Firefox usage slipping fast

I for one have never been impressed by the extension support in Chrome/Chromium, and in my experience, this is often the reason die hard Firefox users remain unwavering. Chrome has definitely snatched up a lot of the low hanging fruit, as webkit does tend to be faster than gecko, and when it comes to Flash, things tend to run more smoothly (my take on that though is that if a site is running Flash, things are already broken...my day to day in 2014 finally includes 0 use of Flash).

Chrome's existence isn't something I worry too much about, as long as open standards in web development are maintained and Google doesn't pull a Microsoft and just steamroll the open web (or try to anyway). Chrome represents the competition that really forces the Mozilla devs to take performance seriously, and avoid some of the more egregious memory leaks and other issues that have come up in the past, because as we've now seen a few times, those come with pretty drastic user migration in many cases. On the other hand, Mozilla is a non-profit, Firefox is an open source project, and they do not have any good reason to sacrifice on core goals merely for the sake of acquiring more users than the other browsers out there. This, I think, is its strength, which Netscape did not have the luxury of.

I personally keep both browsers around, but Firefox accounts for a solid 95% of my web browsing, and will continue to do so. Webkit and Gecko are different enough that both should have a place in the future of the web, just as SUV's and sports cars both have their role in the world of automobiles.

In spite of their best efforts to do exactly nothing, Mozilla still has the better browser engine with better plugin support.

Its perennial and terminal memory leaks, however, go on and on and on. One cannot leave any Mozilla browser resident for much longer than a couple of days before memory use becomes freaking ridiculous, leading to inevitable reboots (on ALL platforms, Win, Lin, and Mac).

I would have stuck with Chromium, but it really sucks -- pages load strangely, caching is just weird, and most importantly the plugin architecture doesn't really work. If you care about blocking ads smoothly and effectively, you're not using Chrome.

It does not surprise me, at all, that Firefox is declining. They've done NOTHING over 15 years except (a) suck Google's teat, (b) relentlessly and poorly copy Chrome, (c) reduce features again and again, and (d) IGNORE and deny and FAIL to address their chronic memory leaks.

It doesn't help that Google scummily (via malware-ish bundling) pushed Chrome down people's throats and that people let them do it, 'cuz Google.

Mozilla Foundation has been an abject failure as a force for good open source software. Firefox itself was a mediocre idea, poorly executed, and their purposeful burying of both MozSuite/Seamonkey and Thunderbird is just shameful. They have proven they don't deserve the eyeballs. Oh yeah, and they really really really like promoting bigots; that probably didn't help either.


It's freaking sad that Mozilla has let Google eat its lunch so completely, from mindshare to technology lead. It wasn't for lack of (criminally squandered) funding.

Ever since the update which added the menu button at the right, I've been meaning to make the switch to another browser. The seamonkey project looked interesting, but they're integrating browsing with email, and I'd rather keep things seperate. Anyone had luck finding a good replacement? I only care about speed, compatibility with web standards and ad-blocking. And an interface that doesn't suck, I guess, but that's pretty much the easiest thing to get right.