edited the heading of the question. I think most of us here are reasoning why more people are not using firefox (because it was the initial question), but none of that explains why it's actively losing marketshare.
I don't agree ideologically with Firefox management and am somewhat of a semi-conservative (and my previous posts might testify to that), I think Firefox browser is absolutely amazing! It's beautiful and it just feels good. It has awesome features like containers. It's better for privacy than any mainstream browser out there (even counting Brave here) and it has great integration between PC and Phone. It's open-source (unlike Chrome) and it supports a good chunk of extensions you would need.
This was about PC, but I believe even for Mobiles it looks great and it allows features like extensions (and I hear desktop extensions are coming to firefox android?), it's just a great ecosystem and it's available everywhere unlike most FOSS softwares.
So why is Firefox's market share dying?
I mean, I have a few ideas why it might be, maybe correct me I guess?
- Most people don't know how to use extensions well and how to use Firefox well. (Most of my friends in their 30's still live without ad blockers, so I don't think many are educated here)
- It's just not as fast as Chrome or Brave. I can't deny this, but despite of this, I find it's worthy.
- It's not the default.
- Many features which are Google specific aren't supported.
- Many websites are just not supporting firefox anymore (looking at you snapchat), but you would be right in saying this is the effect of Firefox losing it's market share not the cause (at least for now) and you would be right.
But what else?
I might take time (a lot of it) to get back at you, thanks for understanding.
occasionally I’ll find websites that don’t work 100% because they were coded primarily for chromium based browsers. FU Google
In theory you can use memory to precompute almost everything as an acceleration technique. For example, imagine you're asked to do integer division (in some range, let's say 0 to 100) without hardware acceleration. Now you could precompute all 0 to 100 by 0 to 100 division options (10000 total), and store the result of all of them in memory. The next time you're asked to divide these numbers, you can look up the answer in memory instead of having to do the computation.
This is always a tradeoff using many heuristics and guesses for what's worth precomputing and what's a waste. Then there are also systems used (by for example Chrome) where the app looks at available RAM and stores more precomputations if the PC has more RAM.
But no, this is not why Firefox works fine. There was a rewrite of Firefox's rendering engine a few years ago, search for "Firefox Quantum" if you want to know more. They shifted to heavy GPU acceleration, which brought it on par with if not above Chrome's rendering performance.
The big issue with Firefox is that the Android app still feels unpolished, and people like to use one browser across devices for password/bookmark sync etc. They simply don't have the manpower to compete with Android Chrome, which has the entirety of Google behind it. It's basically their flagship product combining Search Engine, Android OS, Chromium and Material Design all at once.
I've been using Firefox on Android forever and it has absolitely no downsides in my experience, it works perfectly
Finding one specific tab using their collection system is much more annoying than Chrome's tab groups for organization, with nice drag-and-drop animations for each group.
Pull to refresh bugs out on some pages and triggers when trying to scroll up, so I have to keep it disabled, meaning reloading a page is super difficult.
There's a problem with multi-line text boxes where my text goes in the next line when I try to type inside of an existing paragraph.
And these are just 3 random annoyances I find with Firefox. I've used it for two years after they brought quantum to Android, and now switched back to Chrome. Firefox Mobile is usable but nowhere near the level of polish as Chrome, and it adds up for an app I use multiple hours every day for years.
I use AdGuard DNS so I don't have ads in either browser.