6 ms·

To me it's surprising and unsettling to see how small the market share of Firefox has become.

by blux 5y ago

forbiddenvoid 5y ago
Why is that surprising? Firefox doesn't have a narrative that's compelling for the typical user and I'm not sure it's ever had one that was really viable. 'Not-google' really isn't good enough for the average user, and no amount of 'we care about your privacy' is going to convince the common user that Mozilla _does_, in fact, care about their privacy. The reality is that most typical users care about their privacy a lot less than we might expect or want. That's probably not a great sign for society in general, but I think it's the truth.
- irrational 5y ago
  > Firefox doesn't have a narrative that's compelling for the typical user Firefox doesn't sell you off to the highest bidder?
  - d12bb 5y ago
    Oh, they absolutely do, like 90% of the funding for Mozilla comes from Google.
    - irrational 5y ago
      Google just does that so they don't get broken up. But that doesn't mean Firefox is sending your data to Google.
      - account42 5y ago
        It does exatcly mean that Firefox is (by default) sending your searches to Google. Mozilla also uses Google Analytics on their websites and keep testing the waters with putting ads right into the browser. Users are absolutely justified in not trusting Mozilla's claims about caring for privacy.
  - forbiddenvoid 5y ago
    My point is that far fewer people care about this than one might expect. And a non-trivial number probably don't believe it anyway.
- brimble 5y ago
  They needed to differentiate themselves years ago. The value prop in the early days was "very light & fast, blocks popups, has tabs, is totally free with no ads". It was a no-brainer to install it on every barely-technical relative's computer a nerd could get their hands on. The only thing that approached it and wasn't incredibly obscure was Opera, and that either cost money or displayed ads. FF is no longer "very light & fast" (it may no longer be possible to attain that and actually support modern web browsing—Safari is the only mainstream browser that's even close, AFAIK) and does have ads. Their various interface redesigns have made it confusing as hell to my parents. Old-school popups are handled well enough by ~every browser and they just about all use tabs and have for over a decade. Meanwhile they've added... what? To differentiate them? Plugins. But now those are the same as Chrome's. Very good dev tools—but now those are available elsewhere, too. They needed to go all-in on something radical years ago to have a long-term shot at relevance. Decentralized social networking or chat built-in to the browser. Aggressive built-in ad blocking & unique user-empowering controls. More, not fewer, non-HTTP Internet protocols built in. Something. And clearly not Pocket. Now I don't think their market share's big enough for even something like that that to save them. In fact now it'd likely just kill them even faster.
  - heavyset_go 5y ago
    > FF is no longer "very light & fast" I beg to differ. It's certainly faster and uses less resources than even Ungoogled Chromium on the same machine.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Waterluvian 5y ago
Hypothetically: I don’t care to burn calories on being an “activist.” I just want to visit the sites I visit and get on with my life. Sell me on Firefox.
- irrational 5y ago
  It works great (in my experience) and doesn't sell your privacy to the highest bidder.
- tejtm 5y ago
  Use Firefox and if a site does not work just move on with your life. It passively improves our future to squander our attention on the less egregious actors.
  - lelanthran 5y ago
    > Use Firefox and if a site does not work just move on with your life. It passively improves our future to squander our attention on the less egregious actors. I do this, and I do not remember the last time I actually had to 'move on' from a site because it did not work. Anyone wants to start a list of sites that do not work with FF? I am genuinely curious which sites these are that do not work with FF.
- imachine1980_ 5y ago
  Firefox is sometime a good tool to have for webdev, in some case Firefox(desktop)(i think i need to us a camera) work more similar than chrome(desktop) in comparison too chrome(android), i will totally pay money for a tool-set web development of quality but as browser most advance things use some quirks of chromium to work, isnt as secure as other people say you need to twist thing here and there and download extensions, in general is more worth use brave, if you really want to have control use librewolf.net is a fork of Firefox focus on privacy and work out of the box
- MiddleEndian 5y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29894463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29894463 My reasons for using Firefox over Chrome, unrelated to any form of activism. Also backspace and shift+backspace still work for back and forward.
filoeleven 5y ago
Firefox was in its prime when it was the main competitor to IE. It was just a no-brainer for users: it was faster and it had tabs! Now Chrome has become dominant. I don’t know all the reasons, though I’m sure marketing is a big one. Firefox can’t compete with Google’s marketing budget, and as a user and a web dev, I haven’t found any other compelling reasons to make FF my primary browser. Their dev tools weren’t as nice as Chrome’s the last time I checked, and it seems like common (for tech folks) Chrome plugins make up the privacy differences. We do need a healthy multi-browser ecosystem in order to prune web tech to follow a user-centric direction. I want FF to convert me. I just haven’t seen the substantial arguments yet. It’s kind of telling that Microsoft didn’t either, so they switched Edge over to Chromium, a tool from one of their main competitors. It’s possible that this puts FF into the same position of being “the outsider” that it was in before. I hope that stress makes them do something radical to sway more users. If they do, it will likely be related to browsing privacy (especially if it’s a default) and will upset the status quo again.
- nerdponx 5y ago
  Firefox had kind of stagnated in terms of innovation and design when Chrome rolled around. Not to mention performance: we are spoiled today with recent versions of Firefox, but I remember a lot of people I know who switched to Chrome did so because of crash-resistance, performance, and the ability to run relatively large numbers of tabs. People like to complain about Firefox chasing Chrome in terms of feature set and design, but I think at least some of that chasing led to a better Firefox. That at least explains how Chrome gained dominance. Sites that don't fully support Firefox + the "outsider" effect you identified are contributing to FF's continued decline. Safari will probably keep going for years and years solely because of users who don't care or know how to change their default browser (and some people do actually like it more than other browsers).
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    > a lot of people I know who switched to Chrome did so because of crash-resistance, performance, and the ability to run relatively large numbers of tabs. Firefox was stable with a lot more tabs open than Chrome, because it didn't have a thread per tab. Chasing Chrome brought down the number of tabs you could comfortably have open in Firefox.
remram 5y ago
I ask this every time it comes up, but how do you know the market share of Firefox, and are you sure you aren't only counting Firefox installs with no ad blocking? There is definitely a larger ratio of ad-blocking on Firefox than Chrome, Safari, or Edge.
ksec 5y ago
Those are total market shares including smartphones, which Firefox has very little presence. Most people look at Firefox market share tends ( or used to ) focus on Desktop market share. ( The term Desktop actually includes Laptop LOL, which used to be a separate category. )
nicbou 5y ago
Webkit was made to be embeddable, so it spreads faster. More webkit-based browsers exist. Firefox as a project seems directionless. New releases anger its users with unwanted feature. Its custodians wasted so much energy on silly projects that people are reluctant to donate. Oh and of course the competition comes pre-installed on millions of devices. Operating systems even remind you when you're not using their bundled browser.
gherkinnn 5y ago
I moved back to Firefox for 80% of my browsing back in 2018 or whenever Quantum update was released. At this point it's only idealism that keeps me there. Tiny things just don't work well. And it is so endlessly frustrating. - I want the bookmark bar only to be shown in the new page tab. This does exist, but accidentally hitting _cmd+b_ resets it. - The new-tab page is awful. It's trying to be clever when it really shouldn't be. So I have it all switched off. - The container idea is nice, but so damn unusable in practice. - I use Kagi as my search engine, but can't set the tokenised search URL so it works in private mode. - The Settings are just so clunky. I wince every time I change something. - When typing something in the omnibox, the suggestions are at the very bottom of the list. So far away, that I might as well not have them. At least the dev tools are nice.

To me it's surprising and unsettling to see how small the market share of Firefox has become.

by blux 5y ago

To me it's surprising and unsettling to see how small the market share of Firefox has become.

Why is that surprising? Firefox doesn't have a narrative that's compelling for the typical user and I'm not sure it's ever had one that was really viable. 'Not-google' really isn't good enough for the average user, and no amount of 'we care about your privacy' is going to convince the common user that Mozilla _does_, in fact, care about their privacy. The reality is that most typical users care about their privacy a lot less than we might expect or want. That's probably not a great sign for society in general, but I think it's the truth.

irrational 5y ago
> Firefox doesn't have a narrative that's compelling for the typical user Firefox doesn't sell you off to the highest bidder?
- d12bb 5y ago
  Oh, they absolutely do, like 90% of the funding for Mozilla comes from Google.
  - irrational 5y ago
    Google just does that so they don't get broken up. But that doesn't mean Firefox is sending your data to Google.
    - account42 5y ago
      It does exatcly mean that Firefox is (by default) sending your searches to Google. Mozilla also uses Google Analytics on their websites and keep testing the waters with putting ads right into the browser. Users are absolutely justified in not trusting Mozilla's claims about caring for privacy.
- forbiddenvoid 5y ago
  My point is that far fewer people care about this than one might expect. And a non-trivial number probably don't believe it anyway.
brimble 5y ago
They needed to differentiate themselves years ago. The value prop in the early days was "very light & fast, blocks popups, has tabs, is totally free with no ads". It was a no-brainer to install it on every barely-technical relative's computer a nerd could get their hands on. The only thing that approached it and wasn't incredibly obscure was Opera, and that either cost money or displayed ads. FF is no longer "very light & fast" (it may no longer be possible to attain that and actually support modern web browsing—Safari is the only mainstream browser that's even close, AFAIK) and does have ads. Their various interface redesigns have made it confusing as hell to my parents. Old-school popups are handled well enough by ~every browser and they just about all use tabs and have for over a decade. Meanwhile they've added... what? To differentiate them? Plugins. But now those are the same as Chrome's. Very good dev tools—but now those are available elsewhere, too. They needed to go all-in on something radical years ago to have a long-term shot at relevance. Decentralized social networking or chat built-in to the browser. Aggressive built-in ad blocking & unique user-empowering controls. More, not fewer, non-HTTP Internet protocols built in. Something. And clearly not Pocket. Now I don't think their market share's big enough for even something like that that to save them. In fact now it'd likely just kill them even faster.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  > FF is no longer "very light & fast" I beg to differ. It's certainly faster and uses less resources than even Ungoogled Chromium on the same machine.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

Waterluvian 5y ago

Hypothetically: I don’t care to burn calories on being an “activist.” I just want to visit the sites I visit and get on with my life. Sell me on Firefox.

irrational 5y ago
It works great (in my experience) and doesn't sell your privacy to the highest bidder.
tejtm 5y ago
Use Firefox and if a site does not work just move on with your life. It passively improves our future to squander our attention on the less egregious actors.
- lelanthran 5y ago
  > Use Firefox and if a site does not work just move on with your life. It passively improves our future to squander our attention on the less egregious actors. I do this, and I do not remember the last time I actually had to 'move on' from a site because it did not work. Anyone wants to start a list of sites that do not work with FF? I am genuinely curious which sites these are that do not work with FF.
imachine1980_ 5y ago
Firefox is sometime a good tool to have for webdev, in some case Firefox(desktop)(i think i need to us a camera) work more similar than chrome(desktop) in comparison too chrome(android), i will totally pay money for a tool-set web development of quality but as browser most advance things use some quirks of chromium to work, isnt as secure as other people say you need to twist thing here and there and download extensions, in general is more worth use brave, if you really want to have control use librewolf.net is a fork of Firefox focus on privacy and work out of the box
MiddleEndian 5y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29894463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29894463 My reasons for using Firefox over Chrome, unrelated to any form of activism. Also backspace and shift+backspace still work for back and forward.

filoeleven 5y ago

Firefox was in its prime when it was the main competitor to IE. It was just a no-brainer for users: it was faster and it had tabs! Now Chrome has become dominant. I don’t know all the reasons, though I’m sure marketing is a big one. Firefox can’t compete with Google’s marketing budget, and as a user and a web dev, I haven’t found any other compelling reasons to make FF my primary browser. Their dev tools weren’t as nice as Chrome’s the last time I checked, and it seems like common (for tech folks) Chrome plugins make up the privacy differences. We do need a healthy multi-browser ecosystem in order to prune web tech to follow a user-centric direction. I want FF to convert me. I just haven’t seen the substantial arguments yet. It’s kind of telling that Microsoft didn’t either, so they switched Edge over to Chromium, a tool from one of their main competitors. It’s possible that this puts FF into the same position of being “the outsider” that it was in before. I hope that stress makes them do something radical to sway more users. If they do, it will likely be related to browsing privacy (especially if it’s a default) and will upset the status quo again.

nerdponx 5y ago
Firefox had kind of stagnated in terms of innovation and design when Chrome rolled around. Not to mention performance: we are spoiled today with recent versions of Firefox, but I remember a lot of people I know who switched to Chrome did so because of crash-resistance, performance, and the ability to run relatively large numbers of tabs. People like to complain about Firefox chasing Chrome in terms of feature set and design, but I think at least some of that chasing led to a better Firefox. That at least explains how Chrome gained dominance. Sites that don't fully support Firefox + the "outsider" effect you identified are contributing to FF's continued decline. Safari will probably keep going for years and years solely because of users who don't care or know how to change their default browser (and some people do actually like it more than other browsers).
- pessimizer 5y ago
  > a lot of people I know who switched to Chrome did so because of crash-resistance, performance, and the ability to run relatively large numbers of tabs. Firefox was stable with a lot more tabs open than Chrome, because it didn't have a thread per tab. Chasing Chrome brought down the number of tabs you could comfortably have open in Firefox.

remram 5y ago

I ask this every time it comes up, but how do you know the market share of Firefox, and are you sure you aren't only counting Firefox installs with no ad blocking? There is definitely a larger ratio of ad-blocking on Firefox than Chrome, Safari, or Edge.

ksec 5y ago

Those are total market shares including smartphones, which Firefox has very little presence. Most people look at Firefox market share tends ( or used to ) focus on Desktop market share. ( The term Desktop actually includes Laptop LOL, which used to be a separate category. )

nicbou 5y ago

Webkit was made to be embeddable, so it spreads faster. More webkit-based browsers exist. Firefox as a project seems directionless. New releases anger its users with unwanted feature. Its custodians wasted so much energy on silly projects that people are reluctant to donate. Oh and of course the competition comes pre-installed on millions of devices. Operating systems even remind you when you're not using their bundled browser.

gherkinnn 5y ago

I moved back to Firefox for 80% of my browsing back in 2018 or whenever Quantum update was released. At this point it's only idealism that keeps me there. Tiny things just don't work well. And it is so endlessly frustrating. - I want the bookmark bar only to be shown in the new page tab. This does exist, but accidentally hitting _cmd+b_ resets it. - The new-tab page is awful. It's trying to be clever when it really shouldn't be. So I have it all switched off. - The container idea is nice, but so damn unusable in practice. - I use Kagi as my search engine, but can't set the tokenised search URL so it works in private mode. - The Settings are just so clunky. I wince every time I change something. - When typing something in the omnibox, the suggestions are at the very bottom of the list. So far away, that I might as well not have them. At least the dev tools are nice.