Why did Firefox fail so badly?

Paper_Chase

Paper_Chase

brb gym
Apr 23, 2009
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Vancouver, Canada
I'm always interested in analyzing real-life case studies like this. I think there is alot to be learned from big companies with high-end talent that still fall to common growth mistakes.

When Firefox came onto the scene they starting taking alot of market share from Internet Explorer. Then Chrome came onto the scene with a more lightweight browser that was quicker to load and had the inline search built-in to the address bar. Were those 2 features enough to kill Firefox?

What do you guys think?
 


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Firefox failed when they attempted to copy Chrome with their ridiculous update schedule of every 6 weeks without re-building it from the ground up. Mimic a smaller weaker competitor makes them look weaker in my mind. Chromes pretty buggy, but I don't know, there was a whole time period where Firefox's updates where killing the experience. That's when I gave up. I want to go back, but there is something still irking me about them.​
 
I don't know what numbers you are looking at that shows Firefox as dead.

True it's probably lost a bit of market share vs Chrome, but FF is nothing like Opera or Safari in terms of market share.

But basically, FF got too bloated, and slow. I don't think it even utilizes multiple cores like Chrome does.

However with this recent NSA privacy thing, I bet we'd see FF pick up market share from Chrome and IE.

I think a big thing is just, no one stays on top forever. You get lazy, you fail to innovate, or your customers don't want change. Something new and fancy comes in and runs you over.

Also Tom's Hardware just did a shootout with them, and Firefox is right there it seems, maybe they will make a turn around.
 
Rage9 said:
I don't know what numbers you are looking at that shows Firefox as dead.

True it's probably lost a bit of market share vs Chrome, but FF is nothing like Opera or Safari in terms of market share.

But basically, FF got too bloated, and slow. I don't think it even utilizes multiple cores like Chrome does.

However with this recent NSA privacy thing, I bet we'd see FF pick up market share from Chrome and IE.

I think a big thing is just, no one stays on top forever. You get lazy, you fail to innovate, or you customers don't want change. Something new and fancy comes in and runs you over.
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Yes, I agree, they are far from dead. But they are losing market share every month to Chrome...

For me personally, the browser just become to sluggish to use when 20+ tabs were open.
 
For me personally, the browser just become to sluggish to use when 20+ tabs were open.
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I don't know what got me to switch to Chrome. I never really had bad performance problems like a lot of people. I always just chalked it up to faggots having shitty computers.

I think FF just went though a rough update cycle. After using Chrome for like a week, I was like fuck FF.

Google has also done a good job marketing it, which is more than can be said for FF. Googles rolled out their own laptops (Chrome books). Then you have mobile, and tablet. Then you have the whole search, email, docs, and social network platforms.

Just sheer volume Google can put Chrome in front of people. It seems to have capitalized.

FF just launched it's own mobile OS, but I doubt anyone really expects it to get traction as that game seems pretty locked up by iOS and Android. But you never really know.
 
Firefox died because it had a memory leak that would eventually freeze your system if you had too many tabs or left it running overnight. Oh, and the developers (at some point) insulted a lot of folks claimed that the memory leak didn't exist when 4 tabs left on overnight. Firefox ran fast as hell for me for a while, but that's because I had 16gb of ram lol.
 
I loved FF, but it got so slow at some point it was literally unusable. I switched to Chrome and really never looked back. I'd be happy to switch back to FF if they made it back into what it was about 3 years ago.
 
I'm a lazy piece of shit so am still running FF even though I don't like it.

One of my biggest complaints with FF is how it loads slow pages. I don't know how Chrome is.. but IE seems to properly make space for images and tables ahead of time.. before everything is completely downloaded.. this seems much smoother to me.

FF will load a page in such a way that website buttons and links can move as it's loading, etc. Nothing pisses me off more than trying to click on a webpage button only to have it move on you and you click on something else.

Also, FF seems to freeze up a lot while loading pages. But I'll say it definitely could be all of the script-blockers, ad blockers, etc that I have installed slowing FF down. Maybe the public made addons helped take FF down.
 
I feel like I am just handing over all my secrets to the enemy when I use Chrome so I use Firefox and just deal with having to restart it 3 times a day when it starts using too much memory. I'm pretty sure that is why they have the "Restore Previous Session" button on the start page.
 
Constantly freezes when loading pages but I don't remember Tor.org recommending anything other than FF to use as a browser back in the day, so probably still less vulnerable than the others as far as security is concerned.
Besides, I've always dug red pandas.
 
I have used FF for the past 4 years or so. I use chrome to do speed tests and image optimizations (thanks btw) but the ad assault I get on chrome has made me swear to never use it. I am literally like WTF IS THIS SHIT DOES GOOGLE THINK THIS IS ACCEPTABLE FUUUKKKK.
 
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