In my limited career I have been in several projects whose plight didn't make any sense -- with all the smart people and the effort poured over them, how could the disaster continue to unfold! -- until I realized failure rather than success was the goal.
I can't understand how this keeps coming up when Google just lost an antitrust case largely because they pay Firefox and Safari for their default search. Chrome only exists to funnel people into Google, they wouldn't risk their search monopoly so there's browser competition.
1. A marketing department that can get it more than 2% market share
2. A legal and advocacy department that can work with governments to stop monopolists like Google and Apple privileging their own browsers on platforms they control
3. To use its seat on standards boards to stop abhorrent practises like the W3C endorsing DRM, or Google dropping effective web-blocking APIs from extensions.
Firefox should focus on not hemorrhaging users, they're about to reach the cutoff (1%) where the US government will no longer even support their browser.
No normal person will switch to Firefox for tor, despite us nerds thinking it's cool. And if they can't get actual users to switch, the browser has no future.
I'm trying to use it right on mac right now. It's still slow with many tabs (even with autosleep enabled), visibly slower than both Safari or any Chromium based browser.
Also they killed visual tab expose, and any extensions that could replace it, so all I have for managing the tabs is a vertical list.
In addition to what everyone else said, comments like yours confirm that it would be a waste for me to check out Firefox for the hundredth time. You are among a sea of comments enumerating the specific reasons why it sucks, and you're here insisting with zero substantiation that it is "effective" and "by far the best browser around". A better approach would be to acknowledge the issues that users have had with it and explain how it has improved.
On the other hand, if your definition of "effective" and "best" describes Firefox the last time I checked it out, then our definitions do not match, and I don't need to check it out again.
I'm not sure if you are serious. I mean, look at Chrome and Edge and Safari. They are managed by corporations that control their own platform. I get Chrome, Edge, and Safari because it is actively pushed onto me.
What does Firefox have?
The ugly truth is that browsers like Chrome and Edge and Safari are just as good as Firefox, and a user who is not a software militant doesn't really care or know what browser they are using. They open the "internet" app and browse away.
What leads you to believe this is a Firefox issue?
Edge and Safari yes, but Chrome doesn't come pre-installed in both Windows and MacOS. You and every Chrome user actively goes out of their way to download and install it.
> What does Firefox have?
Every single nontrivial Linux distribution out there comes packaged with Firefox as the default browser.
> a user who is not a software militant doesn't really care or know what browser they are using. They open the "internet" app and browse away.
Clearly then all Chrome users on laptops/desktops are software militants..
> What leads you to believe this is a Firefox issue?
Firefox had at least half a decade of a headstart against Chrome and did jack shit with it.
This here is a single comment that explains everything. Firefox is kept clueless.
Sorry to all the devs grinding inside the machine - you are doing great work, and while it is not your fault the ship is going in the wrong direction, you are providing the fuel for it to keep going there by keeping your heads down and not revolting.
Firefox is an antitrust litigation sponge, but you have to keep it rudderless and ineffective.