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baffled by a lot of the demands already in the thread. Firefox needs one thing right now and that is market share or else the browser is dead in a few years. P

baffled by a lot of the demands already in the thread. Firefox needs one thing right now and that is market share or else the browser is dead in a few years. Privacy, telemetry, and Linux don't matter, sorry folks, if they did people wouldn't use Chrome or Edge. The most important thing is compatibility with major sites at this point. if people's banking or health insurance page reject Firefox, people are just going to use Chrome. The mobile battery drain is a disaster as well. with less than 1% usage on android phones there should easily be room for many more users if you baked in ublock origin and fixed the performance because people actually do hate mobile ads.

least 4y ago
> Firefox needs one thing right now and that is market share or else the browser is dead in a few years. > The most important thing is compatibility with major sites at this point. if people's banking or health insurance page reject Firefox, people are just going to use Chrome. That's really not the primary issue, although it will drive people back to their preferred browser if that is an issue. Firefox is fighting an uphill battle against default browsers, which are Edge on Windows, Safari on MacOS/iOS, and Chrome on Android phones. You can't just say "We're compatible with all the sites that already work with the browser you use" and expect people to switch. You need genuinely useful and unique selling points that can be appreciated by the average person in order to overcome the default's inertia.
- p1esk 4y ago
  Are people leaving FF or are people not switching to FF? Which is more important?
  - fleddr 4y ago
    The amount of internet users keeps growing significantly, where almost all new users are dedicated mobile users, whom tend to use Chrome/Safari. So the market grows in size, almost none of that growth being distributed to Firefox, hence the slow and endless bleed.
- ekianjo 4y ago
  > Firefox is fighting an uphill battle against default browsers That's not an argument. Firefox made all of its share back in the day by being better than IE even though IE was everywhere on Windows computers.
  - least 4y ago
    What? You're right, It's not an argument. It's a statement of fact. Firefox gained marketshare against Internet Explorer by being significantly better than Internet Explorer. I remember enthusiastically switching to Firefox, especially because it had a mouse gestures addon and was just so much faster than Internet Explorer. I also switched to Chrome because it felt like a big jump from a Firefox that had become bloated and slow. I also got my family members to switch. It was just plainly obvious how much better they were at the time. Since then I've used Safari, Firefox, Brave, Chromium, Chrome, and a variety of other browsers for long stretches of time. All of them have large sets of upsides and drawbacks associated with them, but Firefox doesn't really have much of anything that I can enthusiastically point to as reasons to switch for my non-tech obsessed family members. That's a problem that Firefox desperately needs to overcome if it wants to continue existing.
    - 20after4 4y ago
      Ad blocking that actually works is a pretty big advantage (chrome is gradually killing off ad blockers )
Nextgrid 4y ago
> Privacy, telemetry, and Linux don't matter, sorry folks, if they did people wouldn't use Chrome or Edge. The people who wouldn't use the aforementioned browsers are Firefox's only hope - otherwise, why not just use Chrome or Edge? Firefox isn't going to win by being a more faithful Chrome copy (this current strategy has failed them for years).
- p1esk 4y ago
  I use FF and I don’t care about privacy, telemetry, or Lunux. I care about performance, ad blocking, and website compatibility.
  - cercatrova 4y ago
    This. I use Firefox primarily for uBlock Origin not being gimped by Google's push for Web Extensions Manifest V3.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    > don’t care about privacy > performance, ad blocking Blocking privacy-invasive garbage and ads (aka spam) will often improve performance. So you'd still indirectly benefit from a user-focused, privacy friendly browser even if you don't explicitly care about privacy.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    If you care about performance and compatibility, you prefer Chrome. If you really care about ad blocking, Firefox should be very important to you like a year from now, if Google doesn't retreat before they even lock v2 extensions out. If they back off, what's the reason you have to prefer Firefox?
    - p1esk 4y ago
      what's the reason you have to prefer Firefox? Two reasons: 1. inertia - I’ve been using it for 17 years and it’s still good enough to not switch, and 2. Google already knows too much about me, I don’t want to give them even more data through their browser. So I guess I do care about privacy…
qbasic_forever 4y ago
Privacy is exactly why I switched from Chrome to Firefox. I've never run into a site compatibility issue with it. Never had a mobile battery drain issue, my ryzen laptop still gets 7-8 hours of life on battery with wifi and browsing.
fleddr 4y ago
Five years ago, Firefox was already declared dead: https://andreasgal.com/2017/05/25/chrome-won/ https://andreasgal.com/2017/05/25/chrome-won/ Mozilla can't push their browser. They don't have Android, Youtube, various other services with billions of users. Not even Microsoft is successful in pushing Edge (except for the corporate world) as they too have no giant consumer-facing services. Moreover, Firefox is virtually absent on mobile (0.5% market share). On massive websites (some I see at work), Firefox doesn't even show up on dashboards, it's not even in the top 10. Some weird obscure regional browsers outrank it. Technically speaking, Firefox is an irrelevant browser and has been for several years now. You may love it for sentimental or philosophical reasons, but the real world cares little about that. Anyway, the bleeding will continue without a leverage to push the browser. It's not an engineering problem.
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  Here's the thing, it isn't a single problem, it is the combination of many, just like Windows Phone/Windows Mobile.
  - paulryanrogers 4y ago
    You may be overlooking the larger point, it is just one thing: monopolization. If you control the defaults you win, as long as it doesn't suck too bad. Why did IE so quickly destroy paid browser market then languish for so many years? Because they had a lock on desktop market share. Google and Apple just have to be mediocre because they own the hardware, services, and/or distribution. Mozilla cannot take from other business arms to bankroll its browser. It has to sell defaults, ads, or find other markets.
    - solarkraft 4y ago
      But Firefox used to be the default. It's what people were used to because it used to be significantly better in the past. Then they stopped keeping up ...
      - 4y ago
rvz 4y ago
> Privacy, telemetry, and Linux don't matter, sorry folks, if they did people wouldn't use Chrome or Edge. The most important thing is compatibility with major sites at this point. if people's banking or health insurance page reject Firefox, people are just going to use Chrome. That is the entire truth. Privacy, Telemetry and Linux are red herrings to increasing market share and do not make any money or help Firefox since the majority of users do not care about any of this. If a website isn't compatible with Firefox or is broken and has missing extensions, then the users will just move to Chrome and never look back. Thanks to the re-usability of the Chromium engine it has created many derivatives, just like the ecosystem of Linux distros which people are free to choose. This is what Firefox could have been to cement the browser market and Firefox was once ahead at one point, but did nothing to keep it up and watched Google over take them. What a disaster Mozilla has been for the past 14 years and yet they are still unable to make money outside of accepting Google's money.
- buscoquadnary 4y ago
  I'd argue that the most important thing for Mozzilla to capture is the tech segment because they are the ones who dictate the future of a browser. People didn't switch their "internet" from the e icon to Google because they cared about their browsers. They did it because their "tech guy", whether their nephew who was good with computers, the guy they bowled with who did computers, or whoever in their family setup their computer, installed Chrome for them. 90% of people don't care about the browser but the 10% who do care a lot, and they are the ones who will set the long term trends. So Mozzilla doesn't need to be a power user browser but it does have to appeal to the things tech people want. That's how it has a future that's how it keeps going. Because FF is open source, it doesn't need a revenue stream, shareholders or a board. At the end of the day it just needs enough people who love it to keep using and supporting it.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  > Privacy, Telemetry and Linux are red herrings to increasing market share and do not make any money or help Firefox since the majority of users do not care about any of this. It would be a delusionally ambitious premature optimization for Firefox to target the majority of users. Firefox needs to target a niche well, then grow that niche. If that niche were stamp collectors or people who read historical romance novels, Firefox would barely lose any market share if it focused on them exclusively and converted them all.
ekianjo 4y ago
> Privacy, telemetry, and Linux don't matter, sorry folks, if they did people wouldn't use Chrome or Edge. The only remaining share of Firefox is because of these users. Good luck dropping the ball on that one and not ending with a 0% share.
4bpp 4y ago
> Privacy, telemetry, and Linux don't matter, sorry folks, if they did people wouldn't use Chrome or Edge. The most important thing is compatibility with major sites at this point. if people's banking or health insurance page reject Firefox, people are just going to use Chrome. How many people consciously make an informed choice about which browser they use, to begin with? When I entered college, we had a system that required you to install a spyware client that certified to the network that you were not running any file sharing software - unless you were on an unsupported OS (as identified by the user-agent string), in which case it just let you pass the registration process without certification. After figuring this out, I did this for my entire dorm floor, installing Firefox in the process (as that was the browser for which I knew a quick way of setting up a user-agent spoofing addon off the top of my head). The result was an additional about 30 Firefox users because of one power user's preference of it, which was entirely based on customisability and privacy considerations. Half of the people I set it up for probably wouldn't even have known how to replace or uninstall it if they turned out to hate everything about it, and conversely no amount of pandering to non-technical users would have gotten them to install it for themselves.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  > How many people consciously make an informed choice about which browser they use, to begin with? Agreed, very little. It doesn't mean privacy isn't important for Firefox right now because the only users they have left are those using it for privacy or ideological reasons.
larksimian 4y ago
Ublock origin alone would sell FF mobile to the masses. Side by side scroll a recipe website with chrome vs adblocked FF on the same device. Chrome one is slower, half the content is ads, some of them autoplaying videos with sound! FF experience is the pure content. Dunno about all the other nonsense, a lot of the mobile web is utterly unusable without adblocking.

least 4y ago

> Firefox needs one thing right now and that is market share or else the browser is dead in a few years. > The most important thing is compatibility with major sites at this point. if people's banking or health insurance page reject Firefox, people are just going to use Chrome. That's really not the primary issue, although it will drive people back to their preferred browser if that is an issue. Firefox is fighting an uphill battle against default browsers, which are Edge on Windows, Safari on MacOS/iOS, and Chrome on Android phones. You can't just say "We're compatible with all the sites that already work with the browser you use" and expect people to switch. You need genuinely useful and unique selling points that can be appreciated by the average person in order to overcome the default's inertia.

p1esk 4y ago
Are people leaving FF or are people not switching to FF? Which is more important?
- fleddr 4y ago
  The amount of internet users keeps growing significantly, where almost all new users are dedicated mobile users, whom tend to use Chrome/Safari. So the market grows in size, almost none of that growth being distributed to Firefox, hence the slow and endless bleed.
ekianjo 4y ago
> Firefox is fighting an uphill battle against default browsers That's not an argument. Firefox made all of its share back in the day by being better than IE even though IE was everywhere on Windows computers.
- least 4y ago
  What? You're right, It's not an argument. It's a statement of fact. Firefox gained marketshare against Internet Explorer by being significantly better than Internet Explorer. I remember enthusiastically switching to Firefox, especially because it had a mouse gestures addon and was just so much faster than Internet Explorer. I also switched to Chrome because it felt like a big jump from a Firefox that had become bloated and slow. I also got my family members to switch. It was just plainly obvious how much better they were at the time. Since then I've used Safari, Firefox, Brave, Chromium, Chrome, and a variety of other browsers for long stretches of time. All of them have large sets of upsides and drawbacks associated with them, but Firefox doesn't really have much of anything that I can enthusiastically point to as reasons to switch for my non-tech obsessed family members. That's a problem that Firefox desperately needs to overcome if it wants to continue existing.
  - 20after4 4y ago
    Ad blocking that actually works is a pretty big advantage (chrome is gradually killing off ad blockers )

Nextgrid 4y ago

> Privacy, telemetry, and Linux don't matter, sorry folks, if they did people wouldn't use Chrome or Edge. The people who wouldn't use the aforementioned browsers are Firefox's only hope - otherwise, why not just use Chrome or Edge? Firefox isn't going to win by being a more faithful Chrome copy (this current strategy has failed them for years).

p1esk 4y ago
I use FF and I don’t care about privacy, telemetry, or Lunux. I care about performance, ad blocking, and website compatibility.
- cercatrova 4y ago
  This. I use Firefox primarily for uBlock Origin not being gimped by Google's push for Web Extensions Manifest V3.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  > don’t care about privacy > performance, ad blocking Blocking privacy-invasive garbage and ads (aka spam) will often improve performance. So you'd still indirectly benefit from a user-focused, privacy friendly browser even if you don't explicitly care about privacy.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  If you care about performance and compatibility, you prefer Chrome. If you really care about ad blocking, Firefox should be very important to you like a year from now, if Google doesn't retreat before they even lock v2 extensions out. If they back off, what's the reason you have to prefer Firefox?
  - p1esk 4y ago
    what's the reason you have to prefer Firefox? Two reasons: 1. inertia - I’ve been using it for 17 years and it’s still good enough to not switch, and 2. Google already knows too much about me, I don’t want to give them even more data through their browser. So I guess I do care about privacy…

qbasic_forever 4y ago

Privacy is exactly why I switched from Chrome to Firefox. I've never run into a site compatibility issue with it. Never had a mobile battery drain issue, my ryzen laptop still gets 7-8 hours of life on battery with wifi and browsing.

fleddr 4y ago

Five years ago, Firefox was already declared dead: https://andreasgal.com/2017/05/25/chrome-won/ https://andreasgal.com/2017/05/25/chrome-won/ Mozilla can't push their browser. They don't have Android, Youtube, various other services with billions of users. Not even Microsoft is successful in pushing Edge (except for the corporate world) as they too have no giant consumer-facing services. Moreover, Firefox is virtually absent on mobile (0.5% market share). On massive websites (some I see at work), Firefox doesn't even show up on dashboards, it's not even in the top 10. Some weird obscure regional browsers outrank it. Technically speaking, Firefox is an irrelevant browser and has been for several years now. You may love it for sentimental or philosophical reasons, but the real world cares little about that. Anyway, the bleeding will continue without a leverage to push the browser. It's not an engineering problem.

hammyhavoc 4y ago
Here's the thing, it isn't a single problem, it is the combination of many, just like Windows Phone/Windows Mobile.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  You may be overlooking the larger point, it is just one thing: monopolization. If you control the defaults you win, as long as it doesn't suck too bad. Why did IE so quickly destroy paid browser market then languish for so many years? Because they had a lock on desktop market share. Google and Apple just have to be mediocre because they own the hardware, services, and/or distribution. Mozilla cannot take from other business arms to bankroll its browser. It has to sell defaults, ads, or find other markets.
  - solarkraft 4y ago
    But Firefox used to be the default. It's what people were used to because it used to be significantly better in the past. Then they stopped keeping up ...
    - 4y ago

rvz 4y ago

> Privacy, telemetry, and Linux don't matter, sorry folks, if they did people wouldn't use Chrome or Edge. The most important thing is compatibility with major sites at this point. if people's banking or health insurance page reject Firefox, people are just going to use Chrome. That is the entire truth. Privacy, Telemetry and Linux are red herrings to increasing market share and do not make any money or help Firefox since the majority of users do not care about any of this. If a website isn't compatible with Firefox or is broken and has missing extensions, then the users will just move to Chrome and never look back. Thanks to the re-usability of the Chromium engine it has created many derivatives, just like the ecosystem of Linux distros which people are free to choose. This is what Firefox could have been to cement the browser market and Firefox was once ahead at one point, but did nothing to keep it up and watched Google over take them. What a disaster Mozilla has been for the past 14 years and yet they are still unable to make money outside of accepting Google's money.

buscoquadnary 4y ago
I'd argue that the most important thing for Mozzilla to capture is the tech segment because they are the ones who dictate the future of a browser. People didn't switch their "internet" from the e icon to Google because they cared about their browsers. They did it because their "tech guy", whether their nephew who was good with computers, the guy they bowled with who did computers, or whoever in their family setup their computer, installed Chrome for them. 90% of people don't care about the browser but the 10% who do care a lot, and they are the ones who will set the long term trends. So Mozzilla doesn't need to be a power user browser but it does have to appeal to the things tech people want. That's how it has a future that's how it keeps going. Because FF is open source, it doesn't need a revenue stream, shareholders or a board. At the end of the day it just needs enough people who love it to keep using and supporting it.
pessimizer 4y ago
> Privacy, Telemetry and Linux are red herrings to increasing market share and do not make any money or help Firefox since the majority of users do not care about any of this. It would be a delusionally ambitious premature optimization for Firefox to target the majority of users. Firefox needs to target a niche well, then grow that niche. If that niche were stamp collectors or people who read historical romance novels, Firefox would barely lose any market share if it focused on them exclusively and converted them all.

ekianjo 4y ago

> Privacy, telemetry, and Linux don't matter, sorry folks, if they did people wouldn't use Chrome or Edge. The only remaining share of Firefox is because of these users. Good luck dropping the ball on that one and not ending with a 0% share.

4bpp 4y ago

> Privacy, telemetry, and Linux don't matter, sorry folks, if they did people wouldn't use Chrome or Edge. The most important thing is compatibility with major sites at this point. if people's banking or health insurance page reject Firefox, people are just going to use Chrome. How many people consciously make an informed choice about which browser they use, to begin with? When I entered college, we had a system that required you to install a spyware client that certified to the network that you were not running any file sharing software - unless you were on an unsupported OS (as identified by the user-agent string), in which case it just let you pass the registration process without certification. After figuring this out, I did this for my entire dorm floor, installing Firefox in the process (as that was the browser for which I knew a quick way of setting up a user-agent spoofing addon off the top of my head). The result was an additional about 30 Firefox users because of one power user's preference of it, which was entirely based on customisability and privacy considerations. Half of the people I set it up for probably wouldn't even have known how to replace or uninstall it if they turned out to hate everything about it, and conversely no amount of pandering to non-technical users would have gotten them to install it for themselves.

Nextgrid 4y ago
> How many people consciously make an informed choice about which browser they use, to begin with? Agreed, very little. It doesn't mean privacy isn't important for Firefox right now because the only users they have left are those using it for privacy or ideological reasons.

larksimian 4y ago

Ublock origin alone would sell FF mobile to the masses. Side by side scroll a recipe website with chrome vs adblocked FF on the same device. Chrome one is slower, half the content is ads, some of them autoplaying videos with sound! FF experience is the pure content. Dunno about all the other nonsense, a lot of the mobile web is utterly unusable without adblocking.