Firefox Lost Almost 50 million Users: Here’s Why It is Concerning

Tolkem

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Hi everyone! Hope you're all having a nice life! :)

While checking my feed, bumped into this article https://news.itsfoss.com/firefox-decline/
An excerpt:
So, why are users moving away to Chromium-based web browsers or Chrome in particular?


There are a few things that I can think of right off the bat:


  • Google Chrome being the default web browser on Android
  • Microsoft Edge as the default web browser for Windows (which naturally has a huge marketshare)
  • Google.com (the biggest search engine) recommending users to install Google Chrome (which is potentially an anti-competitive behaviour)
  • Some web services are exclusive to Chrome-based browsers

In addition to that, there are also a few things that Firefox may have done wrong:


  • Constantly breaking the user experience with major overhauls
  • Lack of significant performance improvements in the recent years
 


This happened with the mom and pop stores the big company monopoly's offer the world and can deliver what they offer.

The independent little guy can no longer compete and no longer keep up and eventually goes under.

I've always been a Firefox user and still am however it's hard to ignore what Brave browser offers and pretty much blows Firefox away.
 
Firefox has almost no media presents. You can't install what you are unaware of.

While most people who arrive at this forum has some sort of technical understanding. A majority of people only understand Facebook. As noted, they use Google and most use Microsoft Windows or Apple's OSX. So they get introduced to Chrome, Edge, and Safari. Who introduces them to Firefox.

Almost nobody.
 
After having been a long-time Firefox user I switched over to Brave a few months ago just because of it having better OOTB privacy and seems to be faster than Firefox, I am still using Firefox as my secondary browser though.
 
does anyone see an issue that Brave uses and therefore relies on (or so it seems at firs t sight) Chromium engine of which Google is the main contributor to the "open source code".
 
FF lost out years ago in my opinion, it's engine just never could keep up with Chrome's. That's why chrome is faster and has been for awhile now. FF is a good browser don't get me wrong but they just never kept up. I use vivaldi most of the time find it to be good for my needs. Besides as I posted in another thread FF get a lot of funding from Google so it' only a matter of time before it is taken over.
Brave is also a good choice. I haven't used it much. Used to use opera but of late it's been broken almost every other update. so switched to vivaldi 6 months ago or so. Will revisit brave at some point.
The browser wars continue :)
 
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I have little trust in the Brave browser. Everything about their model and issues that have arisen all point to what they say and what they do being two different things.

I won't even go through all the issues that have been pointed out over time about Brave, but let's just start out that Brave is an advertising company #1. That by itself is a contradiction to *ensuring your privacy*. Brave was caught auto-completing / rewriting URLs to URLs that they earn money off of.

Finally, they offer rewards (Bats/tokens) for viewing ads, but their reward program has *issues* with users not getting their rewards or the counters are inaccurate. I mean, how hard can that actually be? How easy can they manipulate it to save themselves reward payments?

Finally, Brave is known to break websites. This is basically just like the super extreme tracking blockers= plugins, but it's a fact of life these days. If you haven't already noticed. (via Incognito browsing) They don't even need to save anything on your computer anymore to track you. In those cases, Brave and all the other blockers are rendered irrelevant.
 
All browsers nowadays collect your user data to sell for advertising and if you think they don't OK.

Google from the git go has paid in billions of dollars in fines and is still doing so collecting user data from unsecured wireless connections.

I'm not concerned with data collection.

No matter how private and secure you are if you walk into your bank or your doctor or anywhere your personal data will be collected from there.

Everybody / everyone / every website has their hand in your butt plain and simple and you can believe what you want if it makes you feel better.

Ain't nothing or nobody or no one private anymore even if you've never been on the WWW you personal information is available.
 
Is there a single Linux distribution that provides Google Chrome as the default browser? Or even as a secondary browser? Or Brave? Vivaldi? Edge? Not that I'm aware of, but maybe there is, especially Brave as it has become quite popular... but still not as popular as Chrome.

Maybe there is a reason that Linux devs choose Firefox? ;)
 
I have always preferred Firefox and have previously tried Chromium and Chrome, I never liked the user experience and the interface. A few months ago I tried Brave for the first time and it was the first Chromium based based that I actually liked and had a way better user experience than the previous too and also liking the interface better. What added to that was the better OOTB privacy than Firefox and it being a faster browser. Sure everyone is trying to track you these days, the question is who doesn't? If even Rob Braxman approves Brave for it privacy features than I know I didn't make a bad choice, if that changes at some point I can always switch browser again but for now I'm sticking to Brave. Even the EFF's privacy check tool gives me a better result with Brave than with Firefox.
 
but maybe there is, especially Brave as it has become quite popular...
PCLinuxOS Trinity Dig Daddy Community version uses Brave as its default browser.

You will have to take my word on that and if not than download the iso and create bootable media and check for yourself.

The standard PCLinux distros use Firefox as the default browser.
The community versions use whatever the community developers want.

All PCLinux distros are semi rolling releases.
PCLinux is the only Linux distro I've used without any Nvidia graphics cards problems or other hardware problems OOTB.

The forum.

The Wiki.

PCLinuxOS
 
A long time ago, I (and many other people) gave Firefox enough money to get a full page ad in the NYT. (I think it was the NYT. I have a copy of it somewhere.) They were great. They were responsive, they fixed bugs, they interacted with the community like a good opensource program should.

I kept donating, as did these other people. But, I'm pretty sure our donations couldn't compete with the donations from corporations. That corporate money was great for Mozilla's bottom line, but things changed inside. It's as if their focus changed. Performance dropped. They took forever fixing bugs, or just plain ignored them.

I haven't used Firefox in a long time, except as a means to get a better (to me) browser. If it's not a system that I keep around, I'll use Firefox instead of changing to a browser I prefer. In fact, it's completely uninstalled on a few boxes. I actually kept donating for a while (it was automated) after I changed browsers.

Anyhow, this is something I've been seeing in my sites for a long time. The stats don't really lie.

As for usage, here's some data from one of my sites - this isn't very accurate, as it contains bot traffic:

Selection_177.png


With less bot traffic - but not counting those that block scripting:

Selection_178.png


The site in question is linux-tips.us and is largely used by people that already use Linux. As you can see, even among technical users, at least those likely to know enough to switch operating systems, Firefox is no longer the top browser.

It used to be that Firefox was at the top on a number of sites, even on one where the audience was comprised of fans of music history. Not so anymore, and it hasn't been the case for a while.
 
If even Rob Braxman approves Brave for it privacy features
Does he? I don't doubt you, but I didn't spot that. I just watched this video (17:39 min) from him about "browser isolation" and "browser fingerprinting" where he gives some interesting advice about browser privacy. In the video, he stresses:

1. Only use Google Chrome on Google products... Gmail, YouTube, Google Earth, Google Translate, and so on. He's pretty emphatic about this.... use Chrome for nothing else. This lock-in may also be applied to using Facebook on a dedicated browser, but he really suggests not using FB at all.

2. He says that you can better manage other browsers somewhat equally... but he himself uses Firefox for his day-to-day surfing activity. You can go directly to 12:10 - 12:15 of the video to confirm this. He mentions Brave specifically, but he says he uses Firefox. This is less than a year old (November 2020), and maybe he has other more current views that I missed.

3. His techniques for managing "all other browsers" (besides Chrome) are interesting, and I agree with him for the most part. The little that I do differently (limit Javascripts) is not worth the trouble in his view, if I understood him correctly... but I will continue using NoScript for the time being. Yes, it is a lot of trouble, but I have it set up pretty well at this point.
 
PCLinuxOS Trinity Dig Daddy Community version use Brave as its default browser.

You will have to take my word on that and if not than download the iso and create bootable media and check for yourself.
I believe you, and there are likely others. But I'm not going to download or investigate the nearly 300 distros to find out either. People can chime in with what they know from experience, like you. But I think that everyone recognizes that Firefox is the main browser shipping with most distros. And it has been for quite a long time.
 
Does he? I don't doubt you, but I didn't spot that. I just watched this video (17:39 min) from him about "browser isolation" and "browser fingerprinting" where he gives some interesting advice about browser privacy. In the video, he stresses:
Maybe I worded it wrong, I should have said he doesn't disapprove of Brave and he seems to point out that Brave does a good job of masking your fingerprint. I've been following his channel for a few weeks and been trying to become more privacy aware for myself. So that video gave me the impression that he's not too worried about Brave as some here have stated they are. I even replaced my Iphone with a Google Pixel which is de-googled running LineageOS without Gapps.
 
Firefox is no longer the top browser.
I'm not too familiar with user-agent strings.... does "Chrome" also represent Brave, Chromium, and Vivaldi? Seeing Edge and Opera, but not seeing Brave, strikes me as kinda strange.
 
I'm not too familiar with user-agent strings.... does "Chrome" also represent Brave, Chromium, and Vivaldi? Seeing Edge and Opera, but not seeing Brave, strikes me as kinda strange.

That's a good question...

They're probably counted as Chrome. You can check with those browsers easily enough.


That's the result I got for checking user agent but it said it hates my VPN and I didn't feel like turning it off.

More advanced analytics would probably tell if it was Vivaldi or Brave - and I have seen Chromium as itself and not Chrome.

Those are also only the most common browsers used. Depending on where I look, like 5 to 20% of them are 'unknown'. Analytics aren't nearly as good as the people afraid of them think. No, no they are not.
 

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