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Firefox had been a bad browser for years, the only people I ever meet who use it heavily are tech enthusiasts and privacy activists. If nobody is choosing your

Firefox had been a bad browser for years, the only people I ever meet who use it heavily are tech enthusiasts and privacy activists. If nobody is choosing your browser for practical reasons then you've failed to make a useful browser but pointing this out only ever results in jeering and being told some token line like "Compromise means the erosion of privacy!". This is what that philosophy gets you and down the line I expect the real situation will be Firefox in 4th since Brave has been gaining momentum too.

abdullahkhalids 7y ago
Edge, IE and Safari have their shares because they are the default already installed browser on the main OSes, used either because people like them or are too technically illiterate to install a potentially better browser. Chrome has a huge share because it is heavily advertised on some of the most used websites in the world. The others like Firefox, Brave, etc have almost zero advertising budget and rely on word of mouth and third party kindness to be known. The fact that millions to hundreds of millions of people use them, despite knowing the alternatives, is testament to how good they are. 55% of traditional PCs have Windows 10 on them [1], yet Edge only has a 7% share of the browser market specifies how good Edge is. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_10#Market_share_and_sales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_10#Market_share_and_sa...
paulryanrogers 7y ago
> If nobody is choosing your browser for practical reasons... Is that really the case or is it marketing and network effects. For a time IE had a majority share and it took a while for superior browsers to overcome that. There is also marginal utility in switching as all browsers converge on the same set of user-visible capabilities.
- djdeusudufy 7y ago
  Products require marketing to succeed, the only exception is when there is a massive utility gap like there was when Firefox started to displace IE. Not every browser needs to be a top 3 mainstream browser but you don't get to say that you're a browser for the masses and then go cheap on marketing without having some incredible utility gains in development. Firefox currently does not have the same utility advantage over its competition that it did when it went head to head with IE.
rumanator 7y ago
> Firefox had been a bad browser for years Honestly I have no idea how someone can honestly arrive at this conclusion. I have been continuously using both Chrome and Firefox and I'm yet to notice any practical difference between them. I'm curious, in your opinion what's the worse thing about Firefox?
- djdeusudufy 7y ago
  Sure. Firefox doesn't work with acceptable universality first and foremost, I'd never use Firefox to take an online test at University for example because the one in a million chance it has a hiccup isn't worth the risk when using Chrome or Edge is riskless. The way that situation arise may not be Mozilla's fault but it doesn't change the reality. There are ways to make Firefox more reliable in terms of hiccups on websites but we're past the point of asking users to do extra work being acceptable if they're not your employee. Perhaps relatedly, Firefox's features for syncing across devices are unappealing because there aren't terribly many Mozilla products that I care about whereas most people have a Gmail and many also have Microsoft accounts. I can't imagine the circumstance that would lead me to have a Mozilla account already and so it's just one more thing to have to think about in an ecosystem where I have other options. Extension support is stronger in Firefox but most users aren't heavy extension users and if they are it's probably an adblocker. Ad-blocking is a lot less special now since most of the competing browser's have acceptable adblock options whereas once upon a time Firefox was the only choice if you wanted a not awful internet experience. Edge pays you to use it, Brave does this too but have yet to see the growth of Edge yet I feel it's worth acknowledging because this might just be the cost of trying to genuinely compete with Chrome. Chrome doesn't pay but it has little reason to since it's Chrome. Finally, Firefox's mobile browser is terrible. Chrome is similarly terrible in terms of UI but Edge and Brave are light-years ahead in terms of having a layout suitable for a mobile device. It's worth noting this might change in the future since Firefox Lite and Firefox Focus both have much better UIs for mobile than the flagship mobile browser but until the flagship catches up those are just novelties for alternate markets. I'm sure Firefox is still the 'ethical' browser and it runs fine for non-critical web usage, but the market is past that being enough to make a web browser stand out in the mainstream. Nobody wants to manage two web browsers when they could make due with one and so it makes the most sense to just use the critical task browser for eveything. Related to this, most people don't have the extreme outlook on browser ethics that the privacy movement does and so Firefox doesn't offer them anything in that regard anyway. It flies on hacker news to handwave this part as a matter of normies just not knowing better (informed consent arguments) but the reality is that no one has made a convincing argument for demonstrating how all of this is actually damaging the mainstream users and the topics are old enough that there's been plenty of time to come up with persuasive arguments Summarized, Firefox's strengths are things that mainly appeal to particular ideologies. For people who don't share those ideologies it doesn't offer anything over the other browsers and I've seen little that suggests Firefox will be able to overcome this hurdle since its identity these days is built on being the private/ethical browser.

abdullahkhalids 7y ago

Edge, IE and Safari have their shares because they are the default already installed browser on the main OSes, used either because people like them or are too technically illiterate to install a potentially better browser. Chrome has a huge share because it is heavily advertised on some of the most used websites in the world. The others like Firefox, Brave, etc have almost zero advertising budget and rely on word of mouth and third party kindness to be known. The fact that millions to hundreds of millions of people use them, despite knowing the alternatives, is testament to how good they are. 55% of traditional PCs have Windows 10 on them [1], yet Edge only has a 7% share of the browser market specifies how good Edge is. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_10#Market_share_and_sales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_10#Market_share_and_sa...

paulryanrogers 7y ago

> If nobody is choosing your browser for practical reasons... Is that really the case or is it marketing and network effects. For a time IE had a majority share and it took a while for superior browsers to overcome that. There is also marginal utility in switching as all browsers converge on the same set of user-visible capabilities.

djdeusudufy 7y ago
Products require marketing to succeed, the only exception is when there is a massive utility gap like there was when Firefox started to displace IE. Not every browser needs to be a top 3 mainstream browser but you don't get to say that you're a browser for the masses and then go cheap on marketing without having some incredible utility gains in development. Firefox currently does not have the same utility advantage over its competition that it did when it went head to head with IE.

rumanator 7y ago

> Firefox had been a bad browser for years Honestly I have no idea how someone can honestly arrive at this conclusion. I have been continuously using both Chrome and Firefox and I'm yet to notice any practical difference between them. I'm curious, in your opinion what's the worse thing about Firefox?

djdeusudufy 7y ago
Sure. Firefox doesn't work with acceptable universality first and foremost, I'd never use Firefox to take an online test at University for example because the one in a million chance it has a hiccup isn't worth the risk when using Chrome or Edge is riskless. The way that situation arise may not be Mozilla's fault but it doesn't change the reality. There are ways to make Firefox more reliable in terms of hiccups on websites but we're past the point of asking users to do extra work being acceptable if they're not your employee. Perhaps relatedly, Firefox's features for syncing across devices are unappealing because there aren't terribly many Mozilla products that I care about whereas most people have a Gmail and many also have Microsoft accounts. I can't imagine the circumstance that would lead me to have a Mozilla account already and so it's just one more thing to have to think about in an ecosystem where I have other options. Extension support is stronger in Firefox but most users aren't heavy extension users and if they are it's probably an adblocker. Ad-blocking is a lot less special now since most of the competing browser's have acceptable adblock options whereas once upon a time Firefox was the only choice if you wanted a not awful internet experience. Edge pays you to use it, Brave does this too but have yet to see the growth of Edge yet I feel it's worth acknowledging because this might just be the cost of trying to genuinely compete with Chrome. Chrome doesn't pay but it has little reason to since it's Chrome. Finally, Firefox's mobile browser is terrible. Chrome is similarly terrible in terms of UI but Edge and Brave are light-years ahead in terms of having a layout suitable for a mobile device. It's worth noting this might change in the future since Firefox Lite and Firefox Focus both have much better UIs for mobile than the flagship mobile browser but until the flagship catches up those are just novelties for alternate markets. I'm sure Firefox is still the 'ethical' browser and it runs fine for non-critical web usage, but the market is past that being enough to make a web browser stand out in the mainstream. Nobody wants to manage two web browsers when they could make due with one and so it makes the most sense to just use the critical task browser for eveything. Related to this, most people don't have the extreme outlook on browser ethics that the privacy movement does and so Firefox doesn't offer them anything in that regard anyway. It flies on hacker news to handwave this part as a matter of normies just not knowing better (informed consent arguments) but the reality is that no one has made a convincing argument for demonstrating how all of this is actually damaging the mainstream users and the topics are old enough that there's been plenty of time to come up with persuasive arguments Summarized, Firefox's strengths are things that mainly appeal to particular ideologies. For people who don't share those ideologies it doesn't offer anything over the other browsers and I've seen little that suggests Firefox will be able to overcome this hurdle since its identity these days is built on being the private/ethical browser.