edited the heading of the question. I think most of us here are reasoning why more people are not using firefox (because it was the initial question), but none of that explains why it's actively losing marketshare.
I don't agree ideologically with Firefox management and am somewhat of a semi-conservative (and my previous posts might testify to that), I think Firefox browser is absolutely amazing! It's beautiful and it just feels good. It has awesome features like containers. It's better for privacy than any mainstream browser out there (even counting Brave here) and it has great integration between PC and Phone. It's open-source (unlike Chrome) and it supports a good chunk of extensions you would need.
This was about PC, but I believe even for Mobiles it looks great and it allows features like extensions (and I hear desktop extensions are coming to firefox android?), it's just a great ecosystem and it's available everywhere unlike most FOSS softwares.
So why is Firefox's market share dying?
I mean, I have a few ideas why it might be, maybe correct me I guess?
- Most people don't know how to use extensions well and how to use Firefox well. (Most of my friends in their 30's still live without ad blockers, so I don't think many are educated here)
- It's just not as fast as Chrome or Brave. I can't deny this, but despite of this, I find it's worthy.
- It's not the default.
- Many features which are Google specific aren't supported.
- Many websites are just not supporting firefox anymore (looking at you snapchat), but you would be right in saying this is the effect of Firefox losing it's market share not the cause (at least for now) and you would be right.
But what else?
I might take time (a lot of it) to get back at you, thanks for understanding.
occasionally I’ll find websites that don’t work 100% because they were coded primarily for chromium based browsers. FU Google
I'm going to disagree there. It's been possible to add more extensions in the unstable nightly builds since just after the change, but requires having a Mozilla account and jumping through some hoops. Iceraven, a third-party build removes some of the hoops, and indeed many extensions not specifically built with Android in mind work just fine.
I can't guess what Mozilla is actually thinking here, but it's not true that it isn't or wasn't technically feasible to allow installation of arbitrary extensions on Firefox for Android following the rewrite.
That's patronizing.
A checkbox to enable full extensions support and a clickthrough warning on anything that didn't explicitly support the new version for Android would have been more than adequate.
I'm going to call an app developer saying "users are not sophisticated enough to make good decisions about add-ons even if we warn them about incompatibility" as showing a superior attitude toward users.
Ultimately, my objection to how they handled it isn't that some effort was required to install extensions. Instead, it's that:
It's not a quote. It's what their decisions say to me. I don't think we're likely to come to an agreement about whether their decisions were patronizing, and that's fine - it's a matter of opinion more than objective fact.
That's not correct. Stable doesn't allow it at all, and an account is required for nightly.
As for a roadmap, saying the intend to open up extension support soon isn't that big a promise since the support already exists and is just locked out by default.