Why you SHOULD be using Firefox

Another article saying we should all be very concerned by the apparent decline of Mozilla and the Firefox browser.

"But Mozilla isn’t just a Firefox company. It isn’t just another boutique tech company outflanked by trillion-dollar competitors like Microsoft, Apple, and Google. Instead, Mozilla is a company with a long history of moving the world of web standards forward. And its crisis should concern us all."
 
Honestly I'm trying to work out why Firefox has seen such a decline.

The browser is good. If anyone takes the latest version for a spin they will see that so I don't think it's a quality issue.

I put it down to brand name and marketing.

A user of a PC still needs to go on the internet to download a third party browser. Google Chrome vs Mozilla Firefox.

It's quite easy to see there why brand name is playing a huge part in this.

If I asked my parents who can't tell a mouse from a keyboard which one of those two products do they recognise they will most surely pick out the Google browser.
 
If you look back through this thread you'll see a number of annoying design decisions that have been forced on the user with no way to change them. Firefox has long been favoured for it's many customisation options but recently Mozilla don't seem to care whether a feature is wanted or even useful, they just force it on the user. That's the main reason I don't use it much anymore.

Unfortunately, once someone is annoyed with something they are forced to look elsewhere and if they find a good replacement they have no real reason to go back. So it's much easier to alienate users than to win them back.
 
You can disable/remove new features but the way they are enabled by default on new builds does tend to be annoying and put some people off - they'd be better off having a button that highlighted after new builds which either launched a wizard or a quick menu or both where you could see highlights of new features and decide if you wanted them.

I think brand prominence is a significant factor in the decline though - aside from the annoyance above it is a generally a robust and well featured browser.
 
The issue is I don't think anything Mozilla do can stop the rot. It's a downwards spiral with no way of getting out of it.

They are trying to diversify by developing different products (vpn, a chat service) but those markets are already congested and have some big players already established so I don't see how they will make any money through those either.
 
Firefox is my preferred browser nowadays. Moved from chrome a couple of years ago and I've never looked back. I even think Edge chromium is superior to Google Chrome.
 
opethdisciple said:
Honestly I'm trying to work out why Firefox has seen such a decline.

The browser is good. If anyone takes the latest version for a spin they will see that so I don't think it's a quality issue.

I put it down to brand name and marketing.

A user of a PC still needs to go on the internet to download a third party browser. Google Chrome vs Mozilla Firefox.

It's quite easy to see there why brand name is playing a huge part in this.

If I asked my parents who can't tell a mouse from a keyboard which one of those two products do they recognise they will most surely pick out the Google browser.
Click to expand...

Once upon a time Internet Explorer was the only browser in town other than something called Netscape but it was seen as a minority thing, not necessary. IE became dated and even vunerable and especially when an exciting young browser called Firefox arrived on the scene and it became the best thing since sliced bread everyone loved it. Over time though it became slow and had a reputation for being bloated, people kept using it but things could be better. Then a new browser arrived out of nowhere it was seen as being sleek, clean, efficient and gosh darn it sexy and everyone moved to it in droves. It was called Chrome.

Chrome benefited from the off by being clearly designed with a single purpose in mind and with a single vision and by a corporate entity, Firefox on the other hand feels like it grew organically with no single hand at the tiller leading to an inefficient design and poor memory management. Ultimately like IE before it it suffered from appearing to be out of date and behind the times. Also the internet that created it full of mostly full of tech enthusiasts and pioneers has gone replaced by a less tech savvy userbase and big corporate interests with mass brand recognition.

Mozilla panicked and desperately tried to appear modern and relevent with cliche phrases like "Quantum" and radically overhauling the codebase but ended up throwing most of the really useful functionality of plugins out with it that alienated a lot of core users. Things move on they should have realised that.

Theres always been multiple browsers out there but only one that captured the public imagination at any one time I used Opera for a long time and honestly I thought it was great and couldn't understand why more people didn't use it and before people start feeling too sorry for Firefox its last big overhaul before Quantum was a straight rip off of Opera's ideas and even its design I couldn't believe they could be so brazen and get away with it, but they did.
 
From a security perspective though Firefox is delivering where other browsers are not.

With Firefox you can get all four green ticks in this and with the next version out next week you will have the option to use https only mode. These are fundamental security settings which will be available right from with the browser it's self without needing any addons etc...

I've had a little play around with Chrome the last few days and actually find more websites broken in Chrome and Edge then Firefox.

For example this page if you open it in Chrome/Edge notice the broken flag (shippable build status). Also click it and you will just seen plain json.

Open the same page in Firefox and it renders fine and click the link and you get a different view rather than just plain json.
 
Last edited:
Blackjack Davy said:
Once upon a time Internet Explorer was the only browser in town other than something called Netscape but it was seen as a minority thing, not necessary. IE became dated and even vunerable and especially when an exciting young browser called Firefox arrived on the scene and it became the best thing since sliced bread everyone loved it. Over time though it became slow and had a reputation for being bloated, people kept using it but things could be better. Then a new browser arrived out of nowhere it was seen as being sleek, clean, efficient and gosh darn it sexy and everyone moved to it in droves. It was called Chrome.

Chrome benefited from the off by being clearly designed with a single purpose in mind and with a single vision and by a corporate entity, Firefox on the other hand feels like it grew organically with no single hand at the tiller leading to an inefficient design and poor memory management. Ultimately like IE before it it suffered from appearing to be out of date and behind the times. Also the internet that created it full of mostly full of tech enthusiasts and pioneers has gone replaced by a less tech savvy userbase and big corporate interests with mass brand recognition.

Mozilla panicked and desperately tried to appear modern and relevent with cliche phrases like "Quantum" and radically overhauling the codebase but ended up throwing most of the really useful functionality of plugins out with it that alienated a lot of core users. Things move on they should have realised that.

Theres always been multiple browsers out there but only one that captured the public imagination at any one time I used Opera for a long time and honestly I thought it was great and couldn't understand why more people didn't use it and before people start feeling too sorry for Firefox its last big overhaul before Quantum was a straight rip off of Opera's ideas and even its design I couldn't believe they could be so brazen and get away with it, but they did.
Click to expand...

It was called Phoenix originally. I was using the Mozilla browser before that. Crazy to think this was 2000/01.
 
Firefox here. Firefox containers are reason enough to switch. Quite simply the best privacy feature of any browser available right now.

This is coming from someone who used Chrome from version 4. I switched about 2 months ago to Firefox and now I'll never go back (unless it is testing websites I have developed with Chrome and other browsers to make sure my websites work on them).
 
A Firefox user since it was called phoenix! Been more of a chromium edge user lately as it seems quicker and integrates well with win10.
However, been using the latest android varient and massively impressed. Being able to add shortcuts on the desktop is great and as there standalone act more like an app. Great for YouTube +adblock :D
 
opethdisciple said:
Honestly I'm trying to work out why Firefox has seen such a decline.

The browser is good. If anyone takes the latest version for a spin they will see that so I don't think it's a quality issue.

I put it down to brand name and marketing.

A user of a PC still needs to go on the internet to download a third party browser. Google Chrome vs Mozilla Firefox.

It's quite easy to see there why brand name is playing a huge part in this.

If I asked my parents who can't tell a mouse from a keyboard which one of those two products do they recognise they will most surely pick out the Google browser.
Click to expand...

I was a Firefox user before Quantum builds, however after that a lot of my extensions would not work, so I ditched FF for Vivaldi which is really like the old Opera, layout wise and I have never looked back , it has so much customisation and never crashes, just fell in love with Vivaldi, sorry FF you messed things up for a lot of ex-FF users, your lost as they say :) .
 
Elevon said:
I was a Firefox user before Quantum builds, however after that a lot of my extensions would not work, so I ditched FF for Vivaldi which is really like the old Opera, layout wise and I have never looked back , it has so much customisation and never crashes, just fell in love with Vivaldi, sorry FF you messed things up for a lot of ex-FF users, your lost as they say :) .
Click to expand...

I've been using Vivaldi for a a while but am now giving Firefox another whirl because I've been having trouble with Captchas loading in Vivaldi. All of the extensions I use are working in Firefox although that's not many.
 
Buffalo2102 said:
I've been using Vivaldi for a a while but am now giving Firefox another whirl because I've been having trouble with Captchas loading in Vivaldi. All of the extensions I use are working in Firefox although that's not many.
Click to expand...

Ironically I had to do a captcha check yesterday and had no trouble with Vivaldi, some of them can be tricky/ hard to do regardless of browser in question. End of the day Vivaldi works fine for me and have no reason to change, looking forward to the next new features they add.

:)
 
Yea, at least one of the Captchas I was having trouble with is working again now but I couldn't log into a site for about a week. If it's unreliable I'm going to look elsewhere. Until Mozilla messes up Firefox again of course. :)
 
Firefox user here. I don't see any discernible difference in performance between it and Chrome yet I would rather not give all of my data to Google.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom