Hmm, I have access to stats for some hundred million monthly desktop surfers, in a pretty varied and non-niche market (age and gender demographics may skew pre-retirement age and 65-70% male, but that's it), and my numbers do not mirror those at all.

The trends aren't far off, with firefox losing approx 2% this year and Chrome gaining it, but gross share numbers are not particularly close.

No obvious link to their data collection methods.

Considering they keep breaking the memory management, which was working flawlessly until this last version, and keep changing the UI that everyone loved to some crap nobody likes, OF COURSE IT'S IN DECLINE!

Currently I'm back to rebooting this pile-o-junk daily otherwise it crashes hard, and it's been doing that as well Haven't had this issue in a very long time and now it's back.

People are running away in droves from this pile of junk and only developers are clinging to it because there aren't any good alternatives.

IncrediBILL... and when you reboot it the same thing happens

- You want me to turn on? Sure, lets get this thing going!
- Wait, I have to let Firefox know you're logging on
- Wait, you have microsoft software that wants to be notified too
- Wait, you have programs that want to check for updates
- Wait, you have security software that wants to do checks(and report their findings)
- Wait, a little malware here wants to switch Today's ads for you
- Wait, I need to make sure your hardware is up to date
- Wait, you've got a few other services that want an update
- Wait, was that NEO from the matrix? I swear I saw NEO, maybe it was the NSA? Who knows.
- Wait, your niece likes playing her game and it needs to run a background update
- Wait... ahh forget it, half of these updates are telling ME to wait so I quit, keep waiting!


If only a truly secure browser existed that would do what WE want it to ONLY... that would be grand. That's not the current iteration of Firefox unfortunately, perhaps next update? Wait...

and only developers are clinging to it because there aren't any good alternatives.

... and that's why the three of us* who still use Camino have refused to change.


* The other two are, for some reason, in Italy.

This graph shows what is going on.

[gs.statcounter.com...]

• IE losing a lot of share
  
• Chrome gaining a lot of share
  
• Firefox losing some share
  
• Safari gaining some share
  

Firefox is losing share gradually but there are no steep declines. It's been hovering around 18% usage for a while now.

I got fed up with Firefox when it kept trying to shove Yahoo down my throat as its default search engine.

Huh! I never noticed that. Yahoo is on the list to choose from, but I've never had a problem to choose which search engine to use. I click the dropdown to "Manage Search Engines" and paste the URL I want to use. Then use the dropdown to choose which one I want to use now. Simple to switch to whatever SE you want.

I was far more unhappy that I needed to install a plugin to have a status bar. I find it alarming that people will browse without a status bar.

I believe some people are actively boycotting Firefox.

[washingtontimes.com...]

I also believe the marketing of Chrome is having an impact on the numbers.

I wonder how much effect it has when the update to Adobe Flash is installing Chrome and setting it to default browser unless you notice and untick the box when you update Flash?

There are an awful lot of untech people online today and while they may like the speed of Chrome, it is very resource intensive to prefetch and cache things to give the illusion of speed. Now and then I have landed on search results pages I was happy to get out of before they could completely load.

Exactly, not2easy, chrome is heavily marketed and that is a perfect example where people get chrome on their system without realising, then, just start using it.

Something that may also be putting people off Firefox is their update schedule. We appear to have a major release every other day. The new UI is IMO crazy. It just makes the switch to Chrome a lot easier.

Maybee that's the idea?

Mack.

I think it's just a phase that the net is going through right now with all of the new technologies/options available. People are just trying new things :)

Firefox isn't going anywhere, anytime soon ;)

I stopped using FF a long time ago unless I need it. At some point it always started crashing and just being annoying overall, no matter what machine I used it on. Also preferred the Chromium UI

unless I need it.

I find myself using FF when there's a particular addon I need, like Live Headers or Font Finder. I don't personally use Favicon Reloader but I love people who do, because it tells me they've got one of my pages bookmarked ;)

As stated above, via Flash updates, Chrome often gets installed without people even realizing it, along with a toolbar, and they don't know that Chrome is now their default browser.

Aren't these types of actions exactly like what Google fought against with IE and Microsoft years ago?

because there aren't any good alternatives

I keep waiting for the Linux crowd to come up with something .. Right now, Firefox is the only best alternative .. Most major Linux builds (that I'm aware of) dropped Chrome last year as the default.

Upon after the big "turning Google Toolbar off when it really wasn't" scandal from a few years back, I never trusted Google .. This whole Chrome bundling with legit software has been another reason not to trust Google. If this browser is so great, why do you have to resort to shady tactics to get people to use it.

.. and .. I don't think Google Chrome is being used as much as people seem to think. It gets downloaded as a part of another download, and there it sits .. uninstalled by the end user, while they continue to use their Internet Explorer or Firefox ..

From a Linux perspective, Firefox in no where near the resource hog that it is on Windows ..

If not for fear of Google and the excellent Inspect Element and Firebug tools for Firefox (yes, I know there's FB Lite for Chrome - not the same), I expect that even developers would quit using Firefox.

As much as I fear Google, Chrome just works better for me.

As stated above, via Flash updates, Chrome often gets installed without people even realizing it, along with a toolbar, and they don't know that Chrome is now their default browser.

More inclined to believe that the general "user" can't figure out how to get FF BACK (ie, can't figure out the icons on their desktop... don't laugh! We all have family members that damn stupid!)

OR

The migration is insidious for the same above reasons.

Those who know make it work. And for those who claim crashes I wonder how you are using it (FF) and what else is configured (plugins, et al) FF has never crashed on me (except that tragic 3x and a bit version)

Mozilla is trying to do too much. Bugs in FF (like the continuing, or recurring one, with border-collapse making 1px borders disappear altogether) go unfixed. Established products like Thunderbird and XUL runner are abandoned, while resources go into a whole lot of new projects. Does anyone outside Mozilla have any interest in Rust, for example?

Open source gets a lot of support from a very pro-free speech and transparency crowd. Firing Brendan Eich for his politics, and almost entirely failing to talk about what was happening was a huge mistake.

Firefox's biggest strength is its addons. Most users do not know about them and a lot of them destabilise the browser.

I now use FF for development, testing, and certain sites. Chromium (not Chrome) for some others, and Rejonq as my main browser.

That should read "Rekonq" as my main browser.

@mcneely, that is one answer to what the Linux crowd have come up with. Then there are Midori, Konqueror, and several other webkit based browsers are pretty good as well. I have QupZilla and Dooble installed but have not tried them yet. Ubuntu has Chromium in the repos, so you have Chrome (minus some Google specific bits).

If you look at rendering engines rather than browsers, and at mobile as well as desktop, Webkit is now far ahead. It says a lot for how well designed it is that a rendering engine originally designed to work only in a particular *nix desktop environment is now widely used on everything from Android to Windows, and leading on every major platform except, perhaps, Windows.

As far as most people are concerned they don't use a "browser" they just use the internet.