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Is there even enough mass market adoption for such an exodus at this point? Firefox has basically ceded its mass market usage to chrome. From my subjective ex

Is there even enough mass market adoption for such an exodus at this point? Firefox has basically ceded its mass market usage to chrome. From my subjective experience, the only people I see using it today are technical.

ForHackernews 6y ago
People keep claiming this, but how has Mozilla 'ceded' anything? Firefox became somewhat popular at a time when the big player was Internet Explorer, and it was manifestly terrible. As soon as Google started heavily promoting Chrome (which is, whatever else you might say about it, vastly superior to IE6) people switched to that. What could Mozilla realistically do to compete against the world's largest marketing company pushing their browser?
- pferde 6y ago
  By consistently and continually molding Firefox to be as similar to Chrome as possible instead of offering something different enough to present a meaningful choice. Of course most users took the path of least resistance if the choice was between Chrome and pretty-much-also-Chrome.
  - sgc 6y ago
    I think FFs loss of market share of course has been affected by advertising, but mainly by their own mistakes. I don't think the similarities to Chrome (which were not really so great for a long time) were the main driver. I tried to hold onto FF for as long as possible for ideological reasons, and then for some years when I couldn't justify it because of just terrible performance, I used Chromium. They had a much, much better plugin market / platform for a long time and that too was a larger part of the draw that differentiated them. I switched back to FF as soon as I heard they had dealt with most of their speed issues in an update but, extremely reluctantly, I have been considering whether they are any better than Chromium at this point with the privacy / ad shenanigans that really seem to insist on reappearing in different ways with great consistency lately. The recent monetization debacle has frankly been disheartening. So the main points for me are that they failed on speed (which drove most people I know who switched to Chrome) and now on culture/honesty.
    - whatshisface 6y ago
      You might want to keep an eye on the Firefox tracking forks: https://librewolf-community.gitlab.io/ https://librewolf-community.gitlab.io/ https://github.com/intika/Librefox https://github.com/intika/Librefox
    - pferde 6y ago
      I still use Firefox and only Firefox, as I still see it as the lesser evil, while being performant enough (I never really noticed any significant slowness that people keep harping about), but Mozilla is making it harder and harder every year. Still, I am nowhere near wanting to switch to a Google product - Firefox would have to become really bad for me to consider that - and I see no other browser even remotely close to replacing Firefox for me. It's still "good enough". I even keep an ancient Firefox version installed in /opt, because I need it to run a small proprietary Java applet for work, but that's another topic. :)
      - Izkata 6y ago
        > I never really noticed any significant slowness that people keep harping about > /opt From what I understand, the slowness was primarily on Mac (a high-dpi rendering issue) and sometimes Windows (don't recall if there was a specific issue or just several small things that added up). On linux these issues tended not to exist, or at least be nowhere near as bad.
      - sgc 6y ago
        It was very bad. I am a stubborn old fart and did not want to change, but it pushed me over the edge. I was using Windows at the time.
  - kmeisthax 6y ago
    Is it even possible to be "different enough" from Chrome without also being a significantly worse browser? Becoming "as similar to Chrome as possible" is also the thing most browser users want. e.g. Multiprocess broke the XUL add-on model, but it also means dramatically better browser stability.
    - pferde 6y ago
      Multiprocess was a step in the right direction, of course - nobody likes it when one crashed tab brings down everything else with it. But they kept on removing various cool and useful features just because their telemetry showed that they were only used by a small percentage of users, claiming that they need to save money and focus on things people use the most. Naturally, that leads to the world's blankiest blank of a browser, to borrow a bit of Futurama vernacular.
      - Izkata 6y ago
        Don't forget Mr. Robot and integrating Pocket instead of having it as an add-on.
- coliveira 6y ago
  This is another case of people blaming the victim. The monopoly case against Google is there to show that it has stifled competition, including Firefox. Don't get distracted by the fact that Google is paying Firefox, in fact they're causing much more damage through their monopolist practices than whatever amount they're paying.
berkes 6y ago
> Firefox has basically ceded its mass market usage to chrome. Is that so? What are the numbers? And how do they look absolute? Is there an absolute decline in firefox use? Or just a relative one? Which of those really matter?
- devenblake 6y ago
  Relative numbers: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worldwide/#monthly-201509-202009 https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl... Absolute numbers: https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity The numbers are worse when you look at American data alone. It looks like Firefox is slowly shedding users. Probably because of Mozilla's questionable practices recently (the enlarged awesome bar, the layoffs, etc).
  - berkes 6y ago
    Maybe I am missing a zoom function, or the visualisation is poor, but I see an almost flat curve, in some cases even slightly upwards (hours per day, probably Covid/work-from-home effect?). US data does show a very small downtrend on some graphs, but so small, that it hardly counts as "trend", IMO.
    - devenblake 6y ago
      According to statcounter in September 2016 Firefox had a roughly 15% market share. It now has roughly 9%. In America it's 13.7% down to 7.1%. The monthly active users chart for Firefox shows that the last time there were 250M+ active users was April 2019 and the last time there were 240M+ active was October of that year. The graph as presented shows a very slight curve downward, it would be more clear if the Y axis started at 200M (which would however bring about its own caveats - data visualization sucks).
    - gilrain 6y ago
      Firefox usage is flat or slightly trending down. However, overall internet usage grows each year, which means their market share is shrinking.

ForHackernews 6y ago

People keep claiming this, but how has Mozilla 'ceded' anything? Firefox became somewhat popular at a time when the big player was Internet Explorer, and it was manifestly terrible. As soon as Google started heavily promoting Chrome (which is, whatever else you might say about it, vastly superior to IE6) people switched to that. What could Mozilla realistically do to compete against the world's largest marketing company pushing their browser?

pferde 6y ago
By consistently and continually molding Firefox to be as similar to Chrome as possible instead of offering something different enough to present a meaningful choice. Of course most users took the path of least resistance if the choice was between Chrome and pretty-much-also-Chrome.
- sgc 6y ago
  I think FFs loss of market share of course has been affected by advertising, but mainly by their own mistakes. I don't think the similarities to Chrome (which were not really so great for a long time) were the main driver. I tried to hold onto FF for as long as possible for ideological reasons, and then for some years when I couldn't justify it because of just terrible performance, I used Chromium. They had a much, much better plugin market / platform for a long time and that too was a larger part of the draw that differentiated them. I switched back to FF as soon as I heard they had dealt with most of their speed issues in an update but, extremely reluctantly, I have been considering whether they are any better than Chromium at this point with the privacy / ad shenanigans that really seem to insist on reappearing in different ways with great consistency lately. The recent monetization debacle has frankly been disheartening. So the main points for me are that they failed on speed (which drove most people I know who switched to Chrome) and now on culture/honesty.
  - whatshisface 6y ago
    You might want to keep an eye on the Firefox tracking forks: https://librewolf-community.gitlab.io/ https://librewolf-community.gitlab.io/ https://github.com/intika/Librefox https://github.com/intika/Librefox
  - pferde 6y ago
    I still use Firefox and only Firefox, as I still see it as the lesser evil, while being performant enough (I never really noticed any significant slowness that people keep harping about), but Mozilla is making it harder and harder every year. Still, I am nowhere near wanting to switch to a Google product - Firefox would have to become really bad for me to consider that - and I see no other browser even remotely close to replacing Firefox for me. It's still "good enough". I even keep an ancient Firefox version installed in /opt, because I need it to run a small proprietary Java applet for work, but that's another topic. :)
    - Izkata 6y ago
      > I never really noticed any significant slowness that people keep harping about > /opt From what I understand, the slowness was primarily on Mac (a high-dpi rendering issue) and sometimes Windows (don't recall if there was a specific issue or just several small things that added up). On linux these issues tended not to exist, or at least be nowhere near as bad.
    - sgc 6y ago
      It was very bad. I am a stubborn old fart and did not want to change, but it pushed me over the edge. I was using Windows at the time.
- kmeisthax 6y ago
  Is it even possible to be "different enough" from Chrome without also being a significantly worse browser? Becoming "as similar to Chrome as possible" is also the thing most browser users want. e.g. Multiprocess broke the XUL add-on model, but it also means dramatically better browser stability.
  - pferde 6y ago
    Multiprocess was a step in the right direction, of course - nobody likes it when one crashed tab brings down everything else with it. But they kept on removing various cool and useful features just because their telemetry showed that they were only used by a small percentage of users, claiming that they need to save money and focus on things people use the most. Naturally, that leads to the world's blankiest blank of a browser, to borrow a bit of Futurama vernacular.
    - Izkata 6y ago
      Don't forget Mr. Robot and integrating Pocket instead of having it as an add-on.
coliveira 6y ago
This is another case of people blaming the victim. The monopoly case against Google is there to show that it has stifled competition, including Firefox. Don't get distracted by the fact that Google is paying Firefox, in fact they're causing much more damage through their monopolist practices than whatever amount they're paying.

berkes 6y ago

> Firefox has basically ceded its mass market usage to chrome. Is that so? What are the numbers? And how do they look absolute? Is there an absolute decline in firefox use? Or just a relative one? Which of those really matter?

devenblake 6y ago
Relative numbers: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worldwide/#monthly-201509-202009 https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl... Absolute numbers: https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity The numbers are worse when you look at American data alone. It looks like Firefox is slowly shedding users. Probably because of Mozilla's questionable practices recently (the enlarged awesome bar, the layoffs, etc).
- berkes 6y ago
  Maybe I am missing a zoom function, or the visualisation is poor, but I see an almost flat curve, in some cases even slightly upwards (hours per day, probably Covid/work-from-home effect?). US data does show a very small downtrend on some graphs, but so small, that it hardly counts as "trend", IMO.
  - devenblake 6y ago
    According to statcounter in September 2016 Firefox had a roughly 15% market share. It now has roughly 9%. In America it's 13.7% down to 7.1%. The monthly active users chart for Firefox shows that the last time there were 250M+ active users was April 2019 and the last time there were 240M+ active was October of that year. The graph as presented shows a very slight curve downward, it would be more clear if the Y axis started at 200M (which would however bring about its own caveats - data visualization sucks).
  - gilrain 6y ago
    Firefox usage is flat or slightly trending down. However, overall internet usage grows each year, which means their market share is shrinking.