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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?

#331

Post by BossingAround »

sebmellen wrote: post #267
Jayakumark wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Current CEO is a cancer to Mozilla, her main goal seems like to make more money personally before Mozilla goes bankrupt. As long is as she is there - there is no hope https://itdm.com/mozilla-firefox-usage-down-85-but-why-are-e...

The arrogance is hard to believe. > In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008. On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask peopl…

I don't think this has anything to do with arrogance, this is simply the market value speaking. Ginni Rometty did something similar with IBM; while being a terrible CEO ("IBM was the worst-performing large-cap tech stock during Rometty's tenure, dropping 24%" [1]), she got a whopping $20M per year [2] during her first 7 years of being a CEO, and she got $20M golden parachute [3] upon leaving the shell of an IBM.

This is not arrogance. This is simply the pay of a CEO, regardless of their performance.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/31/ibm-was-worst-performing-lar...

[2] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-01-31/ginni-rome...

[3] https://www.silicon.co.uk/workspace/ibm-ginni-rometty-20m-33...

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

#332

Post by Jensson »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #304
sebmellen wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The arrogance is hard to believe. > In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008. On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask peopl…

Fuck, I'll do it for a mere million dollars. The market has spoken. I can't do much worse than losing 85% market share.

Do nonprofits really care about the market? Not sure how that works, what would it take to replace her if she doesn't want to be replaced?

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

#333

Post by runarberg »

May I suggest that our best effort in saving Firefox is to enforce existing pro-consumer laws which breaks up large companies like Google while promoting laws that protects our privacy.

Firefox’s biggest threat is a company with a really broad range of products that all coalesce into selling scary profitable ads.

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

#334

Post by marginalia_nu »

akdor1154 wrote: post #309
marginalia_nu wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tried using it on Android and it simply doesn't work on my hardware. Takes minutes to load a page.

Since the re-architecture? Its pretty great now.

Tried it just now. From pressing the url bar to the keyboard showing up is a 2 second delay. Overall pages seem really unresponsive.

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

#335

Post by pstuart »

twblalock wrote: post #323
Jayakumark wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Current CEO is a cancer to Mozilla, her main goal seems like to make more money personally before Mozilla goes bankrupt. As long is as she is there - there is no hope https://itdm.com/mozilla-firefox-usage-down-85-but-why-are-e...

A better CEO would not be cheaper, particularly considering that whoever takes the job would be tasked with saving a dying product. High salary and a golden parachute would be required to attract anyone good enough to succeed.

Really? This isn't GM -- it's a web browser. An important one, but even a paltry $1M should be enough to draw in the right talent.

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

#336

Post by jka »

Few device manufacturers and platform ecosystems appear incentivized to bundle Firefox, perhaps because it doesn't provide much in the way of competitive moat-building opportunities in return for the partnership (there is the Google sponsorship, which is probably helpful in their unique case because it provides a defence against allegations of monopolistic behaviour).

The cost of bundling for Chrome and Safari is low, because it's software -- so they are included with a large number of devices, especially where commercial partnerships can be formed (generally on favourable terms to Google and Apple, respectively, I'd expect).

I don't think that the average user notices much difference in terms of behaviour and functionality between any of these browsers. I'll admit that there are probably rare exceptions like vendor-pushed codecs where one or other browser tends to have an advantage (again, typically leveraged by partnerships with streaming content providers).

So: I don't know, but it's something to do with getting Firefox on more devices by default -- and that's not something that happens easily when supply chains are easily influenced by a small number of upstream "ecosystem providers".

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

#337

Post by zaptheimpaler »

While Firefox has many small imperfections compared to Chrome, the big point IMO is that Firefox is not preinstalled on any large consumer OS/device besides Linux.

It has many little details that aren't as good as Chrome but I don't know how much that affects adoption. Even if it does, that last bit of polish is very expensive to fix and they would need users or another mechanism to fund it.

I would focus heavily on getting Linux to be more mainstream. There is already growing momentum behind Linux and a lot of room for organizations (like Mozilla) that can typically execute on long multi year strategies better than the anarchy of FOSS. There's a lot of work to be done on all levels - partnerships, marketing, technical, finance etc. so people in all roles could contribute.

Maybe that would even play out outside Mozilla, like people leaving and joining other companies that push OSS ahead until it gains enough users for Mozilla to be relevant again.

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

#338

Post by thecrumb »

I'm really at the point if I see another stupid popup from Mozilla about something I can 0% about when my Firefox updates I'm going to switch to something. I use Firefox because I'm trying to support the little guy but honestly when the little guy doesn't care about supporting me back then it's time to move on.

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

#339

Post by tomxor »

> Why is Firefox losing marketshare

Can we validate that it is in fact losing market share first?

It's possible there are other factors such as the increased privacy capabilities and integrated tracker blocking and tendency for Firefox users to value and use these features and plugins, or even useragent string spoofing... I do the later so I look like a chrome/windows user because some sites will block features from Firefox for no reason (and also it's nice to be less trivially uniquely identifiable).

Where are the stats you are using and how are they collected?

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

#340

Post by chasil »

heurist wrote: post #211
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…

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…

From this perspective, the RPM from one of RedHat's derivatives would be the ideal answer - a long term support release.

As far as I know, such lengthy support terms do not exist for any Windows releases.

Firefox on RedHat 8 will stay as it is until 2029.

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