edited the heading of the question. I think most of us here are reasoning why more people are not using firefox (because it was the initial question), but none of that explains why it's actively losing marketshare.
I don't agree ideologically with Firefox management and am somewhat of a semi-conservative (and my previous posts might testify to that), I think Firefox browser is absolutely amazing! It's beautiful and it just feels good. It has awesome features like containers. It's better for privacy than any mainstream browser out there (even counting Brave here) and it has great integration between PC and Phone. It's open-source (unlike Chrome) and it supports a good chunk of extensions you would need.
This was about PC, but I believe even for Mobiles it looks great and it allows features like extensions (and I hear desktop extensions are coming to firefox android?), it's just a great ecosystem and it's available everywhere unlike most FOSS softwares.
So why is Firefox's market share dying?
I mean, I have a few ideas why it might be, maybe correct me I guess?
- Most people don't know how to use extensions well and how to use Firefox well. (Most of my friends in their 30's still live without ad blockers, so I don't think many are educated here)
- It's just not as fast as Chrome or Brave. I can't deny this, but despite of this, I find it's worthy.
- It's not the default.
- Many features which are Google specific aren't supported.
- Many websites are just not supporting firefox anymore (looking at you snapchat), but you would be right in saying this is the effect of Firefox losing it's market share not the cause (at least for now) and you would be right.
But what else?
I might take time (a lot of it) to get back at you, thanks for understanding.
occasionally I’ll find websites that don’t work 100% because they were coded primarily for chromium based browsers. FU Google
They are focused on AV1. Good, I will focused on it in future, I hope it beats MPEG-LA's VVC.
That's not the point, in case you don't know everybody is focusing on AV1 including Google.
Google is actually the main developer of AV1.
Nobody asks from Mozilla to include software HEVC decoding. They would have to pay a lot of money for it and honestly they shouldn't give to MPEG-LA a single dollar.
They could do what Chromium has done and include ONLY hardware decoding support.
Chromium pays nothing to MPEG-LA for that because they use our own hardware, our graphics card, and the manufacturer of the graphics card has already paid for it.
I also don't see any issue coming from it with widevine, if there isn't any issue from it in Chromium, I don't see why it would cause issues only to Firefox.
They proparly don't have the resources to include support for it. Totally understandable. But I will be selfish on this, my choice of my primary browser would be based on my needs....
Who knows maybe even that is seen as too much effort in regards to the cost of development or it just isn't seen as a good enough effort investment because they are sure that AV1 (or something else) will replace it in the near future. - I am not sure but i dont remember an explicit statement in regards to passthough hardware support, but i might just have missed it.
Absolutely! - If this feature is more important to you than anything else firefox currently provides to you, like ...
... just to name some, then i dont see any reason why you should not switch.
Maybe if you like just sometimes check back and see if your priorities/needs and/or firefox might have changed and match up again.
Anyway, whatever you decide, i wish you a nice day and hope you find a solution that works for you.