Firefox is Losing its Users

Firefox is Losing its Users

Beginning with the browser version 4 Mozilla have adopted Google's short update cycles. Now changes were blowing like a hurricane from their developing center. This has been happening for years and is happening now with the only difference: at the moment the rapidness in combination with the way the updates are installed is ruining the product instead of helping it grow bigger.

Mozilla’s History of Releases

1.3 update per month

Over the past 10 months the company worked out 13 updates, which, if counted, result in more than one bunch of changes per month.

Now the latest version is 13.0.1 which differs from the previous 13.0 just in some fixes and saw the world only 10 days after it. What's more – you can already test the beta 14 version. But this is not new for them as the development cycles like this became an ordinary thing for Mozilla long ago.

The Release Notes for Firefox 13.0.1

The Way to Go

Yet, compared with the early releases the current updates run more or less automatically: they are first downloaded in the background and installed at the next browser start afterwards. But if you didn't give your Firefox a chance to apply update changes for more than 24 hours you will be asked to do so in a pop-up dialogue box. And as usual, this happens right in the middle of your working session, at the 'best' possible time, so to say. So, quite reasonably, when this happens twice a month it can become irritating.

Taking to account that we want a safer browsing, the updates themselves consisting of security matters, bug fixes and support for the new web standards are necessary and welcome. Thus, the main problem, as the Webmonkey survey brings it, is not the updates themselves, but rather the way they are handled. Besides, the above-mentioned intrusive dialogue boxes are not the only annoying and frustrating things that scare off the users. They are compounded by the endless changes of browser's interface. The situation is like this: you have just got used to one style of UI and in a couple of weeks you have to re-adopt yourself to a new one... This certainly isn't the way to keep the user numbers up.

Beta Firefox 14 Release Notes

The good news for the customers is that Mozilla are going to move on and to fix some of these irritating issues in their future releases, like making the updates installation run unnoticeable for the user. To my mind, this is not only a right intention, but also a long awaited one, though, unfortunately, for some users the damage done is not recoverable.

Title picture credit: mychicagoimprov.com, themana.gr