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I hate to break it to you developers and tech people out there, but Firefox isn't used by consumers. It has become a niche web browser for you guys. I've been a

I hate to break it to you developers and tech people out there, but Firefox isn't used by consumers. It has become a niche web browser for you guys. I've been a developer for 20 years and briefly used it in 2009-2010. Then Chrome took over and I switched to what my customers use. I have zero reasons to use Firefox. I do feel bad about since it is dear to the community of developers I am part of. In the end though, and logically, I don't have any incentive to use Firefox. Mozilla in my mind is a lab company with one product to monetize it: Firefox. At the end of the day though if you're product can't bring in enough money, you need to cut. Seems to be what's happening.

veddox 6y ago
> Firefox isn't used by consumers Though there are big regional differences: It still has a 13% market share in Germany... 22% if you only look at the desktop. Worldwide, across all platforms, it's 4%. (https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share)
chrismorgan 6y ago
I happen to be staying with a non-technical man of around retiring age at present. Yesterday he had his laptop returned from a service which included an OS reinstall. After that, Firefox was installed and Chrome was not; he knows of Firefox, but has been a Chrome user for whatever reason. He observed: “Firefox? But no Google. I suppose they’ve installed Firefox and didn’t reinstall Google. Hmm. Firefox. Is it any good?” I responded: “well, I use Firefox”. So now he’s using Firefox and having no difficulty. (I then watched him hunt-and-peck “www.google.com” into the address bar. I told him that he didn’t need to do that, he could just type his search term straight away. In this case, he wanted to access Gmail. I despair sometimes, really I do. But this all matched what he’d been doing in Chrome, it wasn’t anything specific to Firefox.) The observations here: 1. Most casual users don’t actually care which browser they use. (Citation needed, to be sure, but among casual users, I suspect it’s the substantial majority.) 2. Corollary: often I have seen cases where a different browser is installed, and the user just accepts it and keeps going. This has been used most parasitically by Google, bundling their browser with other things (an obnoxious practice in the industry at large that is I think not as common as it used to be, but is still widespread in certain niches). A great many users that have Chrome don’t even know how it ended up on their computer; it just… became their default browser at some point. 3. Google as a whole has been extremely underhanded in its marketing and positioning of Chrome, abusing their position of strength in one industry in order to dominate another. There has been some grumbling about this in legal circles, but not a great deal of action; yet if current trends continue, antitrust lawsuits will assuredly come. He wasn’t calling it “Chrome”, he was calling it “Google”. Google search, Google mail, Google browser, Google horizontals.
esarbe 6y ago
If you've been a web developer for 20 years, then you remember the IE5 and IE6 times. Total vendor lock-in. It was hell. You have a reason to use Firefox.
- ok_coo 6y ago
  I remember wasting days, weeks of my life making things display correctly in IE6. We're going down the same path again and it makes me sad.
Grumbledour 6y ago
I think it is actually the other way around. We technically minded people are mostly the tastemakers on this kind of topics. I know a lot of "normal" people using Firefox with privacy add-ons, mostly because someone knowledgeable told them to. I have often seen these people very receptive when I tell them why I deem Firefox a better Choice then Chrome. I do however see no way to convince my coworkers to switch. And look at hacker news threads on this topic. It's always some variation of "I don't like google collecting everything I do but Mozilla did this one thing once so I can never ever use Firefox!" So if we, the people who are supposed to be in the know don't recommend it, why would anyone who is not in the know want to use it?
- acephal 6y ago
  I don't think this is particularly true in the case of Chrome. In the case of FF, maybe, but Chrome had a well-oiled marketing machine behind it. I was volunteer coaching a HS debate team, none of whom had any interest in "tech", and they all of my students switched to Chrome from FF/IE with zero input from a supposed tastemaker like myself, and Chrome had no extensions/adblock on launch, which kept me from adopting it.
- pessimizer 6y ago
  > Mozilla did this one thing once Nobody is saying this.
  - Izkata 6y ago
    I think some on here did after the Mr. Robot fiasco.

veddox 6y ago

> Firefox isn't used by consumers Though there are big regional differences: It still has a 13% market share in Germany... 22% if you only look at the desktop. Worldwide, across all platforms, it's 4%. (https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share)

chrismorgan 6y ago

I happen to be staying with a non-technical man of around retiring age at present. Yesterday he had his laptop returned from a service which included an OS reinstall. After that, Firefox was installed and Chrome was not; he knows of Firefox, but has been a Chrome user for whatever reason. He observed: “Firefox? But no Google. I suppose they’ve installed Firefox and didn’t reinstall Google. Hmm. Firefox. Is it any good?” I responded: “well, I use Firefox”. So now he’s using Firefox and having no difficulty. (I then watched him hunt-and-peck “www.google.com” into the address bar. I told him that he didn’t need to do that, he could just type his search term straight away. In this case, he wanted to access Gmail. I despair sometimes, really I do. But this all matched what he’d been doing in Chrome, it wasn’t anything specific to Firefox.) The observations here: 1. Most casual users don’t actually care which browser they use. (Citation needed, to be sure, but among casual users, I suspect it’s the substantial majority.) 2. Corollary: often I have seen cases where a different browser is installed, and the user just accepts it and keeps going. This has been used most parasitically by Google, bundling their browser with other things (an obnoxious practice in the industry at large that is I think not as common as it used to be, but is still widespread in certain niches). A great many users that have Chrome don’t even know how it ended up on their computer; it just… became their default browser at some point. 3. Google as a whole has been extremely underhanded in its marketing and positioning of Chrome, abusing their position of strength in one industry in order to dominate another. There has been some grumbling about this in legal circles, but not a great deal of action; yet if current trends continue, antitrust lawsuits will assuredly come. He wasn’t calling it “Chrome”, he was calling it “Google”. Google search, Google mail, Google browser, Google horizontals.

esarbe 6y ago

If you've been a web developer for 20 years, then you remember the IE5 and IE6 times. Total vendor lock-in. It was hell. You have a reason to use Firefox.

ok_coo 6y ago
I remember wasting days, weeks of my life making things display correctly in IE6. We're going down the same path again and it makes me sad.

Grumbledour 6y ago

I think it is actually the other way around. We technically minded people are mostly the tastemakers on this kind of topics. I know a lot of "normal" people using Firefox with privacy add-ons, mostly because someone knowledgeable told them to. I have often seen these people very receptive when I tell them why I deem Firefox a better Choice then Chrome. I do however see no way to convince my coworkers to switch. And look at hacker news threads on this topic. It's always some variation of "I don't like google collecting everything I do but Mozilla did this one thing once so I can never ever use Firefox!" So if we, the people who are supposed to be in the know don't recommend it, why would anyone who is not in the know want to use it?

acephal 6y ago
I don't think this is particularly true in the case of Chrome. In the case of FF, maybe, but Chrome had a well-oiled marketing machine behind it. I was volunteer coaching a HS debate team, none of whom had any interest in "tech", and they all of my students switched to Chrome from FF/IE with zero input from a supposed tastemaker like myself, and Chrome had no extensions/adblock on launch, which kept me from adopting it.
pessimizer 6y ago
> Mozilla did this one thing once Nobody is saying this.
- Izkata 6y ago
  I think some on here did after the Mr. Robot fiasco.