> I know Firefox's share of browser share has dwindled to almost nothing. I know sooner or later, well within my lifetime, it will be gone.

Market share appears to be hovering around 4%, which sounds small but that is still a massive amount of people, over 200 million users. It is even more impressive considering it doesn't have an OS with a large market share feeding it users, people overwhelmingly just use what is already installed. That's a huge number of users earned rather than inherited.

Alphabet needs to be broken up. Chrome, Search, Android, Youtube need to be separate companies. It's not the only company that needs this treatment.

They are in a tough place.

They dont have the advantage of owning the OS (android/chrome and iOS / Safari) nor the advantage of advertising on the google home page like chrome.

The "customers" they are courting are security/privacy zealots who constantly want them "just work on the browser" but never seem to have an answer on how to pay for that.

I am hoping the advent of LLMs allows more entrants into the space at a faster speed. Time will tell. Maybe as FF dies ladybird will take over.

I've been using Firefox as my main browser since I switched from Windows to Linux.

No real complaints so far, haven't really noticed any difference from Chrome to be honest which is about as good a recommendation as I could give. It does chew up memory but so did Chrome I guess, I haven't done a head-to-head comparison.

I've been using Firefox since the beginning and will continue using it. I only use Chrome for occasional testing, but close to 100% of the time, everything works in Firefox unless an overzealous add-on breaks a page and then I simply disable it to get going again.

I'm always so shocked to see so many ads when I see people using Chrome or I have to use it for something myself.

It's still 200 million monthly active users according to https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

Firefox is still popular in Germany, at around 10%

I really wish Firefox will catch up on the debug/devtools front. Nonetheless, I use FF as much as I can on both my mobile and desktop devices.

I switched to Firefox like 6 months ago. I’m happy with it even though Chromium is a better engine imo. What Google is doing with Chrome is unacceptable.

> No single company should have such unilateral control over the internet and its information.

Cloudflare with their "checking if the site connection is secure" (while being MITM) is another example.

> I know sooner or later, well within my lifetime, it will be gone.

I've met so many people in the tech industry who use Zen Browser. Not even because of some ideological point, but just because it is cooler.

So no, I don't believe it'll be gone. I believe firefox and ff-based browsers will actually make a comeback.

Try using ladybird as a fit alternative. It will be complete within your lifetime, and maybe even in firefox’s lifetime.

I'm more of an optimist!

We've been here before with Windows and IE dominance!

IE peaked at ~95% market share, and windows peaked at ~97%.

Broadly it seems to me that Google is behaving much like MS did.

But who knows, everything is the same and different this time around.

Yeah, consider the insane complexity of Web standards, and the fact that even Microsoft failed to create a browser with an independent engine: https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-04-07/will-there-be-a-new-... . This means that not only we are unlikely to see browsers with new engines but also that the existing browser engine diversity might even shrink if an existing browser becomes underfunded and / or loses a critical number of users / web developers.

Typing this from Zen browser as we speak, can't suggest it enough.

I feel the opposite, the more chrome abuse their dominance the closer they move to a tipping point where enough people become browser interested to return to browser wars. It's likely one of those things where it has to go to far, then change will happen fairly quickly.

I know it's more infrastructure, but just use pi-hole and then it doesn't really matter what browser you use, if we're just talking about pop ups and malicious ads.

I use it exclusively on Android for the ad block on naughty hot girl sites wink wink.

I use chrome and those sites are miserable.

I think a lot of us would pay them at this point, if they kept seriously working on the browser.

I use firefox on all devices, but there are two notches against it in my book:

Firefox on Android lags during scrolling on multiple sites that do not lag on Chrome. The only extension I have is UBO, and I don't know if that is the cause of it or not - I haven't tested thoroughly. One way or another there is a performance issue there by default.

Second, GrapheneOS has this to say about Firefox on mobile:

>Worst of all, Firefox does not have internal sandboxing on Android. This is despite the fact that Chromium semantic sandbox layer on Android is implemented via the OS isolatedProcess feature, which is a very easy to use boolean property for app service processes to provide strong isolation with only the ability to communicate with the app running them via the standard service API. Even in the desktop version, Firefox's sandbox is still substantially weaker (especially on Linux) and lacks full support for isolating sites from each other rather than only containing content as a whole. The sandbox has been gradually improving on the desktop but it isn't happening for their Android browser yet.

I'd love for both of these issues to be resolved at some point. But I stand by it because I like UBO and because I'm a bit contrarian.

firefox has a setting on ios version that blocks ads so maybe they will get more market share that way?

This move will help Firefox a lot. This is why they've been my browser on mobile for years, now there's a big incentive to switch on desktop

I stopped using Firefox when it had massive performance issues (CPU and memory) to the point it was unusable. Chrome in comparison was lightning fast and since then I somehow cannot get myself to use Firefox though I know they likely have fixed those issues long time ago. I have Firefox installed but never open it.

I also was a Firefox user, but Mozilla killed Firefox many years ago. I noticed this when a mozilla dev said I must use systemd+pulseaudio in order to watch videos (well, hear audio) on youtube. Chrome worked fine. At that moment in time I knew mozilla no longer cared about the users. (I use thorium though, so actually I can still use ublock origin fine. But I am sad that I ended up with the evil Google empire. There is no real competition against it anymore, sadly enough.)

> No single company should have such unilateral control over the internet and its information.

Indeed. Hopefully more and more people realise this. Google has underestimated The People here.

Firefox is a terrible browser. The engine is alright, and good just because it's not the monoculture. The browser is terrible. When you open it up in a fresh profile, it starts asking you to sign up for things and spend money.

I feel like with the advent of vibe coding, the bar to making your own browser is gradually lowering. People are already making all sorts of useful "houseplant programming" to serve their own pain points. Sooner or later, agentic coding will actually become really good and people will be able to just vibe code a whole browser in Rust or something that addresses the exact pain points that power users have.

I used to use firefox a long time ago but got tired of all the memory leaks and lag before I switched to chrome.

Now that mv2 is going away, I switch back to firefox, and it still has memory leak issues after all these years, it is really disappointing.