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Does anyone know what the incentive behind the development of Firefox is at this point? Like, Chrome has such a huge browser market share, so why do they still

Does anyone know what the incentive behind the development of Firefox is at this point? Like, Chrome has such a huge browser market share, so why do they still develop Firefox? I assume it is not that feasible to invest time and money if the share is only 4%. I am just curious, and not trying to hate on Firefox. But I think most (?) non-tech people use Chrome. So maybe I am asking, what is the point of Firefox if the shares are so low? Again, not trying to hate on it, but I am just curious for the reasons, which I am sure are valid.

RussianCow 10y ago
Because competition is a good thing. I personally wouldn't want the fate of web standards solely dictated by Google. Also, I'm not sure where you got that number, but Firefox's market share is well above 4% for most websites.
- chrisper 10y ago
  I looked here: https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=2&qpcustomd=0 https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpr... It seemed valid, but maybe not. Do you know a better source? EDIT: Others have provided better sources!
  - RussianCow 10y ago
    Each individual version is broken down separately in that chart, so you're looking at the market share for Firefox 49 specifically. The broader number seems to be closer to 11%. Anecdotally, people and organizations that aren't tech-savvy are more likely to use Firefox as well, so it just depends on the target audience.
  - azakai 10y ago
    You're not reading that link properly, but it's understandable since the link isn't the clearest. A specific version of Firefox has the 4% you mentioned, Firefox 49. Look a little lower down and you'll see Firefox 50 has another 3% on top of that, and so forth.
sergiotapia 10y ago
There was a time where Chrome was the up and comer with very low market-share. We need competition or we will suffer as end users. Chrome's time will also come eventually. It's not a matter of if, but when. Vivaldi and Brave are growing and coming along very nicely. Brave is actually spearheaded by the ex CEO of Mozilla before he was fired for some nonsense. https://brave.com/ https://brave.com/
- geofft 10y ago
  I feel like there are a ton more flattering ways to refer to Brave's CEO - "inventor of JavaScript," "co-founder of Mozilla," or "CTO of Mozilla for 9 years" are all way better and way more relevant than "CEO for not even two weeks," and much less likely to cause an argument.
  - sergiotapia 10y ago
    True! He's the father of Javascript - much respect.
- bitmapbrother 10y ago
  If Chrome's time ever comes you can be sure it'll never be at the hands of Vivaldi or Brave. One more thing, these are nothing but frontends to Google's Chromium.
  - Ziomislaw 10y ago
    following your thought you could say that chrome is just a frontend to Konqueror
- TwoBit 10y ago
  Given that IE is tied to Windows, Safari is tied to IPhone and OSX, and Chrome is tied to Android, tbese browsers are guaranteed to be predominant.
saticmotion 10y ago
Firefox has more than a 4% market share[0][1]. One of the main reasons I've heard, is that it's free, and that the Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit. I also just found this bit, that explains how some browsers might be over or under estimated, because of how their internals work[2]. So we really don't know what the market shares really are. [0]http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-yearly-2008-2016 http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-yearly-2008-2016 [1]https://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php https://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Accuracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Ac...
- chrisper 10y ago
  Oh. I guess the source I used was garbage. I just typed in Firefox browser share on google and looked at the first result and it looked legit. It seems their share is shrinking quite fast though.
  - elkos 10y ago
    Using a Google to check the marketshare of a product rival to Google's Chrome. It's interesting how important Google Search is and how powerful it could be. (BTW I certainly don't imply Google's algorithms are skewed)
geofft 10y ago
My impression is that the bulk of Mozilla's financial backing is from competitors to Google (Yahoo, Baidu, Yandex), who have an interest in preventing Google from gaining a monopoly in the browser market. I think Mozilla employees choose to continue working on Firefox for similar reasons, though with more idealism: they have an interest in the browser market not being dominated by commercial vendors.
- zbraniecki 10y ago
  Mozilla has a financial partnership with Google as well. You are spot on on why Mozilla employees work on Mozilla. Source: I'm a Mozilla employees working on Firefox :)
  - elkos 10y ago
    Let's not forget the numerous volunteers around Firefox and Mozilla in general that embrace the idea of an open web.
azakai 10y ago
First of all, by common measurements Firefox's market share is more like 13.5% [1], not the 4% you mentioned. According to that link Firefox is the #2 browser, ahead of Microsoft and Apple's browsers. Second, Mozilla is a non-profit, so the incentives are different that the usual ones. Basically Mozilla wants to help the open web. A 13.5% browser can do that in many ways: drive new standards, provide an alternative to browsers from profit-driven corporations, provide an alternative implementation so the web doesn't end up as a monoculture, etc. etc. [1] http://gs.statcounter.com/ http://gs.statcounter.com/
- chrisper 10y ago
  Thanks. That makes sense. I guess I just wasn't clear that Mozilla had unusual "non-capitalistic" goals.
  - elkos 10y ago
    One could say that having an open source alternative based on standards could actually allow for a more fair plainfield for online businesses. To be frank although I use several Google services and products , I try to use opem source alternatives as much as I can.
  - bzbarsky 10y ago
    The "non-capitalistic" goals are Mozilla's entire reason for existence.
DonHopkins 10y ago
In the excellent Dr. Dobb's Journal interview "A Triumph of Simplicity: James Clark on Markup Languages and XML" [1], they ask him: DDJ: You're well known for writing very good reference implementations for SGML and XML Standards. How important is it for these reference implementations to be good implementations as opposed to just something that works? JC: Having a reference implementation that's too good can actually be a negative in some ways. DDJ: Why is that? JC: Well, because it discourages other people from implementing it. If you've got a standard, and you have only one real implementation, then you might as well not have bothered having a standard. You could have just defined the language by its implementation. The point of standards is that you can have multiple implementations, and they can all interoperate. You want to make the standard sufficiently easy to implement so that it's not so much work to do an implementation that people are discouraged by the presence of a good reference implementation from doing their own implementation. DDJ: Is that necessarily a bad thing? If you have a single implementation that's good enough so that other people don't feel like they have to write another implementation, don't you achieve what you want with a standard in that all implementations — in this case, there's only one of them — work the same? JC: For any standard that's really useful, there are different kinds of usage scenarios and different classes of users, and you can't have one implementation that fits all. Take SGML, for example. Sometimes you want a really heavy-weight implementation that does validation and provides lots of information about a document. Sometimes you'd like a much lighter weight implementation that just runs as fast as possible, doesn't validate, and doesn't provide much information about a document apart from elements and attributes and data. But because it's so much work to write an SGML parser, you end up having one SGML parser that supports everything needed for a huge variety of applications, which makes it a lot more complicated. It would be much nicer if you had one SGML parser that is perfect for this application, and another SGML parser that is perfect for this other application. To make that possible, the standard has to be sufficiently simple that it makes sense to have multiple implementations. [1] http://www.drdobbs.com/a-triumph-of-simplicity-james-clark-on-m/184404686 http://www.drdobbs.com/a-triumph-of-simplicity-james-clark-o...
- tannhaeuser 10y ago
  Hey, thanks for the link; I didn't know it, believing I knew all SGML resources. (I'm the fool having actually implemented SGML -- no less -- in Javascript).
icebraining 10y ago
What's the point of HN, if it's much smaller than Reddit?

RussianCow 10y ago

Because competition is a good thing. I personally wouldn't want the fate of web standards solely dictated by Google. Also, I'm not sure where you got that number, but Firefox's market share is well above 4% for most websites.

chrisper 10y ago
I looked here: https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=2&qpcustomd=0 https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpr... It seemed valid, but maybe not. Do you know a better source? EDIT: Others have provided better sources!
- RussianCow 10y ago
  Each individual version is broken down separately in that chart, so you're looking at the market share for Firefox 49 specifically. The broader number seems to be closer to 11%. Anecdotally, people and organizations that aren't tech-savvy are more likely to use Firefox as well, so it just depends on the target audience.
- azakai 10y ago
  You're not reading that link properly, but it's understandable since the link isn't the clearest. A specific version of Firefox has the 4% you mentioned, Firefox 49. Look a little lower down and you'll see Firefox 50 has another 3% on top of that, and so forth.

sergiotapia 10y ago

There was a time where Chrome was the up and comer with very low market-share. We need competition or we will suffer as end users. Chrome's time will also come eventually. It's not a matter of if, but when. Vivaldi and Brave are growing and coming along very nicely. Brave is actually spearheaded by the ex CEO of Mozilla before he was fired for some nonsense. https://brave.com/ https://brave.com/

geofft 10y ago
I feel like there are a ton more flattering ways to refer to Brave's CEO - "inventor of JavaScript," "co-founder of Mozilla," or "CTO of Mozilla for 9 years" are all way better and way more relevant than "CEO for not even two weeks," and much less likely to cause an argument.
- sergiotapia 10y ago
  True! He's the father of Javascript - much respect.
bitmapbrother 10y ago
If Chrome's time ever comes you can be sure it'll never be at the hands of Vivaldi or Brave. One more thing, these are nothing but frontends to Google's Chromium.
- Ziomislaw 10y ago
  following your thought you could say that chrome is just a frontend to Konqueror
TwoBit 10y ago
Given that IE is tied to Windows, Safari is tied to IPhone and OSX, and Chrome is tied to Android, tbese browsers are guaranteed to be predominant.

saticmotion 10y ago

Firefox has more than a 4% market share[0][1]. One of the main reasons I've heard, is that it's free, and that the Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit. I also just found this bit, that explains how some browsers might be over or under estimated, because of how their internals work[2]. So we really don't know what the market shares really are. [0]http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-yearly-2008-2016 http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-yearly-2008-2016 [1]https://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php https://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Accuracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Ac...

chrisper 10y ago
Oh. I guess the source I used was garbage. I just typed in Firefox browser share on google and looked at the first result and it looked legit. It seems their share is shrinking quite fast though.
- elkos 10y ago
  Using a Google to check the marketshare of a product rival to Google's Chrome. It's interesting how important Google Search is and how powerful it could be. (BTW I certainly don't imply Google's algorithms are skewed)

geofft 10y ago

My impression is that the bulk of Mozilla's financial backing is from competitors to Google (Yahoo, Baidu, Yandex), who have an interest in preventing Google from gaining a monopoly in the browser market. I think Mozilla employees choose to continue working on Firefox for similar reasons, though with more idealism: they have an interest in the browser market not being dominated by commercial vendors.

zbraniecki 10y ago
Mozilla has a financial partnership with Google as well. You are spot on on why Mozilla employees work on Mozilla. Source: I'm a Mozilla employees working on Firefox :)
- elkos 10y ago
  Let's not forget the numerous volunteers around Firefox and Mozilla in general that embrace the idea of an open web.

azakai 10y ago

First of all, by common measurements Firefox's market share is more like 13.5% [1], not the 4% you mentioned. According to that link Firefox is the #2 browser, ahead of Microsoft and Apple's browsers. Second, Mozilla is a non-profit, so the incentives are different that the usual ones. Basically Mozilla wants to help the open web. A 13.5% browser can do that in many ways: drive new standards, provide an alternative to browsers from profit-driven corporations, provide an alternative implementation so the web doesn't end up as a monoculture, etc. etc. [1] http://gs.statcounter.com/ http://gs.statcounter.com/

chrisper 10y ago
Thanks. That makes sense. I guess I just wasn't clear that Mozilla had unusual "non-capitalistic" goals.
- elkos 10y ago
  One could say that having an open source alternative based on standards could actually allow for a more fair plainfield for online businesses. To be frank although I use several Google services and products , I try to use opem source alternatives as much as I can.
- bzbarsky 10y ago
  The "non-capitalistic" goals are Mozilla's entire reason for existence.

DonHopkins 10y ago

In the excellent Dr. Dobb's Journal interview "A Triumph of Simplicity: James Clark on Markup Languages and XML" [1], they ask him: DDJ: You're well known for writing very good reference implementations for SGML and XML Standards. How important is it for these reference implementations to be good implementations as opposed to just something that works? JC: Having a reference implementation that's too good can actually be a negative in some ways. DDJ: Why is that? JC: Well, because it discourages other people from implementing it. If you've got a standard, and you have only one real implementation, then you might as well not have bothered having a standard. You could have just defined the language by its implementation. The point of standards is that you can have multiple implementations, and they can all interoperate. You want to make the standard sufficiently easy to implement so that it's not so much work to do an implementation that people are discouraged by the presence of a good reference implementation from doing their own implementation. DDJ: Is that necessarily a bad thing? If you have a single implementation that's good enough so that other people don't feel like they have to write another implementation, don't you achieve what you want with a standard in that all implementations — in this case, there's only one of them — work the same? JC: For any standard that's really useful, there are different kinds of usage scenarios and different classes of users, and you can't have one implementation that fits all. Take SGML, for example. Sometimes you want a really heavy-weight implementation that does validation and provides lots of information about a document. Sometimes you'd like a much lighter weight implementation that just runs as fast as possible, doesn't validate, and doesn't provide much information about a document apart from elements and attributes and data. But because it's so much work to write an SGML parser, you end up having one SGML parser that supports everything needed for a huge variety of applications, which makes it a lot more complicated. It would be much nicer if you had one SGML parser that is perfect for this application, and another SGML parser that is perfect for this other application. To make that possible, the standard has to be sufficiently simple that it makes sense to have multiple implementations. [1] http://www.drdobbs.com/a-triumph-of-simplicity-james-clark-on-m/184404686 http://www.drdobbs.com/a-triumph-of-simplicity-james-clark-o...

tannhaeuser 10y ago
Hey, thanks for the link; I didn't know it, believing I knew all SGML resources. (I'm the fool having actually implemented SGML -- no less -- in Javascript).

icebraining 10y ago

What's the point of HN, if it's much smaller than Reddit?