How Firefox Loses When it Tries to Copy Chrome
How Firefox Loses When it Tries to Copy Chrome
You might not know it, but Firefox was once widely considered to be an innovative browser. It wasn’t just an alternative to Internet Explorer (and now Chrome). Firefox introduced honest-to-goodness new features that people loved and rely on to this day.
My biggest problem is how they've become seemingly hostile toward people who remember how customizable Firefox was, and just want to revert the most annoying UI changes. Not only removing options from the menus, but then after workarounds surface actually going in later and stripping useful stuff out of about:config. Don't understand.
Losing the tab separators is what finally drove me over to Chrome.
Note: This draft is a rought and long and I have a lot of things to say about this matter, also I haven't sleep yet, so pardon if it is a bit confusing
How Chrome won over the web is a combination of marketing tactics, change of user interests and timing.
Marketing tactics since there was a time where Google use to bundle Chrome as optional checkbox on several freeware application installers. This may be shady but it helped immensly in the Google Chrome adoption, as most users did not hear about Google Chrome (or did not notice). Helps alot also that their website also helped advertised their new Chrome browser which is touted to be better and faster.
Change of user interests because Firefox started to get slower and slower pre quantum update. It was really so bad that the user experience became clunky and laggy as Firefox runs longer overtime. I mean sure e10s helped speed up things but it wasn't enough to be atleast close to on par with Chrome and users actually notice this.
It does not helped too that Chrome bundles flash player by default which also helped change the interests of the masses. For a casual, why would they bother installing Firefox and Adobe flash player seperately when they can install Chrome which is faster and has flash player integrated by default?
Finally the timing, because as the web has continuously evolved, Google being always on top of the adoption of standards (well to be honest, Google has been pushing the standards for years now that it is safe to assume Google is now the standard, lmao) helped the widespread adoption during the times that:
Competitions where focused on adopting to the standards and Google took note of this as they sway everyone to their side until it was too late for the rest.
Mind you during the 2011-2013, there was a massive flock of Chrome users and this is because Firefox may have been super customizable from the getgo, Chrome originally lacked extensions support but as soon as the Chrome extension store came out, it was already an uphill battle for Mozilla as they where focused on adopting to the evolving standard, it took them time to catch up with the user experience causing the bleeding of userbase.
It does not even helped that they had a hard time adopting to the ever evolving standards because their manpowered was shifted all over the place due to Mozilla's other focus of trying to be not dependent on Google's income. I am referring to projects such as Firefox OS.
Honestly during the massive growth of Chrome era between 2011-2018, the only one that had a chance to stop it was Microsoft but well Internet Explorer and Edge was always behind on updates mainly because they tied their updates to Windows updates which was known to be slow and clunky. So even if we consider Mozilla having a bleeding userbase problem, Microsoft actually had it worse, lol.
Great post. I think a lot of us remember a time before Chrome and take for granted there will be a time without it. I switched back to Firefox last year and happy for it. Still need Chrome for work though..
If I can't run Ublock Origin on a browser, it's dead to me.
That's an interesting interpretation! I definitely agree that that is the underlying bug, but it also seems to rob people -- Firefox users, developers, managers, contributors of agency - we are all in thrall to the almighty Google.
I think we can do more to even in the face of that stiff competition (and ignorance) - which is why I wrote.
Interesting article, that's exactly what I've been thinking about Firefox for many many years now. I hate anything that makes Firefox look and behave like Chrome. And I do everything just to revert these looks and changes.
Will there be an extension that restores the old Firefox reopen tab feature?
The only reason I ever switch from Firefox to Chrome back in the day, was because Firefox was noticably slower and, at the time, had some other ongoing issues that forced me to switch.
It's actually faster now and almost all the issues I once had are gone. The only one that remains is being able to use certain types of option selections on mobile (like drop down boxes, multi-selection, radial, etc).
What was the Mr Robot Scandal?
They remotely installed a Mr Robot addon (US only), because they thought their user base also liked the show. It was a puzzle/game or something, an unpaid promotion.
I'd forgotten about the Mr. Robot thing. What a shitshow.