Their market share is lower because at its peak, Chrome didn't exist.
The rise of Chrome is responsible for all of Mozilla's lost share. But major factors causing Chrome to gain share are being the default on the most popular mobile platform (Android) and being heavily promoted on google.com for many years.
Making it harder to install addons (and breaking all the old ones) is one of the things contributing to Mozilla losing share to Chrome. People used to use Firefox over Chrome because of all the great addons, which they then broke, leaving users with less reason not to use Chrome (which was significantly faster until Firefox Quantum). In other words, the causation is exactly the opposite of what you're suggesting.
The reason I switched to Chrome way back when from Firefox is that they changed the UI and that broke some of the add-ons I used. At that point I thought "well, the browser looks like Chrome now, it has as much customizability as Chrome, but its JS engine is slower, so I might as well be using Chrome." At the time I was playing a browser-based game, where the speed of JS mattered a lot to me.
If all the add-ons had kept working on FF, then I probably wouldn't have switched browsers.
I used to default to Firefox for work. Then they killed the old addons, which broke a major part of my workflow (FireFTP's "open a file and as you edit it it automatically re-uploads" feature). So there was a lot less keeping me stuck to it. Recently, and this is past Quantum, performance on some things (Google Apps) became abysmal (now, this could well be Google being half-assed or deliberately malicious about testing) but that was enough that I gave up on Firefox for work.
I haven't used Chrome in a while, but I was under the impression sideloading was completely blocked in Chrome nowadays. So the fact that Mozilla allows sideloading at all puts them ahead in that regard.
The rise of Chrome is responsible for all of Mozilla's lost share. But major factors causing Chrome to gain share are being the default on the most popular mobile platform (Android) and being heavily promoted on google.com for many years.
Not giving any technical and ux credit to chrome for also being a major factor for firefox's loss of market share is disingenuous IMO.
Indeed. The lack of Chrome-like profiles keeps me off Firefox.
I want to have a profile for my work, and a personal profile. Chrome provides that, and Firefox, last time I checked, required multiple hoops to enable and also blocked me from having more than one open.
I would even contribute funding to that if Firefox had a "Fund this feature".
I'm looking at the "containers", but it isn't very self explanatory. So with this, I couldn't have two installs of Bitwarden, one for personal and one for work?
I can't offer you a number, but it's significant enough for Google to offer me to autocomplete "firefox quantum addons" with "stopped working", and relevant discussions left a visible footprint on the net. I'm not sure how is the second sentence related to the question. If you're implying that addons dragged it down -
it for sure is incorrect.
Yes, Quantum changed API => it made a bunch of addons dead => lots if worried, and upset users appeared discussing it. I have nothing against Quantum, I accept it was necessary to go for a new model, but it clearly shows addons are important for a significant share of users.
You said "exactly because of choice of third-party addons" and that's what I'm questioning. I'm not questioning whether addons in general are important for a significant share of users.
Could you clarify your position please: do you think that "Significant part of FF's userbase decided in its favor exactly because of choice of third-party addons" is incorrect?
What you want to have is a trustworthy place where >99% of users can get >99% of software. You can have that -- look at Linux package managers -- without preventing side loading. And in fact that's necessary to prevent despotism.
The people operating the repository want people to use it. They don't want them getting things from untrustworthy places. But if they can just prohibit that, they can be tyrants -- refusing beneficial software that the user wants because the monopoly provider has a conflict of interest or is being coerced by someone else.
By contrast, if the user can load the beneficial application themselves then the repository has the incentive to prevent that from happening (and thereby discourage users from doing that in general) by carrying it themselves. And the fact that there can be competing repositories means that the one that carries the most beneficial software and the least user-hostile software can be the one that wins in the marketplace. But not if the vendor locks everyone else out and becomes an abusive monopolist.
I think Linux is quite a bit different. Firefox shares its space with applications that have the same privilege, making sideloading into Firefox much easier, especially on Windows. And then Linux is also niche enough as a consumer OS that it's just not as attractive for malware in the first place.
> I think Linux is quite a bit different. Firefox shares its space with applications that have the same privilege, making sideloading into Firefox much easier, especially on Windows.
All the more reason to have a supported way to do it. If they require the malware to replace the Firefox binary with a different one, what happens when it does? The user ends up with twelve pieces of malware instead of one because the original malware author didn't bother to support browser updates properly and the user ends up with a browser full of publicly known security vulnerabilities.
> And then Linux is also niche enough as a consumer OS that it's just not as attractive for malware in the first place.
People have been claiming that as the reason there was so much more malware on Windows for decades. Then Windows adopted some of the same types of measures as Linux and the amount of Windows malware fell off considerably.
It's still falling even after the Quantum push. It's dipped under 5% total market share and under 9% on desktop. Losing a percentage point every several months.
