To be precise, it was 289 million on July 1st 2018, and 248 million on July 9th 2019. It was 239 million on August 24. Yes, the numbers are huge. Any product that has this many users would be considered a major success, but the trend is still troubling.
Why would the typical user make the effort to download Firefox when they're already happy with Chrome? The typical user isn't on HN with strong opinions on privacy, has little notion of what constitutes a tech monopoly, covets convenience, and has already configured their one browser extension but doesn't remember how (and it turns out that same browser extension isn't in Firefox).
For most people, they can already see the internet in Chrome, or Safari, or maybe even Internet Explorer. Why would they switch when they don't even know what they're switching to or why?
Meanwhile Chrome has the full force of Google behind it, and Chrome is actually one of their important projects that they aren't going to abandon any time soon. It's really Chrome vs. the world, and Chrome is winning.
Firefox 57 launched at the end of 2017 and was very much a love-it-or-hate-it change. Some people saw a significant performance improvement and that was important for them. Other people didn't have a problem with its performance anyway but saw the entire ecosystem of extensions that made Firefox different thrown under a bus.
I'm firmly in the latter camp, and if it weren't for the security implications I'd still be running pre-57 Firefox with the full set of extensions I found useful. If I didn't need to use all the major browsers anyway because of my web development work and I wasn't so untrusting of Google in terms of privacy, I might easily have decided at that point that Firefox no longer had any compelling advantage over Chrome and switched. Presumably some people did.
I prefer firefox, but I'm on a mac and it runs pretty hot. I believe they're improving this though. Once performance is solved it'll be my default browser.
I’m pretty sad that it took a long time to solve this. I know there was a lot of work put into bringing Firefox back up to snuff, but this single issue seems to have caused a lot of trouble. This Bugzilla link is light grey for me, so I’ve visited it before, most likely a year or two ago. Since then I’ve been running Firefox with the gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque flag set to false, which doesn’t even cause any issues aside from sharp corners on browser windows, and HTTP auth prompts having a black background instead of a nice macOS blur. That was the best workaround available, one I almost wish they could have made some compromise to enable by default in the meantime. I’m glad it’s been sorted now, but this seemed like it should have been a release blocker to me when I first started switching back to Firefox during the Quantum betas.
It only really affects Retina Macs, which are a small fraction of the total userbase [1]. I understand that it's frustrating, but it would have been doing a disservice to the vast majority of Windows users to block a release on Mac power improvements. Especially since graphics power management on macOS isn't a new issue by any means; Quantum didn't introduce it.
