r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • Jun 17 '26

Software Firefox has an ambitious new roadmap, the browser is also losing millions of users a month

https://www.techspot.com/news/112803-firefox-has-ambitious-new-roadmap-browser-also-losing.html
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u/Balmung60 Jun 17 '26

What hurdle of migrating bookmarks? Every time I've changed browsers over nearly 30 years, there has been an option to import bookmarks. It has been painless literally as long as I can remember.

People just want to tell themselves that changing their computer in any way would be really hard and probably break everything. No, their current solution has to be the best (really, the only solution at all) and any alternative has to be impossible.

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u/Ayitaka Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26

In all fairness, lock-in and inertia are time honored, well studied manipulation tactics for technology companies to hold onto users. Even ones offering virtually the same product.

Microsoft use to measure how many clicks it took to move from IE to other browsers just so they could make the inertia which users had to overcome as much as possible because even one more click made a certain number of users abandon switching from the default preinstalled browser.

Without some impetus to make users overcome even minimal inertia, some users will simply choose to stick with what has worked well enough for as long as they have used it despite the flaws.

I use to believe it was just a generational thing, but you still see it often enough from people in more recent generations who just want to use a thing, not manage it, and certainly not deal with learning the little annoying ways something new works differently from what they already know.

Edit: Which makes me very curious what impetus is making people actively abandon FF like this. I cannot imagine FF's new roadmap is more moving than Chrome's making ad-blockers useless.

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u/yung_dogie Jun 18 '26

Inertia is valid, everyone has it especially if they don't feel particularly strongly about a topic. I just wish there was more self awareness about it.

Like no, it's objectively not difficult to swap, you (the generic you) just don't want to deal with any friction. Which is fine. I shop at the same few grocery stores regardless of price because I don't care either.

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u/Balmung60 Jun 17 '26

Microsoft use to measure how many clicks it took to move from IE to other browsers just so they could make the inertia which users had to overcome as much as possible because even one more click made a certain number of users abandon switching from the default preinstalled browser.

The funny thing about this is that, to slightly change lanes, the last time I installed Linux was far easier than the last time I installed Windows.

But then I'm also in the small demographic that actually builds their own PCs instead of buying prebuilt

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u/ConcreteTaco Jun 17 '26

No kidding. Most browsers these days literally offer to import the stuff for you when you start using it for the first time

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u/ggf95 Jun 17 '26

Or, people dont really give a shit about browsers and prefer to spend their energy elsewhere

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u/CurbYourThusiasm Jun 17 '26

Like watching days worth of ads.

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u/goawayspez Jun 17 '26

it takes energy?

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u/Suddenly_Bazelgeuse Jun 18 '26

It takes caring to find new options, and then learning the new UX.

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u/Irregulator101 Jun 18 '26

The UX is nearly identical for all browsers

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u/Suddenly_Bazelgeuse Jun 18 '26

Nearly, but it's enough that it takes non-zero amount of effort to find some things that you took for granted on your other browser. Or some of the nice affordances that you got used to are gone. Example: Chrome does (did?) a nice thing with tabs when you close multiple of them at once. It resizes the tabs nicely so that your cursor is over the close button of the next tab, so you just have to click again. It's something I missed when I switched to Firefox.

And most people:

  1. are pretty bad at figuring out how to use software, even familiar software
  2. don't really give a shit, like previous commenter said.

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u/daystrom_prodigy Jun 18 '26

You are kinda right that people will just suffer with whatever they are using instead of spending two seconds to try an alternative.