Is Firefox dead now?

[BU508A]

Hello,

I've read today these messages (source, sorry, it's in German):

Security Team:
https://twitter.com/MichalPurzynski/status/1293220570885062657
Quote:
They killed entire threat management team. Mozilla is now without detection and incident response.

Tristan, Alicia, Lucius, even our new director are gone

Gecko Team:
https://twitter.com/gcpascutto/status/1293519587967983616
Quote:
To combat some FUD: my Security and Hardening team working on Firefox also appears to have survived.

I conclude that a secure Gecko is still considered key to achieving Mozilla's goals.

I'm happy to still be here. We have key improvements in the pipeline that I want to ship.

Rust engine team / Servo:
https://github.com/servo/servo/discussions/27575
Quote:
Is the project being killed off?

Reportedly the team is gone https://twitter.com/directhex/status/1293352458308198401?s=19

MDN team:
https://twitter.com/SteveALee/status/1293487542382333952
Quote:
and ALL of MDN team Blow #2

[AntiProtonBoy]

Is Firefox dead now?

No. They are getting rid of people to reduce costs. COVID economy has put a damper on their long term development goals. The layoffs have been looming for some time now.

[Benta]

I removed FF from all my machines (Win and Linux) a couple of years ago.

FF started out as a smart, relatively lightweight browser with a lot of configuration options thanks to addons.

It's ended up as one of the heaviest pieces of bloatware on the market, with the worst memory management imaginable.
Running FF on either Win or Linux forces restarts at least once a week due to full RAM and disk swap space.

Goodbye and good riddance.

[MrMobodies]

I remembered when they shipped some edition that included plugin in about 2014 or so. What use to happen before, sometimes the external flash plugin would continue to utilize lot of cpu time over nothing after watching some Youtube videos or some other flash stuff after closing down the page.

On this edition I opened a blank page and the included flash starts to consume a lot ofl cpu time over a blank page. I killed it in task manager and felt so insulted for this overlay to appear over the working page (that was blank and didn't need flash) something about "the tab has crashed" etc telling me nothing useful and would not let me see behind it other than to reset the tab and then that loads up flash again. Not happy about that.

I think it was like the one on the attached image.

Also something had been removed do with some SSL version? I can't remember but I could not view certain webservers from my old routers and equipment and would not even allow me to make an exception and that is when I stopped recommended it  I stuck with the Firefox 22 and moved over Chrome and I think I might have mentioned this before somewhere.

I have seen some improvements in Firefox 75 but after I have customized it in the way I want and turning off things, that I don't want to see that put me off (or ruin it for me) like the decorations and animations (like the blue flashing thing when typing in the address bar that annoyed me but had to do it from Userchrome.css. Thanks to others complaining too about that and despite the complaints they have removed the options in about:config to turn them off in the later editions.

[Marco]

IMO Quantum and process per tab improved Firefox and was worth getting rid of the old extension mechanism.

I'm comfortable with Firefox's current performance and direction, I'd hate for Apple to become the only real alternative to Chromium browsers.

[alank2]

Firefox always works great for me.

[Whales]

Firefox is not dead, but it is on a downward trend.

• Management goals of Moz don't look good
• Funding for Moz is greatly controlled by their competitor Google
• Google and other groups keep pushing web standards to be more complex & changing, so that no new players can't easily enter the market
• Apple remains the only strong independent with their forcing of Webkit on many of their devices.

There are smaller groups working on their own browser engines (Netsurf, Flow) and forks of Mozilla's Gecko (Seamonkey, Palemoon); however these are going for smaller market appeal (unless something dramatically changes in the browser landscape, eg a freeze or culling of new crazy vendor-driven standards).

At the end of the day: whilst browsers don't cost users actual money, it's still a cut-throat competitive market about control and money. 

Google wants everyone on Chrome so they can collect as much data and market as much as possible.  If not chrome, then they want everyone at least on a chromium engine so they can control the direction of web standards and so make it harder for competitors to regain market & mind share. A user monopoly plays directly into their profit, they're a business.

Apple wants to keep all of this off their mobile devices, so they force Webkit (even if your browser claims a different name it's still webkit under the hood, just reskinned.  You have to jailbreak to get around this).  This keeps them with more control over their platform and devices, which is a long term strategy to avoid other companies finding ways of profiting on their devices without Apple agreeing/getting a cut.

Firefox wants to exist for a variety of reasons.  Many of the devs and supporters think it's the right thing to do for the freedom of the web and to keep user's safe.  Unfortunately the leadership also seems to want to make it a viable business of its own (without selling user data).  I don't think Google will ever let them do that, but is more than happy for them to hurt themselves trying.  They spent millions of USD acquiring the pocket addon and now they're planning to do similar branching-out.

[Benta]

Firefox wants to exist for a variety of reasons.  Many of the devs and supporters think it's the right thing to do for the freedom of the web and to keep user's safe.

Very noble, and I support that idea.
But that needs to be backed up by a working product. Which to my mind is a fast, light and functional browser (where FireFox started out).
Not as a bloated browser overloaded with functions added at the whim of some unspecified people/developers, and still after 15+ years with resource hogging and a dysfunctional memory management.

Sorry, FF is either dead, or it needs to get back to it's roots. Fast, lightweight web browsing.

[Marco]

Lightweight, security and scalability bite each other. By far the biggest bloat in recent times was process per tab ... worth it.

[Mr. Scram]

Very noble, and I support that idea.
But that needs to be backed up by a working product. Which to my mind is a fast, light and functional browser (where FireFox started out).
Not as a bloated browser overloaded with functions added at the whim of some unspecified people/developers, and still after 15+ years with resource hogging and a dysfunctional memory management.

Sorry, FF is either dead, or it needs to get back to it's roots. Fast, lightweight web browsing.

The main reason Firefox isn't doing so hot from a market share perspective is Google aggressively acquiring market share by throwing its weight around. The actual Firefox product is fine. The regular public doesn't want a barebones featherweight browser and we all want at least one competent competitor.

[Marco]

Wanted to throw them a small bone by signing up for the VPN, but it's not available in my country yet.

[rdl]

Google has a history of making Youtube run slower on non-Chrome browsers. For me it can be 4-5 seconds into a video before the rest of the interface finishes putting itself together.

[iteratee]

A "modern" browser isn't a browser. It's an application runtime and containerization environment. The original XUL-based architecture was ironically closer to fitting that description, but was considered too complex, ambitious in scope, and difficult to maintain. It was too ahead of its time I guess.

The eventual evolution of the browser into a webassembly execution environment will further clarify directions of things. That may actually be quite a simplification that counters the current state of affairs with massively unimplementable web standards that make the browser do too much heavy lifting. The complexity will move into libraries and other app development platforms running on top of the browser (some of which will probably develop standards of their own).

This has been tried before of course. If silverlight were attempted today it might have had a shot. It was crippled by its proprietary underpinnings and browser plugin architecture garbage.

[Bassman59]

Doubtful.

I use it on Windows 10, in preference to Chrome (which is a privacy nightmare) and Edge (which is now re-labeled Chrome). It has neat security and privacy features, like the ability to disable Javascript on a per-site basis.

If it went away tomorrow I'd use Opera. On the Mac I use Safari.

[GlennSprigg]

I only use Firefox now. It is always updated, and always works flawlessly.
As seen below using Windows Task Manager, there's presently about 2.7 Gb at present for Firefox on this Laptop...

However...  I've presently got 197 Tabs open!,and it works faultlessly and fast!! 

[Mr. Scram]

Doubtful.

I use it on Windows 10, in preference to Chrome (which is a privacy nightmare) and Edge (which is now re-labeled Chrome). It has neat security and privacy features, like the ability to disable Javascript on a per-site basis.

If it went away tomorrow I'd use Opera. On the Mac I use Safari.

Edge Chromium also is a privacy nightmare due to extensive telemetry.

[madires]

The Firefox team has pissed off a lot of Linux users by enforcing PulseAudio for audio output. The reasons given for dropping direct support of ALSA were quite weak. That's like forcing people who hate coffee to drink coffee. So much for Mozilla claiming that Firefox is about freedom. Have you ever searched "about:config" for "google"? Are you aware of the DOH disaster which tries to solve one problem by creating several new ones? They have good intentions at Mozilla, but unfortunately they lost their way.

[rdl]

I used Firefox exclusively for many years, but yeah they did seem to lose their way. I still use it occasionally (whenever I need to accept cookies), but I've never liked that "Australis" interface. When they forced Australis on their users I switched to Pale Moon as my primary browser and it has been doing the job for many years now.

[BU508A]

I only use Firefox now. It is always updated, and always works flawlessly.
As seen below using Windows Task Manager, there's presently about 2.7 Gb at present for Firefox on this Laptop...

However...  I've presently got 197 Tabs open!,and it works faultlessly and fast!! 

 



Source

[miceuz]

I use Firefox as my primary browser. Can't really complain.

[AntiProtonBoy]

I only use Firefox now. It is always updated, and always works flawlessly.
As seen below using Windows Task Manager, there's presently about 2.7 Gb at present for Firefox on this Laptop...

That's not surprising, considering the amount of resources required to maintain image layers for a typical web page. Memory utilisation adds up pretty fast.

[rsjsouza]

I usually use FF for personal pages, but I have been noticing for about a year now that a few websites have issues with forms and some clickable elements. At any rate, I like the fact of being able to have something different.

I have been dabbbing into chromium without the Google-itis and it is very lightweight - to the point of making my 2008-era netbook running Mint 17 still be able to browse with reasonable performance.

[Quarlo Klobrigney]

Last month Captcha or however it's spelled, stopped working. Now it's back to working. Go figure. As far as Linux Mint 19.3, I have had a good experience with it and Firefox. Windoze and Firefox, not so much.
Quote from: rsjsouza on Today at 12:14:42

I have been noticing for about a year now that a few websites have issues with forms and some clickable elements.

[rdl]

Last month Captcha or however it's spelled, stopped working. Now it's back to working. Go figure.

Google will do anything they think they can get away with to make Chrome work and other browsers not.

[madires]

Yep, like YouTube for example. With Chrome YT's UI is fast, and with any other browser it's crawling slow (about five times).

[electrolust]

Is there a question in there besides the subject? Yes, FF has been dead for quite some time now.

The crossover point with Chrome was Nov 2011 when it held 23.5% market share.
The crossover point with Safari was June 2014 when it held 13.78% market share.
The crossover point with IE was Sep 2015 when it held 9.83% market share.

It's now at 4.1% market share.

The only 2 viable browsers today are Safari and Chrome. That's why IE became Edge, based on Chromium.

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-201002-202008

[Marco]

Long term nothing is viable.

Do they need a miracle long term? Sure. But short term it's usable and under active development.