This was a rant at best for the sake of ranting, if not for some more insidious ends. What's the point made here? Abandon Firefox because it's market share is 2%?
"I can finally say I'm Firefox-free."? Like if Firefox is the plague or something.
"Just What Went Wrong?": You went wrong, dear TFA author. Choosing hype over substance? Too desparate to meet your hackaday post quota? Who knows.
Let me anecdotally recap the state of Firefox as of 2025:
- Handles 100s of open tabs with no sweat.
- Allows ad blockers.
- Firefox tab sync. Send a tab from my phone to my desktop. See my laptop's open tabs from my desktop.
- PiP videos. Keep a video playing without obstructing you from other tasks.
- Tab containers cleanly separating work and private sessions.
- Free.
Yes, there are things to be desired from the Mozilla Foundation management end. Yes, at some point (optional) integrations were shoehorned into the browser. Yes, newer browsers may offer a friendlier out-of-the-box experience for the average user (e.g. Brave has ad blocking built-in). But all-in-all, Firefox is a fantastic browser and a real workhorse. For free.
And to be fair, the dip in Firefox popularity around 2010-2015 was deserved. The experience kind of sucked at the time, compared to the rising Chrome. Also the decision to drop XUL was in retrospect the technically correct choice. It was the main reason that Firefox managed to catch up in terms of speed and security with Chrome. Unfortunately, the change was not reflected back to the browser's market share.
I made the jump back to Firefox when Chrome did the first 'we are messing with uBlock' the first time they threatened. Honestly, it has been a really good experience. Most things just work. I'm also amazed how well the adblocking works as I suspect teams don't have the energy to deal with non-chrome + adblock on streaming services. Always a shocker to use a work browser without adblock and see how rough the default internet actually is.
"I can finally say I'm Firefox-free."? Like if Firefox is the plague or something.
"Just What Went Wrong?": You went wrong, dear TFA author. Choosing hype over substance? Too desparate to meet your hackaday post quota? Who knows.
Let me anecdotally recap the state of Firefox as of 2025:
- Handles 100s of open tabs with no sweat.
- Allows ad blockers.
- Firefox tab sync. Send a tab from my phone to my desktop. See my laptop's open tabs from my desktop.
- PiP videos. Keep a video playing without obstructing you from other tasks.
- Tab containers cleanly separating work and private sessions.
- Free.
Yes, there are things to be desired from the Mozilla Foundation management end. Yes, at some point (optional) integrations were shoehorned into the browser. Yes, newer browsers may offer a friendlier out-of-the-box experience for the average user (e.g. Brave has ad blocking built-in). But all-in-all, Firefox is a fantastic browser and a real workhorse. For free.
And to be fair, the dip in Firefox popularity around 2010-2015 was deserved. The experience kind of sucked at the time, compared to the rising Chrome. Also the decision to drop XUL was in retrospect the technically correct choice. It was the main reason that Firefox managed to catch up in terms of speed and security with Chrome. Unfortunately, the change was not reflected back to the browser's market share.
/EOR