> People in HN are specially sensitive to some issues that others don't care much about.
No, everyone cared. Firefox went from market dominance to a rounding error usershare and consistently dropping. HN users aren't a significant enough portion of browser traffic to account for more than 0.001% of that. People who dropped Firefox because it broke and never replaced (or made impossible to replace) two extensions that they used are many orders of magnitude more significant in that downfall.
A browser that sold itself on its openness and extensibility is only slightly more open than Chromium, and explicitly limits its possible extensibility to wherever Chrome chooses to set it. Firefox has relegated itself to being a wonky Chrome that isn't connected to Google services. Nobody would choose that over Chrome except out of nostalgia or stubbornness. This is why Google pays all of Firefox's bills.
> People who dropped Firefox because it broke and never replaced (or made impossible to replace) two extensions that they used are many orders of magnitude more significant in that downfall.
Personally I think the decline of Firefox usage had a lot more to do with Chrome’s performance superiority and objectively better stability for close to a decade. For close to 10 years, until the release of Firefox Quantum in late 2017, Firefox was stuck on a model where browser processes were shared between tabs. Chrome was the first browser to go process-per-tab with its release in 2008.
Process per tab was huge. Flash was still everywhere but tabs had just become a thing and people’s browsers were crashing more and more due to this combination. Mobile was barely a thing. Chrome grew and grew. If a tab crashed it didn’t take down the whole browser session. It was isolated. It’s comparable, for heavy web surfers, to when operating systems got protected memory, multithreading, and preemptive multitasking. A new world of performance.
Today the web is more stable because Flash is gone, mobile has helped push websites to be less piggish on memory use (I mean, obviously they are still pretty bad), ad blockers are more common, and so it’s easy to forget the history. But I switched from FF to Chrome in this period and then came back after FF’s Quantum update, which brought in process (or thread?) per tab, and after Chrome got tied in ever closer to Google’s tracking business.
> FF’s Quantum update, which brought in process (or thread?) per tab
It's something more complicated, to balance resources with stability. I don't know the rules, but for example I have 3 windows with ~700 tabs split across them, which appear to be using 6 processes with 193 threads. (Also I use Auto Tab Suspender, so that probably influences it as well)
You are right. After they ousted the inventor of Javascript, the woke crowd there set about making Firefox into a chrome clone. They also annoyed the users with everything else that was not a chrome feature. I knew this day would come.
https://www.opensourceforu.com/2016/08/firefox-past-present-...
No, everyone cared. Firefox went from market dominance to a rounding error usershare and consistently dropping. HN users aren't a significant enough portion of browser traffic to account for more than 0.001% of that. People who dropped Firefox because it broke and never replaced (or made impossible to replace) two extensions that they used are many orders of magnitude more significant in that downfall.
A browser that sold itself on its openness and extensibility is only slightly more open than Chromium, and explicitly limits its possible extensibility to wherever Chrome chooses to set it. Firefox has relegated itself to being a wonky Chrome that isn't connected to Google services. Nobody would choose that over Chrome except out of nostalgia or stubbornness. This is why Google pays all of Firefox's bills.