Dear friends, I'm Dimitri and I'm a CTO in some web projects. I’ve been a Firefox fan since 2007. I used to recommend it to everyone. I appreciated the open philosophy, the smart design, and the thoughtful features. You’ve built some truly great things over the years — from tab management to private browsing and UI customization. But today, I find myself using Chrome more and more — not because I want to, but because I have to.
You keep building clever, convenient features — and that’s great. But you continue to ignore the core problem: performance.
On Windows desktops, Firefox is slow. Just slow. Maybe things run fine on a brand-new MacBook with an M4 chip or the latest Intel hardware — but the reality is, most people don’t upgrade their laptops every couple of years. They’re still using machines from 2011 or earlier. And when Firefox feels sluggish, they don’t care how ethical or customizable it is — they’ll just install Chrome and move on.
Canvas rendering? 3–4x slower than Chromium or Safari. Overall responsiveness? Noticeably worse. The interface lags. This isn’t just about perception — it’s measurable.
And let’s talk numbers: in just the past year, you lost another 1% of desktop market share — from a disappointing 7% to an even more painful 6%. Sure, you can talk about Google bundling Chrome or Microsoft pushing Edge. But distribution channels don’t matter if your product feels slow.
You’re not just competing with corporations — you’re competing with user expectations. And until you put performance first, all the features in the world won’t save you.
It’s sad. Truly sad to see a product that once led with vision now fall behind. But this is your call to make — whether to keep polishing the UI, or finally focus on making Firefox run fast on the hardware people actually use.
