5 ms·

One thing missed when talking about Firefox's market share is desktop versus mobile market share. If you look at Wikimedia's metrics, Firefox still has ~10% ma

One thing missed when talking about Firefox's market share is desktop versus mobile market share. If you look at Wikimedia's metrics, Firefox still has ~10% market share of the desktop browser market[0], not too bad considering Firefox is not the default browser on any platform outside of linux systems for the most part, and that Mozilla is much smaller entity than competing browser vendors. Still down from the ~30%[0] desktop share they had, but now they have 2 large competing entities offering default browsers so the decline is somewhat expected. Also, contrast this with Firefox's ~0.7% share on mobile[0] where Mozilla has never been able to get a good foothold. As long as Firefox isn't available as a default on mobile and as the share of mobile device web browsing increases, Firefox will keep losing total market share as a percentage. Strategy wise, refocusing efforts on retaining that 10% desktop share might be a good idea. From there, work on building up more of the desktop share and then try marketing the mobile browser to the desktop browser community to build up mobile browser share. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_market_share#Summary_tables https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_market_share#Summary_t...

nicoburns 5y ago
I feel like Firefox on Android should be more popular than it is. Chrome is default, but it doesn't offer an Ad Blocker. Firefox with uBlock origin is a far superior experience. Although there are other 3rd party chromium-based browsers that are just as good. I suspect that it's poor market share is due the very poor performance of the older fennec implementation.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  I use Firefox mobile for the past 3 or so phones. To be blunt, it sucks. The only reason I haven't switched to a Chromium derivative is because I don't want to migrate my bookmarks, because they don't have as good ad blocking support, and out of sheer stubbornness.
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
    It has gotten far better in the past years, although it still has some pretty crippling bugs and tiny yet incredibly annoying UX issues (e.g. can't easily wipe the cookies for the site you're currently on, try opening a URL from your clipboard in incognito). But Firefox has gotten sufficiently close that the overall experience of Firefox with an ad blocker beats Chrome with ads.
  - derbOac 5y ago
    I came to say something similar. I'm a diehard Firefox user, and can articulate all sorts of things about it I love, but mobile has been hugely disappointing. I still use it but there's a massive discrepancy between Firefox mobile and desktop. Desktop is great; not that there's nothing that could be improved, but I love it and do not want to switch for any reason. Mobile has weird lags and hangs that I don't understand, and has this weird crippled extension system. Going into Nightly and adding some of them helps a little but not really. Its UI has been strange at times, and these little changes keep cropping up that I don't quite understand. I still use it but I have thought about moving to something else, and the main reason I don't is because it's so convenient to sync between devices. There was a big part of me that was suspicious that when mobile started becoming dominant, someone in Mozilla made a decision to migrate the mobile browser to something more advertiser-friendly to recoup funding, with the idea that the desktop would be the libre target and the mobile version would be the moneymaker. It just all feels so inward-focused and not user-focused, with crippled extensions and weird UI tweaks all the time.
  - soundnote 5y ago
    Brave's ad blockers are built-in, can do CNAME uncloaking and won't suffer from Manifest v3.
- captn3m0 5y ago
  I’d argue that FF could possibly convince some manufacturers to preload Firefox with uBlock installed as a faster browser (if UCBrowser could, surely FF can).
  - JohnTHaller 5y ago
    I'd wager that Firefox's deal with Google prohibits them from doing this on any platform.
    - godshatter 5y ago
      When you make a deal with the devil I guess you have to expect these sorts of things.
- jakub_g 5y ago
  I tried to use FF on Android, and while it's capable and works rather well, perf-wise Chromium is just years ahead (I use Brave). You can see it well on JS-heavy sites like Twitter, the difference is very easy to perceive with loading time, scrolling perf, and also with memory management (Firefox evicts pages from memory cache aggressively compared to Chromium; you sometimes switch a tab or switch an app, go back, and bang, it's gone and needs a reload); and I have a decent good phone (not top shelf, but a "high-mid" Pixel 3a, probably 60-70th percentile within Androids?).
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  I've tried using it on Android and it simply doesn't work on my hardware. Takes minutes to load a page.
  - akdor1154 5y ago
    Since the re-architecture? Its pretty great now.
    - marginalia_nu 5y ago
      Tried it just now. From pressing the url bar to the keyboard showing up is a 2 second delay. Overall pages seem really unresponsive.
      - nicoburns 5y ago
        Out of interest, what hardware do you have? I had a Samsung S7, and the difference between Chrome and FF was minimal (Chrome was slightly faster, but only just). That's quite an old device, but I wonder if somehow it being a high-end device when it was new still counts for something...?
        marginalia_nu 5y ago
        Cat S52. Although a 6502 managed to respond immediately to input 47 years ago, so I don't understand how a modern processor could struggle with this today.
- noselasd 5y ago
  I can't use Firefox on mobile, its tab management is too annoying, that's the sole reason I abandoned it before christmas.
jakub_g 5y ago
This. When I joined my prev company in mid 2018, I checked some graphs, and mobile users market share was around 45%. When I checked the same graph in mid 2021, mobile market share was >60%. Many people don't have a desktop anymore those days, or barely use it.

nicoburns 5y ago

I feel like Firefox on Android should be more popular than it is. Chrome is default, but it doesn't offer an Ad Blocker. Firefox with uBlock origin is a far superior experience. Although there are other 3rd party chromium-based browsers that are just as good. I suspect that it's poor market share is due the very poor performance of the older fennec implementation.

selfhoster11 5y ago
I use Firefox mobile for the past 3 or so phones. To be blunt, it sucks. The only reason I haven't switched to a Chromium derivative is because I don't want to migrate my bookmarks, because they don't have as good ad blocking support, and out of sheer stubbornness.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
  It has gotten far better in the past years, although it still has some pretty crippling bugs and tiny yet incredibly annoying UX issues (e.g. can't easily wipe the cookies for the site you're currently on, try opening a URL from your clipboard in incognito). But Firefox has gotten sufficiently close that the overall experience of Firefox with an ad blocker beats Chrome with ads.
- derbOac 5y ago
  I came to say something similar. I'm a diehard Firefox user, and can articulate all sorts of things about it I love, but mobile has been hugely disappointing. I still use it but there's a massive discrepancy between Firefox mobile and desktop. Desktop is great; not that there's nothing that could be improved, but I love it and do not want to switch for any reason. Mobile has weird lags and hangs that I don't understand, and has this weird crippled extension system. Going into Nightly and adding some of them helps a little but not really. Its UI has been strange at times, and these little changes keep cropping up that I don't quite understand. I still use it but I have thought about moving to something else, and the main reason I don't is because it's so convenient to sync between devices. There was a big part of me that was suspicious that when mobile started becoming dominant, someone in Mozilla made a decision to migrate the mobile browser to something more advertiser-friendly to recoup funding, with the idea that the desktop would be the libre target and the mobile version would be the moneymaker. It just all feels so inward-focused and not user-focused, with crippled extensions and weird UI tweaks all the time.
- soundnote 5y ago
  Brave's ad blockers are built-in, can do CNAME uncloaking and won't suffer from Manifest v3.
captn3m0 5y ago
I’d argue that FF could possibly convince some manufacturers to preload Firefox with uBlock installed as a faster browser (if UCBrowser could, surely FF can).
- JohnTHaller 5y ago
  I'd wager that Firefox's deal with Google prohibits them from doing this on any platform.
  - godshatter 5y ago
    When you make a deal with the devil I guess you have to expect these sorts of things.
jakub_g 5y ago
I tried to use FF on Android, and while it's capable and works rather well, perf-wise Chromium is just years ahead (I use Brave). You can see it well on JS-heavy sites like Twitter, the difference is very easy to perceive with loading time, scrolling perf, and also with memory management (Firefox evicts pages from memory cache aggressively compared to Chromium; you sometimes switch a tab or switch an app, go back, and bang, it's gone and needs a reload); and I have a decent good phone (not top shelf, but a "high-mid" Pixel 3a, probably 60-70th percentile within Androids?).
marginalia_nu 5y ago
I've tried using it on Android and it simply doesn't work on my hardware. Takes minutes to load a page.
- akdor1154 5y ago
  Since the re-architecture? Its pretty great now.
  - marginalia_nu 5y ago
    Tried it just now. From pressing the url bar to the keyboard showing up is a 2 second delay. Overall pages seem really unresponsive.
    - nicoburns 5y ago
      Out of interest, what hardware do you have? I had a Samsung S7, and the difference between Chrome and FF was minimal (Chrome was slightly faster, but only just). That's quite an old device, but I wonder if somehow it being a high-end device when it was new still counts for something...?
      - marginalia_nu 5y ago
        Cat S52. Although a 6502 managed to respond immediately to input 47 years ago, so I don't understand how a modern processor could struggle with this today.
noselasd 5y ago
I can't use Firefox on mobile, its tab management is too annoying, that's the sole reason I abandoned it before christmas.

jakub_g 5y ago

This. When I joined my prev company in mid 2018, I checked some graphs, and mobile users market share was around 45%. When I checked the same graph in mid 2021, mobile market share was >60%. Many people don't have a desktop anymore those days, or barely use it.