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

You can see it well on JS-heavy sites like Twitter, the difference is very easy to perceive with loading time, scrolling perf, and also with memory management (Firefox evicts pages from memory cache aggressively compared to Chromium; you sometimes switch a tab or switch an app, go back, and bang, it's gone and needs a reload); and I have a decent good phone (not top shelf, but a "high-mid" Pixel 3a, probably 60-70th percentile within Androids?).

  * Aggressive competition who are ready to use dark patterns on all platforms to push their own products. All of Google, Microsoft and Apple are doing it one way or another.

  * No financing. Pocket and Mozilla VPN are rather miserable revenue streams and therefore FF relies on the likes of Google for the bulk of their budget which means that they are limited in what they can do against Google.

  * Really old code base that needs to be adapted for the modern web which takes money and resources from other initiatives.

  * The Mozilla Foundation which seems to consider the browser a golden hen that will provide them nice profits to waste.

  * major legislation that must level up the browser market or an economic shift that will break Google, Microsoft and Apple dominance on the major user platforms.

  * a miracle new money tree should grow up in San Francisco such that it will be an independent revenue source for the project.

  * much more people and organizations should invest in improving the browser either with money or effort (magic tree or failure of all other browser engines).

  * Firefox should be liberated from the foundation and be a community project like Debian so that people have better feeling of ownership of the project.

I'm not sure how critical this is in practice; but the way this evolved may be a symptom of the fact that Blink's authors' motivations align less well with those of an ad-block user than Firefox's authors' motivations do.

The worry of course is that once there truly are no competing rendering engines, that google will no longer feel the pressure to put user's interests before those of sites of even itself. And because blink and webkit don't really compete (still nice to have two, but on virtually no devices are both engines serious alternatives), that day is pretty close; it's likely already having an impact.

Right now, backwards compatibility is protected by competing browsers. If one breaks backwards compatibility too often, it risks becoming known for having sites not work on it.

In a monoculture, Google could take aggressive moves to prevent ad-blocking. In a monoculture, Google could push more ad focused features like FloC. Google could integrate more ways to allow browser fingerprint (not saying they would, but there would be no recourse).

With competition Google knows that people could balk at any point so they must balance their interests with their users' interests. In a monoculture, they wouldn't have to.