It’s wonderful that this has been published. This makes me feel a bit less bad about losing many of my extensions. Still not perfect, but now I can see more of Mozilla’s side to the story.
Next up: why Mozilla made the URL bar start popping out.
Plus it just looks pretty IMO. I once got stuck on the Nightly release of Firefox because Nightly had the new URL bar look and I couldn’t bear going back to the old look.
I believe the die was cast when the focus shifted from SeaMonkey to Phoenix (which later became Firefox I think due to a naming conflict with Phoenix DB…). I was sad but not surprised to see XUL/XBL and XPCOM go away. I don’t think that has much to do with what ate Mozilla’s mind and market shares.
It’s funny… I never loved XUL at the time, and I thought XPCOM was kind of shitty. Now I’d like to have both back, please. The XUL-based “abominations” (remember Komodo IDE in the mid-2000s?) sucked less than the Electron-based ones today.
Loss of gecko embedding also felt like a huge loss to me. And I believe that was almost as instrumental as XUL deprecation in creating the vacuum that Electron stepped in to fill.
SeaMonkey to Phoenix (which later became Firefox I think due to a naming conflict with Phoenix DB…)
Your memory has munged things: Phoenix -> Firebird was because a Phoenix BIOS contained a damn web browser and Firebird -> Firefox was because the Firebird DB people complained, loudly.
Wow, it really did. I remember hating the name change because it made me have to rebuild. I worked on an aging G4 Mac at the time, and mostly contributed to Camino. (Which was similarly afflicted when it was renamed from Chimera…). I had to build Phoenix too because patches couldn’t get a successful review if they broke it, and some of the embedding stuff I was interested in then tended to cause breakage in that tree. I had to rebuild my whole tree when the name change landed, which took a few hours per build on my system. I guess I remembered my reaction to the change better than the details of it.
I would like to know; Did removing XUL (and hence making FF faster) result in a net increase in the userbase or did the userbase drop because people lost their favorite extensions, and many extension writers migrated to Chrome?
The number of people using* extensions is a very small percentage of the FF userbase.
*or broadly speaking only a very small percentage of users ever change any default setting for any widely used software/service - which is why making things opt-out is such a commonly accepted but evil trick
either tech people or someone who’ve used ff long enough that they don’t want change. tech people are pissed if their customized application can’t be customized anymore, the long term users are pissed if anything changes. imho, mozilla betting on the casual-user-base and dumbing down firefox wasn’t the smartest move. the quantum engine change was nice, but the things since then were actively against their userbase.
if anything, i hope servo will be an easily embedable engine so there is some alternative to $webkit. maybe we can have a decent browser again, which isn’t trying to be my nanny.
My impression is that the perfectly spherical average Firefox user is a mythical illusion only existing in some heads of Mozilla management.
Thinking goes like “Chrome has this much marketshare, if we make our browser more like Chrome, people will come to us!!!” – except that this isn’t how it works.
Instead they gave all the loyal, long-term users the finger. I used Firefox since it was Netscape, but I’ll be gone as soon as Firefox devs kill userChrome.css, because they are more successful in alienating actual users than they are in winning new ones over.
I think this comment from the article gets the point across:
To sum it up, there’s just a lot of old power users out there that are sick and tired of companies chasing mobile and cloud, and telling them that their aesthetics, their desire for fine-grained control over their machine, their desire for freedom over security… those things no longer matter and everything they grew up with is being molded into something designed to suit a brave new world that they feel they have no place in, or at least a much smaller place. It’s like… growing old, but before you’re 30 or 40 in many cases.
I agree, but how many people actively installed FF versus have it installed for them by friends or family? For example, on all machines that I helped setup, I installed FF (plain vanila); except lately, I am forced to install Chrome (because a lot of Google properties have a degraded performance in FF).
This was how IE lost its market share in the first place right? Devs started recommending and in many cases actively installing the browser they liked in the computers they setup or maintained.
except lately, I am forced to install Chrome (because a lot of Google properties have a degraded performance in FF)
This is why I think the entire argument about XUL addons is a total red herring.
Most people never installed any add-ons. I myself only install two, and I’m a power user by almost any metric. But anyway, if web pages don’t work well in Firefox, then the whole argument is moot. Who cares how customizable Firefox is if the pages that I want or need don’t work well in it!
And Firefox’s greatest competitor isn’t abandonware any more.
I don’t know about that. I did (and do) use a bunch of addons for myself:
Always kill sticky
Cookie Quick Manager & Cookie Autodelete
ublock origin
Print Edit WE
Redirector
Privacy Badger
Tab session bar
and I know that another bunch exist when I need them. I installed FF for my friends and family because I actively use FF. The extensions such as Vimperator and Redirector and Cookie killers are too advanced to install for others. I was tempted to jump ship when they changed the addons, and can imagine that others might have.
The degradation is a recent phenomenon, much later than the when XUL addons got dropped. Noticeable especially recently. In this, however, I think Google is playing the game because they have overwhelming numbers on their side.
The degradation is a recent phenomenon, much later than the when XUL addons got dropped.
Depends on what you consider a degraded experience, I guess. Google has been showing pop-up ads recommending Chrome since 2012 at least. Google Talk worked out of the box in Chrome, but required an add-on for Firefox, until 2017. Similarly, Google Gears gave you offline support that worked out-of-the-box in Chrome but required an add-on in Firefox until around 2011, where Google’s web apps switched to standard HTML5 for their offline support.
You might never have noticed any of these, because you use an ad blocker and would’ve just installed the browser plug-ins if you needed them, but a lot of people were probably convinced to switch. Besides, this is what insiders are saying about it (the thread is from 2019, but the claim is that it had already been happening for years at that point).
Firefox removed XUL addons in 2017. They had 27% market share in 2009. By 2017, they were already down to 14%.
I would like to know; Did removing XUL (and hence making FF faster) result in a net increase in the userbase or did the userbase drop because people lost their favorite extensions, and many extension writers migrated to Chrome?
Firefox had 18.70% Marketshare in January 2015, 15.95% January 2016, 14.85% in January 2017, was down to 13.04% in October 2017, Firefox 57 (which removed XUL) released in November 2017 at 12.55% Marketshare, by January 2018 they were at 11.87%, and then there was a long, slow bleed until October 2019 they’re at 9.25%.
If anything it seems like they were bleeding users a bit faster before 57 than afterwards. You could read that in a lot of ways; there may have been some accelerated bleed-off of users ahead of Firefox 57 once the plan was announced, to the tune of maybe 1-1.5%, but it doesn’t seem to have been enormous and there definitely wasn’t a disproportionately huge drop afterwards. Or maybe they were bleeding over the perceived performance benefits of Chrome, and dropping XUL helped stem the tide.
A drop in percentage does not indicate a loss of users. They might have been getting more users, but just growing much slower than their competition (which isn’t an absurd claim as the number of internet users worldwide doubled in the last decade: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/broadband-penetration-by-country ).
Remember, Firefox’s WebExtensions are just as powerful as (if not more powerful than) Chrome’s WebExtensions. Nobody migrates off of Firefox to Chrome because Chrome’s extensions are more powerful.
Now, it’s certainly possible that people would stick with an otherwise-inferior browser because the extensions are superior to chrome’s, but Mozilla would probably say that the whole point of the switch is to make Firefox stop being an inferior browser.
It is an unfortunate fact but there is a possible market share of I would guess 0.1-1% for something like that, because most people don’t care. Market share matters very much for browsers because the biggest players set the standards. Firefox became significantly faster with Quantum, so all in all it was a success. I wouldn’t even say that they couldn’t beat Chrome, some parts in Firefox are very competitive and advanced.
Unfortunately, it turned out that there was an unexpected incompatibility between the design of Jetpack and some of the major changes that were needed in Firefox. I’m not entirely clear about what this incompatibility was but this meant that we had to abandon Jetpack.
Even using a better extension than TST doesn’t change much.
Iirc you can disable the default url bar with some advanced hacks linked from their readme.
The mechanism to do that is already on the cutting block, and, yeah, my “hacks” are now 100 lines of custom userChrome.css, and it keeps increasing with every new release of Firefox.
If the goal of Firefox was to make life more miserable with every release, they are doing a splendid job!
It’s wonderful that this has been published. This makes me feel a bit less bad about losing many of my extensions. Still not perfect, but now I can see more of Mozilla’s side to the story.
Next up: why Mozilla made the URL bar start popping out.
I personally like it very much. If ‘m editing the URL, I can read it better, but if I don’t need to do that, it doesn’t take that much space.
Plus it just looks pretty IMO. I once got stuck on the Nightly release of Firefox because Nightly had the new URL bar look and I couldn’t bear going back to the old look.
I believe the die was cast when the focus shifted from SeaMonkey to Phoenix (which later became Firefox I think due to a naming conflict with Phoenix DB…). I was sad but not surprised to see XUL/XBL and XPCOM go away. I don’t think that has much to do with what ate Mozilla’s mind and market shares.
It’s funny… I never loved XUL at the time, and I thought XPCOM was kind of shitty. Now I’d like to have both back, please. The XUL-based “abominations” (remember Komodo IDE in the mid-2000s?) sucked less than the Electron-based ones today.
Looks like another niche that Firefox needlessly pissed away, like browser embedding, Persona, FirefoxOS, …
Loss of gecko embedding also felt like a huge loss to me. And I believe that was almost as instrumental as XUL deprecation in creating the vacuum that Electron stepped in to fill.
It’s beyond absurd that the companies that took over Firefox OS are now forced to rip out their embedding component and replace it with Chrome.
Your memory has munged things: Phoenix -> Firebird was because a Phoenix BIOS contained a damn web browser and Firebird -> Firefox was because the Firebird DB people complained, loudly.
Wow, it really did. I remember hating the name change because it made me have to rebuild. I worked on an aging G4 Mac at the time, and mostly contributed to Camino. (Which was similarly afflicted when it was renamed from Chimera…). I had to build Phoenix too because patches couldn’t get a successful review if they broke it, and some of the embedding stuff I was interested in then tended to cause breakage in that tree. I had to rebuild my whole tree when the name change landed, which took a few hours per build on my system. I guess I remembered my reaction to the change better than the details of it.
I would like to know; Did removing XUL (and hence making FF faster) result in a net increase in the userbase or did the userbase drop because people lost their favorite extensions, and many extension writers migrated to Chrome?
The number of people using* extensions is a very small percentage of the FF userbase.
*or broadly speaking only a very small percentage of users ever change any default setting for any widely used software/service - which is why making things opt-out is such a commonly accepted but evil trick
but who is the ff userbase?
either tech people or someone who’ve used ff long enough that they don’t want change. tech people are pissed if their customized application can’t be customized anymore, the long term users are pissed if anything changes. imho, mozilla betting on the casual-user-base and dumbing down firefox wasn’t the smartest move. the quantum engine change was nice, but the things since then were actively against their userbase.
if anything, i hope servo will be an easily embedable engine so there is some alternative to $webkit. maybe we can have a decent browser again, which isn’t trying to be my nanny.
My impression is that the perfectly spherical average Firefox user is a mythical illusion only existing in some heads of Mozilla management.
Thinking goes like “Chrome has this much marketshare, if we make our browser more like Chrome, people will come to us!!!” – except that this isn’t how it works.
Instead they gave all the loyal, long-term users the finger. I used Firefox since it was Netscape, but I’ll be gone as soon as Firefox devs kill
userChrome.css, because they are more successful in alienating actual users than they are in winning new ones over.I think this comment from the article gets the point across:
[Comment removed by author]
I agree, but how many people actively installed FF versus have it installed for them by friends or family? For example, on all machines that I helped setup, I installed FF (plain vanila); except lately, I am forced to install Chrome (because a lot of Google properties have a degraded performance in FF).
This was how IE lost its market share in the first place right? Devs started recommending and in many cases actively installing the browser they liked in the computers they setup or maintained.
This is why I think the entire argument about XUL addons is a total red herring.
Most people never installed any add-ons. I myself only install two, and I’m a power user by almost any metric. But anyway, if web pages don’t work well in Firefox, then the whole argument is moot. Who cares how customizable Firefox is if the pages that I want or need don’t work well in it!
And Firefox’s greatest competitor isn’t abandonware any more.
I don’t know about that. I did (and do) use a bunch of addons for myself:
and I know that another bunch exist when I need them. I installed FF for my friends and family because I actively use FF. The extensions such as Vimperator and Redirector and Cookie killers are too advanced to install for others. I was tempted to jump ship when they changed the addons, and can imagine that others might have.
The degradation is a recent phenomenon, much later than the when XUL addons got dropped. Noticeable especially recently. In this, however, I think Google is playing the game because they have overwhelming numbers on their side.
Depends on what you consider a degraded experience, I guess. Google has been showing pop-up ads recommending Chrome since 2012 at least. Google Talk worked out of the box in Chrome, but required an add-on for Firefox, until 2017. Similarly, Google Gears gave you offline support that worked out-of-the-box in Chrome but required an add-on in Firefox until around 2011, where Google’s web apps switched to standard HTML5 for their offline support.
You might never have noticed any of these, because you use an ad blocker and would’ve just installed the browser plug-ins if you needed them, but a lot of people were probably convinced to switch. Besides, this is what insiders are saying about it (the thread is from 2019, but the claim is that it had already been happening for years at that point).
Firefox removed XUL addons in 2017. They had 27% market share in 2009. By 2017, they were already down to 14%.
It’s hard to say https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#StatCounter_(Jan_2009_to_October_2019)
Firefox had 18.70% Marketshare in January 2015, 15.95% January 2016, 14.85% in January 2017, was down to 13.04% in October 2017, Firefox 57 (which removed XUL) released in November 2017 at 12.55% Marketshare, by January 2018 they were at 11.87%, and then there was a long, slow bleed until October 2019 they’re at 9.25%.
If anything it seems like they were bleeding users a bit faster before 57 than afterwards. You could read that in a lot of ways; there may have been some accelerated bleed-off of users ahead of Firefox 57 once the plan was announced, to the tune of maybe 1-1.5%, but it doesn’t seem to have been enormous and there definitely wasn’t a disproportionately huge drop afterwards. Or maybe they were bleeding over the perceived performance benefits of Chrome, and dropping XUL helped stem the tide.
A drop in percentage does not indicate a loss of users. They might have been getting more users, but just growing much slower than their competition (which isn’t an absurd claim as the number of internet users worldwide doubled in the last decade: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/broadband-penetration-by-country ).
Yeah, very good point.
Remember, Firefox’s WebExtensions are just as powerful as (if not more powerful than) Chrome’s WebExtensions. Nobody migrates off of Firefox to Chrome because Chrome’s extensions are more powerful.
Now, it’s certainly possible that people would stick with an otherwise-inferior browser because the extensions are superior to chrome’s, but Mozilla would probably say that the whole point of the switch is to make Firefox stop being an inferior browser.
Firefox could have carved itself a niche or being the customisable and freedom respecting browser, rather than being chrome 0.1.
They could never beat chrome at its own game. Why even try?
It is an unfortunate fact but there is a possible market share of I would guess 0.1-1% for something like that, because most people don’t care. Market share matters very much for browsers because the biggest players set the standards. Firefox became significantly faster with Quantum, so all in all it was a success. I wouldn’t even say that they couldn’t beat Chrome, some parts in Firefox are very competitive and advanced.
I feel I’d like to know a bit more about this…
Except in the cases where it doesn’t work at all anymore, like Vertical tabs.
Looks like Microsoft will ship a browser with vertical tabs out of the box, before the remaining Firefox devs get their heads out of their whatever.
Yeah, we saw how that worked out. Great job!
There are extensions. I’m using tree style tabs myself.
Iirc you can disable the default url bar with some advanced hacks linked from their readme.
Yes, and they are utter garbage fires.
Even using a better extension than TST doesn’t change much.
The mechanism to do that is already on the cutting block, and, yeah, my “hacks” are now 100 lines of custom userChrome.css, and it keeps increasing with every new release of Firefox.
If the goal of Firefox was to make life more miserable with every release, they are doing a splendid job!