11 ms·

Firefox's marketshare is pretty horrible - non-existence on mobile and very small on desktop and shrinking at 10% a year. It is basically at Edge-levels of ad

Firefox's marketshare is pretty horrible - non-existence on mobile and very small on desktop and shrinking at 10% a year. It is basically at Edge-levels of adoption on desktop: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-200901-201910 https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-2009...

helpPeople 7y ago
Makes me wonder if the pro Firefox and Anti Google threads are part of the marketing ...
panpanna 7y ago
Firefox on mobile is actually pretty good and more people should use it. (At least on Android, on iOS it's just a skin on top of whatever engine apple forces down their throats).
- pkilgore 7y ago
  I started using Firefox Android a year ago and now I can't stand chrome and all the Ads! Ublock origin on Firefox mobile is a godsend.
  - vorticalbox 7y ago
    I find that firefox + ublock is still far slower than brave on android.
    - smt88 7y ago
      It isn't slower for me, and Firefox + uBlock Origin have the benefits of being FOSS (no for-profit making decisions behind the scenes) and having much better control over blocking. Brave sometimes totally fails to block Outbrain-like junk at the bottom of articles, and that seems like it must be intentional.
  - bombledmonk 7y ago
    Add on dark reader and the mobile experience is dramatically better. It's still a little clunky from a UI/UX standpoint, but still superior experience overall.
    - vangelis 7y ago
      I'd describe the mobile UX as less optimized and more straightforward than Chrome. Definitely easier to tweak your privacy settings as well.
- wcchandler 7y ago
  I use FF exclusively on my laptop. Having FF on my phone syncs my tabs and history. This is amazingly useful. Use it 3-4 times a week. If you enjoy FF I recommend signing up for their beta program. New versions come out every couple of weeks and tend to make noticeable random differences or feature enhancements.
- ahbyb 7y ago
  Firefox on mobile still hasn't implemented something as basic as enlarged touch targets for buttons in webpages. Pressing the [-] button that is next to each comment of this site using Firefox is a nightmare compared to any other webkit browser.
  - guntars 7y ago
    I wouldn’t say that it’s a problem with the browser, rather the implementation of the site’s design. The browser could of course be helpful and increase the click target size to some minimum value, but it would just make the development complicated due to yet another quirk in how browsers implement the UI, especially in cases where you need a lot of small click targets.
  - roca 7y ago
    Hmm, are you sure? Because I remember implementing that. Maybe it got disabled for some reason.
    - iggldiggl 7y ago
      https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1247095 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1247095 for why it's currently disabled, and you can toggle "ui.mouse.radius.enabled" in about:config and see whether the issues that led to this being turned off are actually relevant for your personal usage or not.
- IronWolve 7y ago
  Firefox Focus is very fast, not sure if its out for ios. I dont use it as a daily browser, but I do use it often with sites with obnoxious popups, or incognito sites I don't want to give info too.
- zamadatix 7y ago
  Even most firefox communities agree FF on Android is hot pile of garbage in terms of performance, power usage, and scrolling. The rewritten FF preview is fixing some of that but it's obviously not GA yet.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
    It is not true, FF on Android is pretty great. I use it a lot every day. It actually syncs tabs and passwords better than Chrome (and without leaking them to Google without encryption)
    - zamadatix 7y ago
      > I use it a lot every day. It actually syncs tabs and passwords better than Chrome (and without leaking them to Google without encryption) Has nothing to do with performance, but I agree - to be clear I use FF but that doesn't mean I have to justify/defend "it's slow" with other reasons I choose to use it. > It is not true, FF on Android is pretty great. https://cnet3.cbsistatic.com/img/dzNTI91dH4nch-WEKzTkp_WWza8=/2019/02/27/ac5e5ec6-6e64-40be-9d9d-af09063db4b0/brave-battery-mobile-usage.jpg https://cnet3.cbsistatic.com/img/dzNTI91dH4nch-WEKzTkp_WWza8... https://greenspector.com/assets/img/articles/2018-11-19-navigateurs/ClassementAutonomie.png https://greenspector.com/assets/img/articles/2018-11-19-navi... (Firefox Focus was on still on the WebKit base when that benchmark was done, not their own engine) Even posts about how great it is have to contain qualifiers https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/97vqb2/firefox_for_android_is_actually_much_better_than/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/97vqb2/firefox_for... "I know a lot of people complain about Firefox on Android... "es, the scrolling isn't as good as Chrome". https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/c2qovb/how_stable_and_generally_better_is_the_firefox/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/c2qovb/how_stable_... top comment " but it can have somewhat poor performance... But yeah, Android Firefox is actually being rewritten for that reason. " and only other comment "Yes you can sync. Performance is still abysmal. " https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/bxr3yc/why_is_android_firefox_so_slow/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/bxr3yc/why_is_andr... "I've used Firefox, Firefox Beta, Firefox Focus, and Firefox Nightly. They're all absolutely glacial browsers on Android." top comment is basically what I said "Firefox Preview or fenix is a promising browser . It has modern superfast Ui . Better page loading time and benchmark scores . It is currently under development (that's why it's called preview ) ." . I could go on, these aren't cherry picked they are just going straight through searches and clicking top results. These aren't rare opinions, they score decently high on forums dedicated to discussing FF. The comments on the rewrite are the complete opposite, praising performance and fixing laggy scroll, but it's not done yet. This is a constant source of discussion. If the current version of FF on Android didn't have issues they wouldn't be rewriting it.
- Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
  I dropped chrome on Android a year ago, transitioning to Firefox Mobile. Was kinda uncomfortable for a few weeks, but now I like it more than I ever liked Chrome. I also switched to using DuckDuckGo recently on all my devices, and it's been pretty great! In short: more people should be using Firefox and DDG.
godzillabrennus 7y ago
I have really tried to love the new Firefox builds on desktop due to the containers. The performance is not stellar on OS X and plugin support is tiny by comparison so I find myself drifting back to Chrome.
- jmisavage 7y ago
  Firefox 70 is suppose to have a big performance boost on Mac.
  - DCKing 7y ago
    Firefox 70 will use Core Animation on Macs for graphics rendering, just like Chrome and Safari. This will vastly improve low energy consumption/battery life, but I haven't heard anything about general UI performance? Anyway, it's supposed to be out next week [1] :) [1]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Release_Management/Calendar https://wiki.mozilla.org/Release_Management/Calendar
    - senko 7y ago
      I'm on Firefox Nightly, and performance has been noticably better in the past several months. Previously Firefox was barely usable for anything with animation on OSX. They've been making steady (if slow) progress for the past year or so, now it's subjectively on-par with Chrome and Safari for me.
    - trophycase 7y ago
      Does this mean that watching video via firefox on OSX will no longer make my machine heat like crazy?
  - tick_tock_tick 7y ago
    Firefox performance has been a joke on mac for years with "fixes" supposedly happening every few months but it's still horrible. I'll believe it when I see it.
- krzyk 7y ago
jrnichols 7y ago
at least to me, that graph shows exactly why we need to start using Firefox and not hand the entire web to Google & Chrome. That's frightening to see. I'm old enough to remember the "optimized for IE" buttons everywhere. Interesting to see that Safari has risen and is still slowly rising, even with no Windows version anymore.
- protonimitate 7y ago
  Unfortunately the majority of users don't know and/or care about the differences between browsers. Firefox to them is just a weird looking Chrome. There's an entire generation of internet users that _only_ know Chrome. I am a huge Firefox fan and use it myself, but trying to convince others to switch is a futile in my experience. Those who understand or care about the benefits are either already using it or some other Chrome alternative, everyone else doesn't want to be bothered. At this point I don't know it will take to de-throne Chrome. As much as I want to see Mozilla succeed, I don't know if it will be Firefox. I'm not sure what else they can do to make it enticing to the general populous. I just hope they don't give up and keep pumping out wonderful features.
phillc73 7y ago
Quite an interesting disparity across markets. In Germany, Firefox's desktop marketshare is above 25%. Poland, 20%. France, 16%, Spain 11%, UK and US 8%. I picked those examples as a mix of language markets, the two largest non-English speaking EU countries and an East/West EU comparison. What links Germany and Poland in Firefox adoption on desktop?
- timwaagh 7y ago
  they are neighbours, for one thing
  - phillc73 7y ago
    Well, yes, but so is Denmark and Firefox desktop marketshare in that country is down to 4.55%.
- alex_duf 7y ago
  I suspect Germany and France are much more concerned about privacy
- Semaphor 7y ago
  I’d also like to mention that Chrome only overtook FF 2017 (compared to 2014 in the US) here in Germany.
0x5002 7y ago
For non-technical people, this is not surprising, as Google shoves it down your throat when you go to their website(s). For technical folks, I really don't understand it - I'm not a web developer, so my use case might be different, but I really don't see what exactly people are missing. I've never had issues with browser performance (I use FF on mac, Windows, Linux, and (slow out of the box) development Linux VMs). People here usually complain about performance, but how does one even objectively measure that? Do people's browsers freeze up? Do websites load noticeably slower? This is a genuine question - not just a rant. As a side node, syncing to your own server is a huge feature for me - as far as I'm aware, Chrome can't do that. That + DDG as default search engine is an open alternative to Google's/Chrome's monopoly, which in my opinion should take precedence over pure convenience for the audience of HN.
- hans1729 7y ago
  I can't speak for others, but >[...] which in my opinion should take precedence over pure convenience for the audience of HN. is a no from me. Maybe I've done tech too long, but I don't feel obliged to ditch convenience for nerdcred or the feeling of authenticity or whatever your frame is. Several years ago, FF was slower -talking margins of magnitude- for me, both on windows and linux-machines. Maybe it was due to addons and whatnot, but I migrated to Chrome, and, in simple words, had no UX-related reason to switch back ever since. Chrome does what I want it to do, and I cba to switch back to FF unless I'll actually start seeing ads again. And I'm not a webdev either, for that matter.
  - pgcj_poster 7y ago
    When you say "orders of magnitude" slower, are you referring to specific measurements you made, or are you just saying that Firefox seemed a lot slower?
  - kelnos 7y ago
    > I don't feel obliged to ditch convenience for nerdcred or the feeling of authenticity or whatever your frame is. That's an awfully dismissive way of putting it given the prevailing topic of this thread: privacy. Firefox isn't perfect in that regard, but I trust Mozilla a hell of a lot more than I trust Google. Not to mention I don't want Google dictating how the web works through sheer force of market share. It's like nobody remembers the 90s and IE anymore. Do we really want a repeat of that? Obviously there's a line to be drawn: when "convenience" turns into "browsing is actually a difficult chore because FF has bugs X, Y, Z", then sure, it's of course understandable that you'd ditch FF for an alternative. But I don't think that experience should be common.
djsumdog 7y ago
You know what would be a great comparison? The amount of money in/out of the Mozilla foundation way back in their start when they had an equal 10% market share against IE6 (probably around 2003 or 2004?); along with breakdowns on what they spent it on. They're kinda in the same boat with Chrome that they were with Microsoft/IE way back in the day, but the composition of the company and user base has changed a lot!
marcosdumay 7y ago
Interestingly, that site is completely blocked by default on my browser. I think 3 of the top recommended extensions for Firefox block it (uBlock Origin, uMatrix, and NoScript). I imagine this impacts their data.
aembleton 7y ago
I wonder if statcounter is getting tracking information from Firefox users when Firefox ships with content blocking to protect privacy. I think it's on my by default now.

helpPeople 7y ago

Makes me wonder if the pro Firefox and Anti Google threads are part of the marketing ...

panpanna 7y ago

Firefox on mobile is actually pretty good and more people should use it. (At least on Android, on iOS it's just a skin on top of whatever engine apple forces down their throats).

pkilgore 7y ago
I started using Firefox Android a year ago and now I can't stand chrome and all the Ads! Ublock origin on Firefox mobile is a godsend.
- vorticalbox 7y ago
  I find that firefox + ublock is still far slower than brave on android.
  - smt88 7y ago
    It isn't slower for me, and Firefox + uBlock Origin have the benefits of being FOSS (no for-profit making decisions behind the scenes) and having much better control over blocking. Brave sometimes totally fails to block Outbrain-like junk at the bottom of articles, and that seems like it must be intentional.
- bombledmonk 7y ago
  Add on dark reader and the mobile experience is dramatically better. It's still a little clunky from a UI/UX standpoint, but still superior experience overall.
  - vangelis 7y ago
    I'd describe the mobile UX as less optimized and more straightforward than Chrome. Definitely easier to tweak your privacy settings as well.
wcchandler 7y ago
I use FF exclusively on my laptop. Having FF on my phone syncs my tabs and history. This is amazingly useful. Use it 3-4 times a week. If you enjoy FF I recommend signing up for their beta program. New versions come out every couple of weeks and tend to make noticeable random differences or feature enhancements.
ahbyb 7y ago
Firefox on mobile still hasn't implemented something as basic as enlarged touch targets for buttons in webpages. Pressing the [-] button that is next to each comment of this site using Firefox is a nightmare compared to any other webkit browser.
- guntars 7y ago
  I wouldn’t say that it’s a problem with the browser, rather the implementation of the site’s design. The browser could of course be helpful and increase the click target size to some minimum value, but it would just make the development complicated due to yet another quirk in how browsers implement the UI, especially in cases where you need a lot of small click targets.
- roca 7y ago
  Hmm, are you sure? Because I remember implementing that. Maybe it got disabled for some reason.
  - iggldiggl 7y ago
    https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1247095 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1247095 for why it's currently disabled, and you can toggle "ui.mouse.radius.enabled" in about:config and see whether the issues that led to this being turned off are actually relevant for your personal usage or not.
IronWolve 7y ago
Firefox Focus is very fast, not sure if its out for ios. I dont use it as a daily browser, but I do use it often with sites with obnoxious popups, or incognito sites I don't want to give info too.
zamadatix 7y ago
Even most firefox communities agree FF on Android is hot pile of garbage in terms of performance, power usage, and scrolling. The rewritten FF preview is fixing some of that but it's obviously not GA yet.
- Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
  It is not true, FF on Android is pretty great. I use it a lot every day. It actually syncs tabs and passwords better than Chrome (and without leaking them to Google without encryption)
  - zamadatix 7y ago
    > I use it a lot every day. It actually syncs tabs and passwords better than Chrome (and without leaking them to Google without encryption) Has nothing to do with performance, but I agree - to be clear I use FF but that doesn't mean I have to justify/defend "it's slow" with other reasons I choose to use it. > It is not true, FF on Android is pretty great. https://cnet3.cbsistatic.com/img/dzNTI91dH4nch-WEKzTkp_WWza8=/2019/02/27/ac5e5ec6-6e64-40be-9d9d-af09063db4b0/brave-battery-mobile-usage.jpg https://cnet3.cbsistatic.com/img/dzNTI91dH4nch-WEKzTkp_WWza8... https://greenspector.com/assets/img/articles/2018-11-19-navigateurs/ClassementAutonomie.png https://greenspector.com/assets/img/articles/2018-11-19-navi... (Firefox Focus was on still on the WebKit base when that benchmark was done, not their own engine) Even posts about how great it is have to contain qualifiers https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/97vqb2/firefox_for_android_is_actually_much_better_than/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/97vqb2/firefox_for... "I know a lot of people complain about Firefox on Android... "es, the scrolling isn't as good as Chrome". https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/c2qovb/how_stable_and_generally_better_is_the_firefox/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/c2qovb/how_stable_... top comment " but it can have somewhat poor performance... But yeah, Android Firefox is actually being rewritten for that reason. " and only other comment "Yes you can sync. Performance is still abysmal. " https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/bxr3yc/why_is_android_firefox_so_slow/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/bxr3yc/why_is_andr... "I've used Firefox, Firefox Beta, Firefox Focus, and Firefox Nightly. They're all absolutely glacial browsers on Android." top comment is basically what I said "Firefox Preview or fenix is a promising browser . It has modern superfast Ui . Better page loading time and benchmark scores . It is currently under development (that's why it's called preview ) ." . I could go on, these aren't cherry picked they are just going straight through searches and clicking top results. These aren't rare opinions, they score decently high on forums dedicated to discussing FF. The comments on the rewrite are the complete opposite, praising performance and fixing laggy scroll, but it's not done yet. This is a constant source of discussion. If the current version of FF on Android didn't have issues they wouldn't be rewriting it.
Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
I dropped chrome on Android a year ago, transitioning to Firefox Mobile. Was kinda uncomfortable for a few weeks, but now I like it more than I ever liked Chrome. I also switched to using DuckDuckGo recently on all my devices, and it's been pretty great! In short: more people should be using Firefox and DDG.

godzillabrennus 7y ago

I have really tried to love the new Firefox builds on desktop due to the containers. The performance is not stellar on OS X and plugin support is tiny by comparison so I find myself drifting back to Chrome.

jmisavage 7y ago
Firefox 70 is suppose to have a big performance boost on Mac.
- DCKing 7y ago
  Firefox 70 will use Core Animation on Macs for graphics rendering, just like Chrome and Safari. This will vastly improve low energy consumption/battery life, but I haven't heard anything about general UI performance? Anyway, it's supposed to be out next week [1] :) [1]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Release_Management/Calendar https://wiki.mozilla.org/Release_Management/Calendar
  - senko 7y ago
    I'm on Firefox Nightly, and performance has been noticably better in the past several months. Previously Firefox was barely usable for anything with animation on OSX. They've been making steady (if slow) progress for the past year or so, now it's subjectively on-par with Chrome and Safari for me.
  - trophycase 7y ago
    Does this mean that watching video via firefox on OSX will no longer make my machine heat like crazy?
- tick_tock_tick 7y ago
  Firefox performance has been a joke on mac for years with "fixes" supposedly happening every few months but it's still horrible. I'll believe it when I see it.
krzyk 7y ago

jrnichols 7y ago

at least to me, that graph shows exactly why we need to start using Firefox and not hand the entire web to Google & Chrome. That's frightening to see. I'm old enough to remember the "optimized for IE" buttons everywhere. Interesting to see that Safari has risen and is still slowly rising, even with no Windows version anymore.

protonimitate 7y ago
Unfortunately the majority of users don't know and/or care about the differences between browsers. Firefox to them is just a weird looking Chrome. There's an entire generation of internet users that _only_ know Chrome. I am a huge Firefox fan and use it myself, but trying to convince others to switch is a futile in my experience. Those who understand or care about the benefits are either already using it or some other Chrome alternative, everyone else doesn't want to be bothered. At this point I don't know it will take to de-throne Chrome. As much as I want to see Mozilla succeed, I don't know if it will be Firefox. I'm not sure what else they can do to make it enticing to the general populous. I just hope they don't give up and keep pumping out wonderful features.

phillc73 7y ago

Quite an interesting disparity across markets. In Germany, Firefox's desktop marketshare is above 25%. Poland, 20%. France, 16%, Spain 11%, UK and US 8%. I picked those examples as a mix of language markets, the two largest non-English speaking EU countries and an East/West EU comparison. What links Germany and Poland in Firefox adoption on desktop?

timwaagh 7y ago
they are neighbours, for one thing
- phillc73 7y ago
  Well, yes, but so is Denmark and Firefox desktop marketshare in that country is down to 4.55%.
alex_duf 7y ago
I suspect Germany and France are much more concerned about privacy
Semaphor 7y ago
I’d also like to mention that Chrome only overtook FF 2017 (compared to 2014 in the US) here in Germany.

0x5002 7y ago

For non-technical people, this is not surprising, as Google shoves it down your throat when you go to their website(s). For technical folks, I really don't understand it - I'm not a web developer, so my use case might be different, but I really don't see what exactly people are missing. I've never had issues with browser performance (I use FF on mac, Windows, Linux, and (slow out of the box) development Linux VMs). People here usually complain about performance, but how does one even objectively measure that? Do people's browsers freeze up? Do websites load noticeably slower? This is a genuine question - not just a rant. As a side node, syncing to your own server is a huge feature for me - as far as I'm aware, Chrome can't do that. That + DDG as default search engine is an open alternative to Google's/Chrome's monopoly, which in my opinion should take precedence over pure convenience for the audience of HN.

hans1729 7y ago
I can't speak for others, but >[...] which in my opinion should take precedence over pure convenience for the audience of HN. is a no from me. Maybe I've done tech too long, but I don't feel obliged to ditch convenience for nerdcred or the feeling of authenticity or whatever your frame is. Several years ago, FF was slower -talking margins of magnitude- for me, both on windows and linux-machines. Maybe it was due to addons and whatnot, but I migrated to Chrome, and, in simple words, had no UX-related reason to switch back ever since. Chrome does what I want it to do, and I cba to switch back to FF unless I'll actually start seeing ads again. And I'm not a webdev either, for that matter.
- pgcj_poster 7y ago
  When you say "orders of magnitude" slower, are you referring to specific measurements you made, or are you just saying that Firefox seemed a lot slower?
- kelnos 7y ago
  > I don't feel obliged to ditch convenience for nerdcred or the feeling of authenticity or whatever your frame is. That's an awfully dismissive way of putting it given the prevailing topic of this thread: privacy. Firefox isn't perfect in that regard, but I trust Mozilla a hell of a lot more than I trust Google. Not to mention I don't want Google dictating how the web works through sheer force of market share. It's like nobody remembers the 90s and IE anymore. Do we really want a repeat of that? Obviously there's a line to be drawn: when "convenience" turns into "browsing is actually a difficult chore because FF has bugs X, Y, Z", then sure, it's of course understandable that you'd ditch FF for an alternative. But I don't think that experience should be common.

djsumdog 7y ago

You know what would be a great comparison? The amount of money in/out of the Mozilla foundation way back in their start when they had an equal 10% market share against IE6 (probably around 2003 or 2004?); along with breakdowns on what they spent it on. They're kinda in the same boat with Chrome that they were with Microsoft/IE way back in the day, but the composition of the company and user base has changed a lot!

marcosdumay 7y ago

Interestingly, that site is completely blocked by default on my browser. I think 3 of the top recommended extensions for Firefox block it (uBlock Origin, uMatrix, and NoScript). I imagine this impacts their data.

aembleton 7y ago

I wonder if statcounter is getting tracking information from Firefox users when Firefox ships with content blocking to protect privacy. I think it's on my by default now.