4 ms·

Firefox has a market share around 3%. Even most technologists stopped using it long ago. Many banks and government websites don’t even support it anymore and lo

by p-e-w 10mo ago

Firefox has a market share around 3%. Even most technologists stopped using it long ago. Many banks and government websites don’t even support it anymore and loudly tell people to use Chrome instead, especially in developing countries. Nothing can kill Firefox, because it’s already dead for all practical purposes.

sharken 10mo ago
Given the current state of the Chrome family of browsers and the anti adblocker stance from Google, i'd think that alone would guarantee Firefox a steady user base. Not sure how users cope with Chrome-based browsers and intrusive ads.
- lifthrasiir 10mo ago
  That's just a wishful thinking. Too many ordinary users accept ads as inevitable annoyances and don't even know about the very existence of adblockers.
  - yupyupyups 10mo ago
    Maybe because they don't know any better.
    - lifthrasiir 10mo ago
      Of course, but how would you convince them to switch? Not just your friends, but as a whole.
      - computerfriend 10mo ago
        If only they could see ads for ad blockers.
      - yupyupyups 10mo ago
        You could suggest installing Firefox next to Chrome and install uBlock Origin on it. Open YouTube and show them that there are zero ads. They will likely see a contrast.
- purplehat_ 10mo ago
  I've tried a few times to convince people in my life who would self describe as "bad with computers" to download an adblocker, but they usually find the friction too high. Adding extensions is unfamiliar for most, and even if it seems very basic for us, the non-tech people I know don't really want to deal with the risk of unknown unknowns from that, let alone switching to a healthier browser. (Perhaps reasonable since it feels like these days half the extensions on the Chrome Web Store are spyware or adware behind the scenes.) I also suspect that those who lived through the days of frequent Windows errors and Chrome running out of memory all the time often expect software to fail in weird and unexpected ways, and a lot of people adopt a "don't fix it if it isn't broken" mindset. Still, uBlock Lite and Brave browser are definitely easy wins and I'm glad to see more random people in my life using them than I would have expected. :)
  - kgwxd 10mo ago
    The last time uBlock Origin caused me any pain was a on a toys r us rewards management site.
    - purplehat_ 10mo ago
      That's really funny. Yes, in case it wasn't clear for others reading this and thinking about installing these, it's almost certain that uBlock Origin and Brave browser will not cause you any problems and if you're using stock Chrome I really encourage you improve your situation dramatically for ~5 minutes worth of effort.
  - yummypaint 10mo ago
    If it's the computer of an older family member or something, just put Firefox and ubo on their system for them and be done with it. They will use whatever software is preloaded, and being shown how to use it is a much lower barrier to entry than the cognitive load of finding, vetting, installing, and configuring new software. I used to try to patiently explain why people should do xyz. Now I explain to people why I'm going to change xyz on their device, and if they don't slam the breaks I just do what needs to be done right then. If someone doesn't know what an adblocker is they are getting one so they can see for themselves and reflect on what companies have been putting them through for years to make some incremental amount of money.
graemep 10mo ago
> Many banks and government websites don’t even support it anymore and loudly tell people to use Chrome instead, especially in developing countries. I cannot remember the last time I came across one myself.
- p-e-w 10mo ago
  It very strongly depends on which country you live in.
  - darkwater 10mo ago
    In which country are you seeing that? For me the biggest offender are usually Google products and sometimes the lazy-coded website written by incompetents and whose audience is the tech illiterate (i.e. some websites involving schools/teaching) that just tell you "use latest Chrome just to be sure, download here" to, well, just be sure. Notable mentions for government websites that are like 10 years in the past and that are still on the "Supports Firefox" side because, well, they are just always late to everything.
    - rbits 10mo ago
      I live in Australia and I can't log into government services using my myGov account on Firefox. Works fine on Chromium.
      - someNameIG 10mo ago
        Just to test I just logged into myGov then through Firefox and it worked fine.
      - b112 10mo ago
        Wow. Force-Supporting the same company they're battling daily, on multiple issues.
        graemep 10mo ago
tda 10mo ago
I use Firefox as my daily browser. If i have a website that fails to work, I might try chrome maybe once every two months. And then it usually also doesn't work. So for all browsing I do on the internet, Firefox works like a charm
- sysguest 10mo ago
  well I use it because it can handle 2000 tabs on my m1 macbook air (16gb ram) ... damn do I have adhd?????
  - CodesInChaos 10mo ago
    Get the OneTab extension. It'll save and close all those tabs. That way you won't have Firefox crashing during startup once you exceed the number of tabs it can handle (a few thousand).
    - b112 10mo ago
      I have 117 thousand tabs, and it starts up fine. Just adjust your shm ratio. (I'm kidding)
    - fl0id 10mo ago
      You can also just do tab groups in ffx
    - lxgr 10mo ago
      Doesn't Firefox natively unload tabs these days?
    - Tarq0n 10mo ago
      I've had it function just fine around 9000 tabs.
    - versteegen 10mo ago
      Tip: the crashing is caused by certain extensions such as OneTab and All Tabs Helper which for some reason seem to cause all the tabs to load, just when restoring a session. Temporarily disable these extensions before restoring, then you can reenable.
Cthulhu_ 10mo ago
When they say "don't support it anymore", does that mean they're back to the IE era of using Chrome specific technologies so it doesn't work in any browser, do they use user-agent sniffing and show a big popup, or is it just that they're not testing it in FF anymore? The latter shouldn't be an issue as long as they use standards, the only thing they would run into in this day and age is browser specific bugs - but Safari seems to have that the most.
- p-e-w 10mo ago
  No, they mostly just show a popup telling you to use Chrome. Websites work fine if you switch the user agent.
- OkayPhysicist 10mo ago
  It's exclusively UA sniffing. IMO, Firefox should take the nuclear option and just start reporting the Chrome UA.
walrus01 10mo ago
> Many banks and government websites don’t even support it Because their web developers are too lazy to write anything to proper standards. They're doing some kind of lazy "Check for Chrome, because everyone must be running that, if not, redirect to an Unsupported page". I've yet to find a website that "refuses" to work in Firefox which doesn't work just fine when I use a user agent switching extension to present a standard Chrome on MacOS or Chrome on Windows useragent.
- CoastalCoder 10mo ago
  Are you sure they're all lazy? Another pretty common experience for developers is wanting to do things "the right way", but being overridden by management.
  - OkayPhysicist 10mo ago
    Yes, because in this case "the right way" is to do nothing.
iso1631 10mo ago
Wikimedia stats from last year put it at 15% of desktop browsers, ahead of Safari and Edge.
- embedding-shape 10mo ago
  Yeah, every website has different stats about user-agents, depends a lot on the types of users you attract. I bet HN has Firefox usage ratio above 15% for sure, while sites like Instagram probably has way below the global average. Global browser marketshare never made much sense. You need to figure out what your users use, then aim to be compatible for most of those, and ignore any global stats.
- Timwi 10mo ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if there's a correlation between people frequenting Wikimedia websites and people using Firefox. It would be nice to know.
- kemayo 10mo ago
  If people are curious, all the stats for Wikimedia properties are here: https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#desktop-site-by-browser https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#desktop... As of December 7th, Firefox is 10.3% of traffic there. This makes it the #2 browser, after Chrome (at 62.2%) -- a spot it has been dueling with Edge over for the last year or so. I'm inclined to think that "people visiting wikipedia" is a fairly representative sample of "normal users", overall.
  - ted_dunning 10mo ago
    I'm inclined to think that "people visiting wikipedia" skews heavily towards "people who like facts" which is distinctly not a normal web viewer.
mosquitobiten 10mo ago
that 3% is of total users including mobile which chrome is king because it's basically force fed to users. this is important because there is no choice with browsers for the common mobile user, most of them don't know what is a browser even if they used it every day. also in the 2000s IE was king because guess what? that was what came preinstalled with winxp
- glenstein 10mo ago
  Exactly! I keep banging this drum but I'm fascinated by the possibility of Android being required to have a pop-up where people can choose different browsers, as a potential remedy to Google's monopoly. Because engineering a path dependency on Google search, from mobile hardware, to software, to default browsers, to default search on the browser, I think is part of how they've enforced their monopoly. There's been a legal judgment that they are, in fact a monopoly, but I don't think any remedy has been decided on yet. And there's a lot of historical precedent for a pop-up to select a default as a remedy to software monopolies. Granted in Google's case, it seems that the Monopoly judgment was with respect to ad markets, but locking people into search to serve ads might be understood as part of the structure of that monopoly.
ojosilva 10mo ago
3% market share is 150 million active users give or take. That's no death by any count in the software world. Gosh, I really wish Mozilla would just dig into their user-base and find a way to adequately become sustainable... or find a way to make it work better as a foundation that is NOT maintained by Google, ie like the Wiki Foundation. I do spend a LOT of time in FF, can't anyone see there's a value beyond selling ads and personal info that could make Mozilla more sustainable, dependable and resilient?
csin 10mo ago
This 3% number is deceptive. The whole desktop market is cratering. I was talking to a reddit mod a few months ago. He was looking at the subreddit stats. 95% of his users were on mobile. Think about that. We desktop users are dinosaurs. So FireFox having a 3% market share might actually mean more than half of desktop users are on FireFox.
- abenga 10mo ago
  I can't imagine browsing the web on my phone and tablet without Firefox mobile. That would honestly be the biggest loss once this CEO takes this nonsense to the logical end.
  - csin 10mo ago
    I'm genuinely curious. What does FireFox mobile have over it's competition? You can't install UBlock Origin on mobile. Like I still use FireFox on mobile, just purely out of habit. I don't really see anything better about it (I am quite inexperienced when it comes to phones).
    - OvervCW 10mo ago
      You can install uBlock Origin on Firefox mobile; it's the only reason I use it.
      - csin 10mo ago
        Oh wow TIL. Thanks, that is amazing. I just looked it up. 2023 was when it started. I'm surprised Android even allows something like this.
        rightbyte 10mo ago
        Yeah at some point it wasn't possible. I think Mozilla did some workaround by having a bunch of wetted extensions?
timeon 10mo ago
Have not used Chrome-based browsers 3+ years and never had problem with Firefox. Sometimes Safari was not working 100% - but nothing serious. Maybe it is because, only page from google I use is Youtube; however Firefox has best experience there, even better than Chrome - thanks to proper uBlock Origin.
yread 10mo ago
My software stopped working because its drawing on canvas in a way that causes firefox to glitch with hw acceleration enabled. Not one of my customers/users complained
- moron4hire 10mo ago
  The only reasons I've ever put effort into Firefox support in my software was A) I find it helps push me to write towards standards better if I include multiple browser engines, which makes it more likely I'll support Safari without extra effort, which is difficult for me to test on because I don't daily drive any Apple devices (works about 80% of the time), and B) to avoid the shit-fit I would receive if I ever posted it as a "Show HN." It has never come up as an actual user requirement.
OkayPhysicist 10mo ago
Most of those sites are doing a little move called "lying". I occasionally (once every couple of months) run into a site claiming to not support Firefox. I can't recall a single site that wasn't a tech demo of some bleeding edge feature of Chrome that didn't magically start working when I turned on my Chrome UserAgent. (Hey, if you work at Snapchat: fix your shit. Your desktop site is by far the most mainstream website I've come across that lies like this)
J_Shelby_J 10mo ago
> Even most technologists stopped using it long ago. Funny, because chrome has always been the browser for laptops users, while Firefox has always been the browser of power users.
seanhunter 10mo ago
This is completely untrue in my experience. I use firfox exclusively on my personal laptop and have done exclusively for years. I don’t even have chromium installed. I can’t remember the last time a website was unusable on firefox. It’s certainly not common.

by p-e-w 10mo ago

sharken 10mo ago

Given the current state of the Chrome family of browsers and the anti adblocker stance from Google, i'd think that alone would guarantee Firefox a steady user base. Not sure how users cope with Chrome-based browsers and intrusive ads.

lifthrasiir 10mo ago
That's just a wishful thinking. Too many ordinary users accept ads as inevitable annoyances and don't even know about the very existence of adblockers.
- yupyupyups 10mo ago
  Maybe because they don't know any better.
  - lifthrasiir 10mo ago
    Of course, but how would you convince them to switch? Not just your friends, but as a whole.
    - computerfriend 10mo ago
      If only they could see ads for ad blockers.
    - yupyupyups 10mo ago
      You could suggest installing Firefox next to Chrome and install uBlock Origin on it. Open YouTube and show them that there are zero ads. They will likely see a contrast.
purplehat_ 10mo ago
I've tried a few times to convince people in my life who would self describe as "bad with computers" to download an adblocker, but they usually find the friction too high. Adding extensions is unfamiliar for most, and even if it seems very basic for us, the non-tech people I know don't really want to deal with the risk of unknown unknowns from that, let alone switching to a healthier browser. (Perhaps reasonable since it feels like these days half the extensions on the Chrome Web Store are spyware or adware behind the scenes.) I also suspect that those who lived through the days of frequent Windows errors and Chrome running out of memory all the time often expect software to fail in weird and unexpected ways, and a lot of people adopt a "don't fix it if it isn't broken" mindset. Still, uBlock Lite and Brave browser are definitely easy wins and I'm glad to see more random people in my life using them than I would have expected. :)
- kgwxd 10mo ago
  The last time uBlock Origin caused me any pain was a on a toys r us rewards management site.
  - purplehat_ 10mo ago
    That's really funny. Yes, in case it wasn't clear for others reading this and thinking about installing these, it's almost certain that uBlock Origin and Brave browser will not cause you any problems and if you're using stock Chrome I really encourage you improve your situation dramatically for ~5 minutes worth of effort.
- yummypaint 10mo ago
  If it's the computer of an older family member or something, just put Firefox and ubo on their system for them and be done with it. They will use whatever software is preloaded, and being shown how to use it is a much lower barrier to entry than the cognitive load of finding, vetting, installing, and configuring new software. I used to try to patiently explain why people should do xyz. Now I explain to people why I'm going to change xyz on their device, and if they don't slam the breaks I just do what needs to be done right then. If someone doesn't know what an adblocker is they are getting one so they can see for themselves and reflect on what companies have been putting them through for years to make some incremental amount of money.

graemep 10mo ago

> Many banks and government websites don’t even support it anymore and loudly tell people to use Chrome instead, especially in developing countries. I cannot remember the last time I came across one myself.

p-e-w 10mo ago
It very strongly depends on which country you live in.
- darkwater 10mo ago
  In which country are you seeing that? For me the biggest offender are usually Google products and sometimes the lazy-coded website written by incompetents and whose audience is the tech illiterate (i.e. some websites involving schools/teaching) that just tell you "use latest Chrome just to be sure, download here" to, well, just be sure. Notable mentions for government websites that are like 10 years in the past and that are still on the "Supports Firefox" side because, well, they are just always late to everything.
  - rbits 10mo ago
    I live in Australia and I can't log into government services using my myGov account on Firefox. Works fine on Chromium.
    - someNameIG 10mo ago
      Just to test I just logged into myGov then through Firefox and it worked fine.
    - b112 10mo ago
      Wow. Force-Supporting the same company they're battling daily, on multiple issues.
      - graemep 10mo ago

tda 10mo ago

I use Firefox as my daily browser. If i have a website that fails to work, I might try chrome maybe once every two months. And then it usually also doesn't work. So for all browsing I do on the internet, Firefox works like a charm

sysguest 10mo ago
well I use it because it can handle 2000 tabs on my m1 macbook air (16gb ram) ... damn do I have adhd?????
- CodesInChaos 10mo ago
  Get the OneTab extension. It'll save and close all those tabs. That way you won't have Firefox crashing during startup once you exceed the number of tabs it can handle (a few thousand).
  - b112 10mo ago
    I have 117 thousand tabs, and it starts up fine. Just adjust your shm ratio. (I'm kidding)
  - fl0id 10mo ago
    You can also just do tab groups in ffx
  - lxgr 10mo ago
    Doesn't Firefox natively unload tabs these days?
  - Tarq0n 10mo ago
    I've had it function just fine around 9000 tabs.
  - versteegen 10mo ago
    Tip: the crashing is caused by certain extensions such as OneTab and All Tabs Helper which for some reason seem to cause all the tabs to load, just when restoring a session. Temporarily disable these extensions before restoring, then you can reenable.

Cthulhu_ 10mo ago

When they say "don't support it anymore", does that mean they're back to the IE era of using Chrome specific technologies so it doesn't work in any browser, do they use user-agent sniffing and show a big popup, or is it just that they're not testing it in FF anymore? The latter shouldn't be an issue as long as they use standards, the only thing they would run into in this day and age is browser specific bugs - but Safari seems to have that the most.

p-e-w 10mo ago
No, they mostly just show a popup telling you to use Chrome. Websites work fine if you switch the user agent.
OkayPhysicist 10mo ago
It's exclusively UA sniffing. IMO, Firefox should take the nuclear option and just start reporting the Chrome UA.

walrus01 10mo ago

> Many banks and government websites don’t even support it Because their web developers are too lazy to write anything to proper standards. They're doing some kind of lazy "Check for Chrome, because everyone must be running that, if not, redirect to an Unsupported page". I've yet to find a website that "refuses" to work in Firefox which doesn't work just fine when I use a user agent switching extension to present a standard Chrome on MacOS or Chrome on Windows useragent.

CoastalCoder 10mo ago
Are you sure they're all lazy? Another pretty common experience for developers is wanting to do things "the right way", but being overridden by management.
- OkayPhysicist 10mo ago
  Yes, because in this case "the right way" is to do nothing.

iso1631 10mo ago

Wikimedia stats from last year put it at 15% of desktop browsers, ahead of Safari and Edge.

embedding-shape 10mo ago
Yeah, every website has different stats about user-agents, depends a lot on the types of users you attract. I bet HN has Firefox usage ratio above 15% for sure, while sites like Instagram probably has way below the global average. Global browser marketshare never made much sense. You need to figure out what your users use, then aim to be compatible for most of those, and ignore any global stats.
Timwi 10mo ago
I wouldn't be surprised if there's a correlation between people frequenting Wikimedia websites and people using Firefox. It would be nice to know.
kemayo 10mo ago
If people are curious, all the stats for Wikimedia properties are here: https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#desktop-site-by-browser https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#desktop... As of December 7th, Firefox is 10.3% of traffic there. This makes it the #2 browser, after Chrome (at 62.2%) -- a spot it has been dueling with Edge over for the last year or so. I'm inclined to think that "people visiting wikipedia" is a fairly representative sample of "normal users", overall.
- ted_dunning 10mo ago
  I'm inclined to think that "people visiting wikipedia" skews heavily towards "people who like facts" which is distinctly not a normal web viewer.

mosquitobiten 10mo ago

that 3% is of total users including mobile which chrome is king because it's basically force fed to users. this is important because there is no choice with browsers for the common mobile user, most of them don't know what is a browser even if they used it every day. also in the 2000s IE was king because guess what? that was what came preinstalled with winxp

glenstein 10mo ago
Exactly! I keep banging this drum but I'm fascinated by the possibility of Android being required to have a pop-up where people can choose different browsers, as a potential remedy to Google's monopoly. Because engineering a path dependency on Google search, from mobile hardware, to software, to default browsers, to default search on the browser, I think is part of how they've enforced their monopoly. There's been a legal judgment that they are, in fact a monopoly, but I don't think any remedy has been decided on yet. And there's a lot of historical precedent for a pop-up to select a default as a remedy to software monopolies. Granted in Google's case, it seems that the Monopoly judgment was with respect to ad markets, but locking people into search to serve ads might be understood as part of the structure of that monopoly.

ojosilva 10mo ago

3% market share is 150 million active users give or take. That's no death by any count in the software world. Gosh, I really wish Mozilla would just dig into their user-base and find a way to adequately become sustainable... or find a way to make it work better as a foundation that is NOT maintained by Google, ie like the Wiki Foundation. I do spend a LOT of time in FF, can't anyone see there's a value beyond selling ads and personal info that could make Mozilla more sustainable, dependable and resilient?

csin 10mo ago

This 3% number is deceptive. The whole desktop market is cratering. I was talking to a reddit mod a few months ago. He was looking at the subreddit stats. 95% of his users were on mobile. Think about that. We desktop users are dinosaurs. So FireFox having a 3% market share might actually mean more than half of desktop users are on FireFox.

abenga 10mo ago
I can't imagine browsing the web on my phone and tablet without Firefox mobile. That would honestly be the biggest loss once this CEO takes this nonsense to the logical end.
- csin 10mo ago
  I'm genuinely curious. What does FireFox mobile have over it's competition? You can't install UBlock Origin on mobile. Like I still use FireFox on mobile, just purely out of habit. I don't really see anything better about it (I am quite inexperienced when it comes to phones).
  - OvervCW 10mo ago
    You can install uBlock Origin on Firefox mobile; it's the only reason I use it.
    - csin 10mo ago
      Oh wow TIL. Thanks, that is amazing. I just looked it up. 2023 was when it started. I'm surprised Android even allows something like this.
      - rightbyte 10mo ago
        Yeah at some point it wasn't possible. I think Mozilla did some workaround by having a bunch of wetted extensions?

timeon 10mo ago

Have not used Chrome-based browsers 3+ years and never had problem with Firefox. Sometimes Safari was not working 100% - but nothing serious. Maybe it is because, only page from google I use is Youtube; however Firefox has best experience there, even better than Chrome - thanks to proper uBlock Origin.

yread 10mo ago

My software stopped working because its drawing on canvas in a way that causes firefox to glitch with hw acceleration enabled. Not one of my customers/users complained

moron4hire 10mo ago
The only reasons I've ever put effort into Firefox support in my software was A) I find it helps push me to write towards standards better if I include multiple browser engines, which makes it more likely I'll support Safari without extra effort, which is difficult for me to test on because I don't daily drive any Apple devices (works about 80% of the time), and B) to avoid the shit-fit I would receive if I ever posted it as a "Show HN." It has never come up as an actual user requirement.

OkayPhysicist 10mo ago

Most of those sites are doing a little move called "lying". I occasionally (once every couple of months) run into a site claiming to not support Firefox. I can't recall a single site that wasn't a tech demo of some bleeding edge feature of Chrome that didn't magically start working when I turned on my Chrome UserAgent. (Hey, if you work at Snapchat: fix your shit. Your desktop site is by far the most mainstream website I've come across that lies like this)

J_Shelby_J 10mo ago

> Even most technologists stopped using it long ago. Funny, because chrome has always been the browser for laptops users, while Firefox has always been the browser of power users.

seanhunter 10mo ago

This is completely untrue in my experience. I use firfox exclusively on my personal laptop and have done exclusively for years. I don’t even have chromium installed. I can’t remember the last time a website was unusable on firefox. It’s certainly not common.