Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?

Probably once Chrome brings in the new Manifest v3 changes then FF will start reversing the trend.

Every time I restart Firefox, I get about 8 different prompts for "See what's new!" "Reset your Firefox profile now!" "See our new diversity initiative now!" etc.

It feels like opening a Windows Me installation from 2000. I just want to get browsing done.

Firefox declining market share cannot be reversed. The users have stuck to Chrome for years and they don't care about the broken websites that Firefox can't render or support. In the long run it will continue to decline and Google will just see its not worth it.

Firefox is beyond saving. The question is, what can Mozilla do to save itself?

They had a chance with Rust to turn that into something like Erlang Solutions did with Erlang. ie. A Rust Consultancy and will be able to make a significant amount of money in the long term with that. Instead we were given a corporate foundation that is already in chaos by Amazon.

Mozilla has given up on its mission statement and has partnered and joined the anti-privacy gang: Google and Facebook as they watch them push whatever hostile web standard to W3C, and being powerless to stop or object them.

What a shame.

I've used Firefox only for a few years (up until last month or so).

I'm no expert and would actually like to know, from the experts here, if the following is my subjective experience or not:

I find that for not very heavy or for heavy, but well-behaved sites, I can't really tell the difference between FF and Chrome.

But for very heavy and badly designed sites, Chrome seems to be much faster and have much less latency.

Because Chrome works well enough to be, at worst, "okay" for the average user.

People only really change tech when the one they currently have is visibly & obviously worse, which is part of what spurred the initial migrations to Chrome (I remember switching from FF and in awe at how much faster Chrome was).

That's not to say Chrome hasn't been acquiring it's own list of missteps (manifest V3, restricted Chrome Sync, even attempting Flow), but none of them so far are the type that a non-tech-savvy user would care about, or even know about unless explicitly told.

Then you add on the massive budget Chrome has, compared to Mozilla's struggles to find a revenue source, and it's not hard to see why it's having a hard time.

With that in mind, the obvious solution is for FF to find something distinct it can excel at that the average person finds attractive and that allows for monetization in some way. Problem is, no one really knows what that would be, and the current attempts at being privacy-focused just...aren't widely applicable enough. (Whether or not people should care about privacy is a different debate, and how to get them to care about privacy is its own rabbit hole.)