At least Google knows not to be intrusive and not fuck with the UI so often. Chrome looks almost exactly like it did over 10 years ago. Why can't Firefox imitate that quality of life feature? It's not that hard to not change shit at the surface.
They've been bleeding market share for years including faithful long time users who enjoyed the 'old, boring' Firefox but don't agree with the current direction of imitating Chrome at every step.
Old Firefox = Windows 7
New Firefox = Windows 11
I find the ads narrative pretty hard to believe. Back in the days, Firefox could compete with IE, which was the default in Windows, by being technically superior. It seems very likely that Firefox's users, who had gone out of their way to install Firefox, would also be very willing to go out of their way to install a new better browser even in the absence of ads.
while that isn't really true anymore in any relevant way it's still stuck that way in many peoples heads
And sure part of the perf issues where quite often not well behaving FF extensions, toolbars etc. also often installed by unrelated programs preexisting installed on the same computer and that FF needed some major refactoring/rewriting just because it was quite a bit older (which are done by now but had inevitable but sad effects like XUL extensions being gone).
I suggest you look for screenshot of Google Chrome in 2008.
Market share is what it is because google is pre installed in the majority of the mobile market, that firefox had bad performance rep in some areas, and that google is a synonym of internet in the mouth of the majority of people nowadays the same way explorer was a few decades ago.
Most people don't care about those UI changes.
2016: https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/google-chrome
2024: https://flathub.org/apps/com.google.Chrome
They're basically the same, nothing like what Firefox has been doing. Buttons went flat, bookmarks moved to the right, and two dropdowns got combined into one menu. Tabs haven't changed at all.
that's not how it works the marked share is there for reasons which have little to do with that, at least when it comes to "non technical people" (i.e. not HN crowd)
1. what matters the most is what is pre-installed (like iOs Safari, Android Chrome, etc.)
2. then what matters a lot is mind share, Chrome still has in many peoples minds the image of "the good alternative", "fast", "reliable", "modern UX". While many people still think about FF as slow and clunky even through a lot of this opinions came from well over 10 years ago
3. What also a huge amount is if you can use it for all task you do. Due to apps like Slack, MS outright refusing to fully support Firefox or for example Notion having had egregious FF only bugs a lot of "normal" users have over time moved away and just never come back. The most sad thing is if you look at the technical details it's seldomly FF fault. E.g. basically every time I looked into it when some media player (and I think it was also the case for Notion as far as I remember) didn't work it was because the sites not being standard compliant with CORS. Another (older) example is FF missing media codecs due to licensing issues which Apple/MS fixed by having an OS and Google by having a ton of money. Or polyfills for bleeding edge sometimes not yet even standardized Chrome features being slow. Stuff like that is in my experience kinda true for close to any (systematic) issue of a sites not working correctly on FF.
Lastly when it comes to non technical people the overlap of people which would stop using FF because of stuff like that and the ones which anyway wouldn't use FF because they use some fancy chromium derivative like brave is quite high.
The reason they are bleeding market share is not because they updated to a new UI.
It's because it's today hardly possible to run a browser which isn't either chromium or webkit based.
Still not going to use a Google browser though, that's just a self own.
