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

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

#131

Post by Brakenshire »

ameminator wrote: post #69
selfhoster11 wrote: post #2

They should focus on saving Firefox. - Cut out all (or at the very least, most) initiatives that don't serve the goal of promoting Firefox's market share or sustainability going forward - Donate the major money drains that aren't Firefox to the Apache Foundation or another worthy custodian - Fire all inessential staff that don't want to work on Firefox. - Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not…

I think that's a bit too far - for example, Thunderbird is a great web client. I do think they should have found a way to hold onto the Servo team and make that engine more useable and better than the base chromium engine. If they had been able to keep the Rust foundation on board, it would have also made sense. However, I do agree that their leadership has made terrible decisions and they've absolutely focused on th…

The obvious thing to do was continue to invest in Servo. If they could have produced a parallel layout engine, which could provide app like animations without fiddling on desktop and Android, and then make that easy to embed, they could have made real inroads into blink/webkit.

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

#132

Post by selfhoster11 »

paxys wrote: post #52
selfhoster11 wrote: post #2

They should focus on saving Firefox. - Cut out all (or at the very least, most) initiatives that don't serve the goal of promoting Firefox's market share or sustainability going forward - Donate the major money drains that aren't Firefox to the Apache Foundation or another worthy custodian - Fire all inessential staff that don't want to work on Firefox. - Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not…

You are answering the question "how can Mozilla make more money", but that wasn't what was asked. Mozilla as a whole is profitable already, and revenues have been growing close to 100% year over year. As a company they are in great health. Except that's not what users care about when picking a browser. Google has too much money, tech, marketing and too big an existing user and device base to make any kind of direct c…

The subtitle of the question was "What would you do if you were in charge of Mozilla? How would you save Firefox?"

My answer is an attempt at addressing these two questions. My goal wasn't to make Mozilla more profitable, but to ensure that it's focused on what should be its core mission, rather than the mire of sideshows that they engage in at the moment.

Also, I don't care how Mozilla the amorphous blob of a corporation is doing. I care about how Mozilla the vehicle for the survival, promotion and development of Firefox is doing, and that one seems to be on the brink of death if nothing is done to change the current course.

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

#133

Post by boomboomsubban »

horsawlarway wrote: post #33

This is my personal opinion only, so take it with a grain of salt. ---- Mozilla can't save Firefox. It's not that Firefox can't be saved, but rather that Mozilla as an organization is not capable of doing so. My take is this - Despite a history of being relatively privacy friendly, the vast majority of funding for the organization comes directly from Google (To the tune of ~90% of their total funding, straight from G…

>Mozilla needs a replacement funding plan because Google can essentially turn the lights off at any point by simply refusing to pay them for search at next contract renewal.

And then Bing/Yandex/Baidu buys the rights, and all that changes is the amount they get. It'd drop if Google publicly vowed they won't bid on it anymore, but there's also the possibility that someone like Yahoo pays more than Google like what happened in 2015.

It's not like Google is arbitrarily deciding how much money to give Mozilla, they are buying something at the lowest price they can.

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

#134

Post by captn3m0 »

garciasn wrote: post #62
phkahler wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> We as a community, cannot afford to let Firefox languish until the only browsers in the world are Chromium derivatives. The diversity of truly independent browser engines is far too important to give up without a fight. There are a lot of people oh HN who agree with that but then use a different browser for whatever reason. I feel like these people are being very hypocritical and should use what they want to succe…

They offer nothing I cannot get elsewhere and thus I have no reason to switch. When it first came out, Firefox was faster, lighter and offered way better function than the alternatives at the time. Since then, competition has been fierce in the browser market and they’ve done little to distinguish themselves in any major way from their competitive set. Until they do something so vastly incomparable in the market, the…

On Desktop, I can agree. But uBlock Origin on Android is only possible on Firefox afaik (and one of the major ways Google uses Android for Ad revenue leverage)

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

#135

Post by captn3m0 »

Shared404 wrote: post #45
jms703 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. However, I think they need to answer the question, why should Firefox exist? If there is no compelling reason, well, there you go. If there is, double down on that make that reason shine. They have wasted so much money on the wrong things, IMO.

>they need to answer the question, why should Firefox exist? If there is no compelling reason, well, there you go. If there is, double down on that make that reason shine. Unfortunately, that reason (browser engine diversity)is compelling to people who understand the situation, but not general consumers - and it's impossible to make general consumers care, unless maybe Firefox went for an edgy "rebel against the man"…

They should do a Apple styl “Think Different” campaign.

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

#136

Post by vi2837 »

softwarebeware wrote: post #31

Firefox is losing marketshare because Chrome is the default browser on Android devices and Android devices are the number one device in the world. Most people don't even know how to change their default browser. I don't think Firefox needs saving. Those who use it are active and committed to it.

Yeap, the same story like Windows and Explorer.

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

#137

Post by selfhoster11 »

nwah1 wrote: post #78
paxys wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are answering the question "how can Mozilla make more money", but that wasn't what was asked. Mozilla as a whole is profitable already, and revenues have been growing close to 100% year over year. As a company they are in great health. Except that's not what users care about when picking a browser. Google has too much money, tech, marketing and too big an existing user and device base to make any kind of direct c…

They could pivot to compete with the Big Tech conglomerates in general. Provide their own suite of integrated tools, search engines, communication platforms, and so on. But with a privacy-focused and ad-free approach. DuckDuckGo already proved there is an appetite for something like this. They could go further, and remain relevant and viable in the way that DDG is, even if they never again are the most popular browse…

Pivoting would kill Firefox, and this is exactly what we should be trying to save if we care about some version of the open web. Indeed, I'm advocating for pivoting away from all of these other things, and towards Firefox as the one and only concern for the organisation.

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

#138

Post by concinds »

The best way to predict the future is to analyse the constraints on what can happen.

There is no mass-switching campaign in favor of Firefox. The only foreseeable hope of one happening in the future, is if ManifestV3 kills adblockers, and people decide to switch to Firefox; but now there are so many competitors that oppose ManifestV3 (Brave, Opera, Vivaldi) that Firefox isn't ideally positioned to benefit.

Otherwise, there is no reason to expect the factors behind Firefox's decline to disappear.

Apple bundles Safari with their platforms. Google advertises Chrome on their web properties. Microsoft heavily discourages Windows users from switching away from Edge, and occasional "bugs" reset Edge as the default browser. Most corporations promote Chrome to their employees.

There is no major reason to expect any of this to change. The likeliest change is antitrust action, with "browser choice" screens[0], but I don't see why that would help Firefox more than other browsers.

There's no reason to think that continued incremental improvements in Firefox (the current path) can prevent its decline.

The ballsiest thing Mozilla could do is switch to a forked Blink engine (Mozillium?); they'd save tons of engineering resources which they could refocus on user-facing features & UX, they'd have better webcompat with cutting-edge things (VR, MIDI, etc), they'd still be a part of web standards decisions (since they could still choose how their Blink fork deviates from Google's), and could encourage other Chromium forks to rebase on Mozillium instead of Chromium. But Firefox's most diehard fans would never forgive Mozilla, and they might lose as many users as they gain.

It's hard to think of anything Mozilla can do to double Firefox's market share. Continued decline is the most likely path.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu

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

#139

Post by alex23478 »

tayo42 wrote: post #93
chockablocker wrote: post #61

Everybody is moving to mobile and almost nobody uses Firefox on mobile. However, Firefox mobile does support extensions. Is that something that could emphasized? However, Firefox speed on mobile is much slower than Chrome. That should probably be improved upon. For desktop there's not much of a distinguishing factor left. Chrome is good enough. I like Firefox for the privacy, but is that enough of a distinguishing fa…

I use firefox on android. Its frustrating at times. It doesn't integrate well with android stuff like opening up in apps I think. It takes me to the app store or doesnt even open in apps. Google stuff like looking at reviews doesn't work in firefox.

There's an addon for making the Google pages work as they do in Chrome:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/google-search...

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

#140

Post by weaksauce »

benjamir wrote: post #70
ssorallen wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome’s Profiles are the #1 reason I use it over Firefox. If Firefox had as complete of an implementation as Chrome then I would consider switching, but until then Firefox is a non-starter for me. I use all 3 of these profiles all day every day for work: * one personal profile logged into personal Google * one work profile managed by the company, logged into company Google * one development profile with all the debu…

headscratch I used profiles with Ff for ages... what is the difference to Chrome's?

The only thing I can think of is that the UI is not as nice as chromes for switching? in chrome you can switch the profile from a menu option and there can be more than one profile active at a time with separate everything including extensions and bookmarks.

in firefox you don't get that easy switch and I am not sure the gui for the profiles is enabled by default. you have to manually start up firefox with a -P flag from the command line to get the profile manager. And you only get one profile active at a time.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...

That said, 90% of the time you can use container tabs and it is almost the equivalent of that.

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