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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?

#221

Post by bennysomething »

pmoriarty wrote: post #168
paxys wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a regular end user why do I care about what Mozilla's mission is? Apple makes shiny devices, Google gives me great free services, and in return I use their (perfectly great) browsers. What is one single reason to use Firefox? As long as these large companies continue to put effort into their browsers (which Microsoft didn't do with IE), users are simply never going to switch, the same way no one is using desktop L…

"What is one single reason to use Firefox?" Better ad blocking.

Ha! Was gonna say exactly this! It's the only reason I use it! Used to like the add-ons then they broke them all in an update two years ago

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

#224

Post by janitor61 »

Firefox, like most modern software, is suffering from Winchester house syndrome. Hiring full-time UX designers and making them perpetually justify their salary will eventually turn any software into an unusable, unlearnable amorphous blob that blindly follows trends and alienates even the most determined users, much like hiring dozens of full-time plumbers for your house would transform it into a sci-fi movie set given enough time and money.

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

#225

Post by dontblink »

emn13 wrote: post #188
paxys wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it better than Chrome + uBlock Origin/Privacy Badger/Ghostery?

According to the uBlock author: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b... 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 l…

But why is that a worry? This happened before when IE6 dominated. Firefox was liberation. It can be that again and has set precedent.

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

#226

Post by asoneth »

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #87
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…

The real (and often downvoted) answer is that Mozilla compromised on their core values. A "death by a thousand cuts", as it were. For me, it started back when "sponsored tiles" were first announced in 2014. On the surface it was obviously advertisements, but many defenders tried to argue that it was a "good thing" Then there was the proprietary Pocket extension baked into the browser with no easy removal. Again, many…

I don't recall very many people defending Mozilla on the Mr Robot or the Booking.com missteps. Even current and ex-Mozillans lambasted them for those.

I recall a few people defending the sponsored titles (or half-hearted defenses about how it's bad but not that bad since you can turn them off) but those defenses seemed to be largely drowned out by the overwhelmingly negative response.

The only of those that I recall having anything close to "many defenders" was the Pocket integration.

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

#227

Post by Permit »

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…

> - Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion

Why stop there? Why not get developers who are "in it for the passion"?

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

#229

Post by WorldMaker »

BeefWellington wrote: post #143

I actually have wondered about this. Given the changes in the way tracking protection has been done, have there been any actual studies/analyses that show Firefox is losing marketshare? If it's all based on ad companies and server-side detection, I'm unclear that you could actually correctly make the claim. If anyone has links I'd be interested in reading; I'm sure there are fingerprinting techniques, but ones that r…

I also suspect a lot of the "Firefox is losing marketshare" is driven in part by ad companies, especially the huge one named Google.

Given how many websites think Firefox in Enhanced Privacy Protection mode is "an ad blocker", of course ad trackers think Firefox is losing marketshare because it isn't feeding their trackers.

Between that and how Mobile Firefox still has to use platform browsers (and a lot of user agent detection picks out the platform browser rather than the "user browser" on mobile), I'd be surprised if Firefox marketshare has dropped as much as the narrative believes.

That said, even before Enhanced Privacy Protection and Mobile, Firefox was down in marketshare compared to the behemoth competitors, and so even if it is a trick of "Heisenberg metrics" that Firefox is losing marketshare, it probably could stand to gain marketshare (to push us away from the growing monopsony).

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

#230

Post by nix0n »

agentdrtran wrote: post #215

The amount of people saying "listen to power users" in this thread seem to have read the questions as "what do I want Firefox to do"

The most important thing to a regular user, is that their websites work. But for websites to work, the developer had to test in Firefox. So, Firefox's alienation of power users has hurt its regular userbase.
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