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> 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

by 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 )

by least 4y ago

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 )