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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?

#211

Post by heurist »

phkahler wrote: post #38
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…

>> 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…

A while back I spent a few weeks figuring out how to configure Firefox to work exactly how I want a browser to work, then months happily using it. Then a big update was released and everything broke. I never bothered to get it working again. And despite claims of performance improvements that came with the release, it still chugged slower than Chrome. I would love to use a browser that I can actually configure how I want without things breaking every week, even if it's slower in general. But if I can't configure reliably and it's slower -- what's the point?

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

#212

Post by mhitza »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #86
sockaddr wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently switched to Linux and only installed Firefox. When you force yourself to use it, it's doable. I think only once in the last 6 months did a website not work (my dumb HOA website). Other than that, it's more than sufficient. It crashes sometimes but if that's the price for not having coercive software controlling my life, so be it.

Not claiming, that your experience isn't true, but: Firefox hasn't crashed for me in years! And I am a real tab hoarder. 400 tabs and more are not so uncommon for me. Then again I don't allow arbitrary websites to run all sorts of shit scripts. It might or might not be your hardware, or it might be the websites you visit.

Not the OP, but I consider it a soft crash every time I update Firefox in my OS, and it won't allow me to spawn new tabs until I restart Firefox. Annoying behavior they've included a couple years back.

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

#213

Post by godelski »

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…

For an average person, I think this argument is fine. But we're on HN where we can discuss something with a bit more nuance. There's two major things that I see that FF offers that Chrome doesn't, including chromium alternatives. 1) More privacy. Chrome tracks you substantially more than alternative browsers. In addition to that, is simply the chrome ecosystem, see next point. 2) Chrome's dominance defines the web. A decentralized service doesn't become centralized once one player takes 100% of the users. It happens long before because a big player can throw their weight around and force others to do what they want. Chrome already acts this way. We talk about this extensively several times a year here, so I'll let others state this argument better. But the short is that Google can define protocols, more tracking analytics, etc.

It really comes down to two things.

- Do you want to encourage more privacy across the web?

- Do you want the web to be more decentralized?

If you want more privacy and less centralization, you should use FF. I don't think it is just about the services that they offer. I think we can go deeper and talk about the future of the web in general and how our choices affect that.

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

#214

Post by JohnTHaller »

captn3m0 wrote: post #144
nicoburns wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like Firefox on Android should be more popular than it is. Chrome is default, but it doesn't offer an Ad Blocker. Firefox with uBlock origin is a far superior experience. Although there are other 3rd party chromium-based browsers that are just as good. I suspect that it's poor market share is due the very poor performance of the older fennec implementation.

I’d argue that FF could possibly convince some manufacturers to preload Firefox with uBlock installed as a faster browser (if UCBrowser could, surely FF can).

I'd wager that Firefox's deal with Google prohibits them from doing this on any platform.

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

#216

Post by sockaddr »

feanaro wrote: post #199
sockaddr wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently switched to Linux and only installed Firefox. When you force yourself to use it, it's doable. I think only once in the last 6 months did a website not work (my dumb HOA website). Other than that, it's more than sufficient. It crashes sometimes but if that's the price for not having coercive software controlling my life, so be it.

Hmm, interesting, because I don't force myself to use Firefox. I use it because it's just plain better than Chrome, in that I can configure it just the way I want.

I'm curious what OS you're running. For me, on macOS Firefox performs the best out of all browsers I've tried, but on Linux it feels a bit sluggish.

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

#217

Post by feanaro »

weaksauce wrote: post #140
benjamir wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> And you only get one profile active at a time.

This isn't true. As I'm writing this, I have three Firefox windows open, each in a different profile. What makes you think you can only have one profile active at a time?

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

#218

Post by dewey »

pasc1878 wrote: post #36
nikanj wrote: post #13

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.

I get none of that - you musty have some odd config.

I have a pretty standard config and I got that the other day: https://twitter.com/tehwey/status/1483531515631919106

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

#219

Post by selfhoster11 »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #173
selfhoster11 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm hoping for the latter. Or if not, the that if the Firefox collapsed, it would re-emerge in some fashion as a grassroots community project with non-Mozilla governance.

You know… you don't have to wait for the company to collapse.

Perhaps we have to.

Look at what happened to youtube-dl - even before the DMCA takedown, nobody was doing anything about the leadership being AWOL despite the huge PR backlog. Then, when it was taken down, various forks popped up, including yt-dlp which became a natural potential successor. They injected lots of potential, because the main authority was absent and they seized initiative.

Even after youtube-dl came back, they eventually went under a new management. The entire space of YouTube/video downloaders is better off for the DMCA incident, even if taken by itself it was a harmful event.

Mozilla falling might just reenergise Firefox, though I'd obviously much rather they undergo a priority shift instead, so we can keep continuity.

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

#220

Post by antupis »

loudtieblahblah wrote: post #66
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…

If all that is left is chromium, then you can kiss what is left of web standards good bye. Google will set the standard, taking input from any other tech player big enough to have a seat at the table. Its bad enough ISO certification boards and official positions of the W3C can be bought or corrupted. Let there be only one engine, controlled by Google? And even the pretense of a open and fair playing field goes away.…

Yeah we would get "IE6" from google not like first 2-4 years but soonish.
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