Those complaints had one common sentiment, “If I wanted my browser to look like Chrome I’d just use Chrome”.

5000 people complaining doesn’t represent the majority of users”. When inundated with user complaints about the change, the response I received from a lead developer who shall remain nameless was “We have hundreds of millions of users. It doesn’t change if you leave it alone for a few weeks. The argument that it was “too hard to maintain” a single setting enacted by 2 lines of code in a 4 Million line codebase is just insulting to the intelligence of users. The code for desktops is different from phones so there was no rational reason to try and force a mobile UI onto desktop users who were Firefox’s primary userbase. On a desktop it is counterintuitive and breaks workflow with all other programs. On a smartphone it may make sense, as there isn’t room for a full desktop style menu layout. Then Google decided to make the tabs on top standard for its Chrome browser, which was designed for mobile devices not desktops. Proprietary software like MS Office and Adobe, FOSS software like Notepad++ and GIMP, 3D design, video editors, hex editors, you name it: It is the standard, logical design. Every other program on a PC uses tabs against the active window. It all started in 2009 Q3 with the fateful decision to force… Tabs-On-TopĪs soon as this decision was made, Firefox starting losing market share. There has been a lot of discussion lately about the decline of the Firefox browser and numerous articles about it losing 50 Million users in the last two years.īut the real decline has been over 12 years with a total loss of half a Billion users and 75% of the market share it once held.

Why mozilla firefox will not open