Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

netmarketshare.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 755 posts

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#11

Post by jopsen »

rocky1138 wrote: post #4

I didn't see any indication as to their methodology for how they're calculating these stats. It's probably been said a zillion times before, but if it's JavaScript-based you can safely assume that they are incorrect as it's likely there is a large intersection between people browsing with an ad-blocker, private browsing, or with content blocker and those people using Firefox.

Does it matter?

Even if the measure is somewhat flawed it's hard to argue that drop isn't related to a drop in the underlying number of users.

Mozilla is awesome, but growing Firefox is an uphill struggle.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#12

Post by chrisseaton »

rocky1138 wrote: post #4

I didn't see any indication as to their methodology for how they're calculating these stats. It's probably been said a zillion times before, but if it's JavaScript-based you can safely assume that they are incorrect as it's likely there is a large intersection between people browsing with an ad-blocker, private browsing, or with content blocker and those people using Firefox.

It probably almost doesn't matter if they're wrong - if they see this decline in users, true or not, then so will people monitoring users to their websites, and they will be likely to stop testing their sites on Firefox.

Also it's a drop - do you think the number of people turning off JavaScript has gone up since Quantum? Why would that be? It's either that or less Firefox users.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#13

Post by sciurus »

baroffoos wrote: post #2

All of the other browsers have some other vector to push their browser. Safari, Edge and Chrome are all preinstalled on OSs and chrome is advertised on the biggest website in the world. Even if firefox is slightly better than the rest it doesn't matter. Chrome only exists because IE was so bad people went out of their way not to use it.

Considering that, it's interesting that Firefox still has more desktop market share than Edge and Safari.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#14

Post by whymauri »

Quantum would make my work laptop (Macbook pro, 13 inch touchbar 2017) overheat constantly. It just always had performance issues and I troubleshooted every way I could. I never figured out what exactly was causing it. I tried to switch to Firefox for 2 solid months, but I just couldn't do it :(

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#15

Post by muxator »

baroffoos wrote: post #2

All of the other browsers have some other vector to push their browser. Safari, Edge and Chrome are all preinstalled on OSs and chrome is advertised on the biggest website in the world. Even if firefox is slightly better than the rest it doesn't matter. Chrome only exists because IE was so bad people went out of their way not to use it.

Historically, that crown goes to Firefox. Its 2004 1.0 release was also publicized in the New York Times. Way before Chrome came out.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#16

Post by nichos »

Sad news. Firefox is my favorite browser, and I like their Dev tools the best.

All the important stuff done in a browser should not be trusted to one that is closed source. (I know chromium is open source, but almost no one is using it).

A good balance of browsers is important, I've already seen "you must use chrome to view this site."

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#17

Post by hnaccy »

Puer wrote: post #10

Just my personal $0.02: 1. The biggest thing keeping me tied to Chrome over any other browser is the extension support. Extensions are second class citizens in any other browser. This is partly because other browsers keep overhauling their systems and deprecating old software which discourages extension developers, and mainly because (as an extension developer) why would you code for browser X when you can get more u…

Are there specific WebExtension APIs you care about that Chrome supports and Firefox doesn't?

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#18

Post by _wmd »

baroffoos wrote: post #2

All of the other browsers have some other vector to push their browser. Safari, Edge and Chrome are all preinstalled on OSs and chrome is advertised on the biggest website in the world. Even if firefox is slightly better than the rest it doesn't matter. Chrome only exists because IE was so bad people went out of their way not to use it.

Chrome only exists because Google were afraid of lacking control over the stack they use to deliver their content. Firefox was already 'good enough' long before it ever appeared, and Google could easily have dedicated engineering resources if the problem with Firefox was purely technical, much as they do with Linux.

FWIW a lot of Google behavior can be cast as an analogy to a paranoid control freak. Net neutrality is an obvious one, the incredible lack of any demarcating information useful for traffic shaping in QUIC is another. But of course both of these are really about citizen rights and privacy :)

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#20

Post by yial »

I still use Firefox on my work computers and personal. The reason simply being that I feel the performance is better than chrome most times. I used Firefox / Mozilla for many years, then went to chrome when it was new and shiny, but I’m back to Firefox as I believe it truly is the better product. They just need to somehow market it better to people.
Post reply on HN