The rush to copy Chrome in appearance and behavior has essentially ruined what was a decent experience before. What's worse is that the design changes haven't actually brought any benefits, either. And to make it even worse, there has been nothing to suggest that things will actually improve any time soon.
Firefox's declining market share over this period is very good evidence that people are not happy with it. It initially became popular because it provided a better experience than other browsers; now it's declining because it's providing a worse experience, and the recent changes clearly haven't been helping the situation.
The only evidence we have is that Google's marketing team has been very effective at advertising Chrome. :-P
> Many of us long-time Firefox users have actually found the past three years to be the worst so far, in terms of design.
I'm not sure why you think you can speak for many Firefox users.
> rush to copy Chrome in appearance and behavior
I'll quote myself from a different discussion [1]:
Outside of manilla folder-like tabs and a panel menu, Chrome is given far too much credit in innovating the direction of browser UI. Tabs on top is an objectively better UI choice [2]. The download manager is an original Firefox design [3] and almost anything else that other browsers have adopted (tabs on top, start page tiles, etc) is all from Opera.
> now it's declining because it's providing a worse experience, and the recent changes clearly haven't been helping the situation.
FWIW, Firefox has held steady over the past year hovering around 20% according to Net Applications [4], and they even had a small uptick in the past month. In any case, I am confident Firefox lost users because of Chrome's superior performance and snappy behavior, not because of UI changes. I think projects like MemShrink [5], Project Snappy [6], and the revived Electrolysis [7] will go a long way towards improving Firefox's performance. Will those changes be too little too late? Who knows. Will the upcoming Australis design be the last straw if your theory holds true? That's up for debate.
I've recognized your handle on other Mozilla/Firefox related posts on HN and your comments seem to be universally negative [8]. Have you had a bad experience with the community? I understand strong dislike for a company or product, but it just seems...difficult to hate on such an underdog like Mozilla. :-P
/says self-declared Mozilla fanboy
[1]:http://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1fhgak/mozilla_plea...
[2]: https://blog.mozilla.org/faaborg/2010/06/24/why-tabs-are-on-...
[3]: http://limi.net/articles/safari-downloads/
[4]: http://www.netmarketshare.com/
[5]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink
[6]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/Snappy
[7]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis
[8]: https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=firefox+P...
StatCounter's desktop and mobile stats show a consistent decline from 26.49% in June 2011 to 16.86% in May 2003.
StatCounter's desktop stats show a peak of 32.21% in November 2009 down to 19.76% last month.
The Clicky stats are similar, showing a peak of 33.43% in December 2009, down to 21.19% in May 2013.
And then there's W3Counter's data, which shows peaks of 32.3% between December 2009 and March 2010, down to 19.2% in May 2013.
Wikimedia's data, although not as recently updated, shows a peak of 30.96% in February 2010, down to 19.11% in October 2012.
The numbers you cite are quite different from these other sources, which are all relatively consistent, which in turn makes me suspicious of yours.
I think we have indeed seen Firefox go from approximately 30% share at the end of 2009 and beginning of 2010 down to less than 20% today. That's a pretty significant drop in just 3.5 years.
As for my negatively, like I said, the Mozilla crew has earned it. I know many others share this opinion, as well. The numbers above support that very strongly.
We were quite happy with Firefox up until Firefox 4. Before then, the focus was on usability, and providing a good browser. Since then, however, the priorities have clearly shifted, and the resulting product has declined in quality and usability quite severely. It's a bad situation, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. Some people speak out, others just move to a different browser.
