One strategy might be to pursue creating software to run on the server or as a proxy. There are probably a number of optimizations that could take place on the server that would benefit from knowledge of how browsers will interpret a page. Eg, you could inline certain styles or other resources to speed up loading, rather than requiring the browser to request them separately. I think chrome benefits from being the best way to view a number of google properties, and it would be interesting if firefox could respond by being the best way to view diverse other sites on the web. Note that I'm not suggesting they purposefully break features on chrome, but rather that certain browser features might become nore useful if there was a guarantee that servers would take advantage of them.
Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
241–250 of 949 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
If Firefox dies, the open web dies. It's that simple. For the open web to remain open, there needs to be at least one more truly independent source of authority regarding how a rendering engine should work. Everyone else has thrown in the towel and abdicated that authority to Google by embedding Blink. Google is either actively malicious to the open web, or doesn't care about it other than as something they can strip…
Why does everyone always forget about Safari in these discussions? Safari has a respectable marketshare on mobile / tablets. Not as good on desktop but it’s not a lost cause.
Probably because you can only use Safari on Apple products.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#243Here's my perspective on this - Chrome has established itself as the baseline. The baseline is no longer the W3C standard, it's Chrome due to all of the experimental future W3C spec items being in Chrome. Chrome leads the spec, and with its 70% market share developers allow it to. Firefox will always be playing catchup because of this, regardless of their market share. This leaves three main reasons for using Firefox…
We need a better way to communicate this: Chrome doesn't "lead the spec", it "rushes out ahead of the spec". The developers using non-standard features need to be held better accountable for using non-standard features, and Google needs to be held better accountable for releasing non-standard features ahead of standardization processes.
W3C is seen as no longer relevant to HTML specs having delegated "HTML5" to WHATWG, and WHATWG seems to exist entirely to rubber-stamp Google's will (up until Firefox or Safari or increasingly less common Microsoft complains, and then they try to compromise, sometimes). WHATWG seems to have no teeth to hold Google accountable to standards processes and the Emperor Has No Clothes. (ETA: And yes, that's a hot take that's very unfavorable. I understand many individuals still care inside the W3C and WHATWG, but the end result of collective action is a dangerous rubber-stamping of a Chromium monopsony.)
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Firefox promises all these things, but I think that by and large the problem is that it just doesn't deliver on them for the average person. And average person is how we get the market share and safety in numbers.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#245One thing missed when talking about Firefox's market share is desktop versus mobile market share. If you look at Wikimedia's metrics, Firefox still has ~10% market share of the desktop browser market[0], not too bad considering Firefox is not the default browser on any platform outside of linux systems for the most part, and that Mozilla is much smaller entity than competing browser vendors. Still down from the ~30%[…
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've tried using it on Android and it simply doesn't work on my hardware. Takes minutes to load a page.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#246Build more SaaS services users can pay for, like Mozilla VPN[1] which enhances privacy , better user experience and keep things more secure.
Mozilla needs recurring revenue stream strong enough to help them get off Google deal and scale up revenue to compete with big guns on equal footing.
Firefox has the advantage of not being advertising driven, privacy focused and a great brand.
Services like say Identity(expand Firefox account for say form-less login to supporting websites), password management (LastPass), payment/credit card management , their own email/calendar service to complement Thunderbird, notes/clipboard like Evernote/notion , screen recording sharing like loom and so on and deeply integrate to their browser to provide seamless experience .
Focus on services which browsing better/ safer can build strong revenue runway that can fund all the ambitions they have for other projects
Opt -in for any service and modular. Nothing breaks regular experience. Just offer better convenience people will pay, one thing Apple get right.
[1] Yes it is white labelled Mullvad VPN, but it is still recurring revenue for Mozilla.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
> DuckDuckGo already proved there is an appetite for something like this. An appetite, yes. But not a major one. A privacy-focused, ad-free approach would be hugely appealing to the HN crowd. But I’m less convinced about the public at large.
market to multiple verticals. schools, local/regional/state governments, non-profits - types of orgs that have some long-term interest in privacy.
>schools
The same schools that went all in with Chromebooks?
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#248Make if fast.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use Firefox. Not exclusively, but most of the time, on principle. I would call it usable, but not "very usable". For normal people, Chrome(ium) UX is better. For power users, Vivaldi is a far better choice despite the Chromium browser engine. And for both of these groups, Firefox UX worsens and improves seemingly at random. Quite frankly, I'm conflicted whether I should recommend Firefox at all. If I say "look, her…
> I would call it usable, but not "very usable". For normal people, Chrome(ium) UX is better. I can't imagine why you would say this. Could you point out some concrete examples of better UX?
The hamburger menu, for one. It's extremely unintuitive. Not the fact that it uses a hamburger icon, but that even simple things like accessing the full list of my bookmarks involve multiple clicks. If you know the keyboard shortcuts then it's not a problem, but I want common UI items to be accessible from the UI.
Besides that, the UI is just sluggish a lot of the time. It feels that Chrome(ium) has a far better latency response.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#250- Fight against Apple in court on the iOS browser monopoly. - get Web extensions (real ones, like uBlock) into Firefox for iOS. - start a campaign around Web browsing speed (using numbers with Privacy Protection and/or uBlock0 enabled). That’s the last competitive advantage FF has, and it needs to use it to gain marketshare. - Keep investing in Open Web initiatives (such as ActivityPub). Mozilla, like it or not, is o…
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