I'm quite ready for daily builds. I tend to leave my browsers open for extended periods of time.

I also do, it'll only update if you close it and even then it takes ~10 seconds at most.

While those are Mozilla / Firefox derivatives, do they support FF addons? NoScript is a big reason I still use FF.

Yeah. The only one that is a little more different is PaleMoon but even then the extensions are still mostly compatible.

[Evil Midnight Bomber]

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Ok, I was wrong, it had 47% the most. From 2008 to 2012 it had over 40% of the share though.

According to one study
Others disagree strongly:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_...al_usage_share

[Artorius]

According to one study
Others disagree strongly:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_...al_usage_share

Some are counting the number of different IPs accessing the web and others are counting how often the browsers are used.

This matters a lot because old people almost always use Internet Explorer but they don't browse the web very often, and younger people will most likely be using Chrome and browsing a lot with it. What you can gather analysing both results is that if you count different people then IE is still the winner somehow, but Chrome is used way more.

[FuxieDK]

Firefox has never had over 50% of the market. The highest it has ever been was 25%.

Pretty sure, MSIE is the only browser, which can claim a 50+% market share, in the last 10 years..

Looking at sites where "nerds" hang out, MSIE will obviously not be anywhere near 50%, but overall, MSIE is 75% or more..
Think news sites.. Think homebanking.. Think communication with official authorities..
Sites average people use on daily basis; MSIE reign surpreme with the common people..

[Deleted]

I'm still using Firefox on all my pcs. To bad I can't get it in my windows phone :/
It might not be the fastest Brower around anymore, but it stabile and works every time. And then the privacy stuff - I'm not doing anything illegal on the internet, but I'm not going to give information's for free to windows or google ...

[Paula Deen]

Chrome actually focuses its development on things besides Slaves and Masters being triggering words, that is why.

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2015/1...t-awards-made/

[Alindra]

Alternative ways to check is going at about:buildconfig or seeing if it says "Firefox" or "Firefox (32 bit)" at the task manager.

This goes to show you should never, never trust user agent strings. What a mess. Yep, actually 32b, as expected.

[ati87]

It does probably help that Chrome is bundled with almost every free program out their and you get a option to install chrome whenever you visit google (which is about 90% of the internet users).

Personally I like Firefox more on my personal computer but I use Chrome on my work because it is easier and better to share stuff like bookmarks then using FF.

[FuxieDK]

It does probably help that Chrome is bundled with almost every free program out their and you get a option to install chrome whenever you visit google (which is about 90% of the internet users).

What "every free program" are you talking about?

Personally, I have never been asked/encouraged to install Chrome, while I installed another program..
Do I have Chrome? Yes. Do I like Chrome? Nope... It's ugly in its own design and changes websites design.. It's slower than MSIE..

I only keep it, because BlizzCon, for some unknown reason, streams badly in MSIE.. No other streaming service streams badly with MSIE..

[Denpepe]

I have chrome because Netflix freezes in IE and Edge and for the odd page that does not work on IE and Edge, used Firefox ages ago but did not really like it, once MS got IE up to par I went back to that for most of my usage.

[SoulForge]

What "every free program" are you talking about?

Personally, I have never been asked/encouraged to install Chrome, while I installed another program..
Do I have Chrome? Yes. Do I like Chrome? Nope... It's ugly in its own design and changes websites design.. It's slower than MSIE..

I only keep it, because BlizzCon, for some unknown reason, streams badly in MSIE.. No other streaming service streams badly with MSIE..

Changes website design? That would be IE who for years never followed W3C standards. They have gotten better over the years but still don't think they quite follow them. And IE is slow as hell. Not sure which backwards computer you are using.