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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?

#411

Post by wolpoli »

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…

I would instead argue that Firefox's Gecko engine is beyond saving and that any money invested in it now would be better donated to other community projects because there isn't enough resource to catch up. Sticking with Gecko will eventually lead to the dismise of Firefox the organization.

Microsoft, with their resource and their ability to bundle Microsoft Edge in with Windows, couldn't get any appreciable amount of marketshare. Firefox, with less resource than Microsoft, won't fare any better.

Rebuilding Firefox with Chronium would salvage whatever the mindshare/marketshare left. Then Firefox could still wield some influence with their marketshare and the threat of forking Chronium.

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

#412

Post by autoexec »

panta wrote: post #374
bradyo wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With enough investment, Firefox could also innovate and introduce features that aren't in Chrome or Safari to actually win users back

It's not user-facing features that move users from one browser to another, it's the number of websites they use that don't break with one or the other.

Because I consider websites with obnoxious ads and a bunch of tracking "broken" Firefox gives people a lot of reason to switch, but unless they try it for themselves they have no idea what they're missing or how the pages they visit would look and be improved without all that junk.

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

#413

Post by echelon »

Barrin92 wrote: post #320

>Why is Firefox losing marketshare very simple answer, because Mozilla doesn't control the infrastructure that runs on 80% of smartphones in the world and ships Firefox as the default browser. It really has nothing to do with the bespoke features that people on HN pay attention to. Firefox doesn't control any platform and defaults matter. There's a reason Google pays them a gazillion dollars to be the standard search…

Microsoft was forced to allow browser choice in the EU. I don't see why Apple and Google shouldn't be subject to the same, with the added condition that browser rendering engine diversity gets preferential treatment.

Give users a 60% chance to see Firefox as the first option, then show them the multitude of Chrome/Safari-based browsers.

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

#414

Post by II2II »

BossingAround wrote: post #331
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…

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…

Mozilla is not IBM. They may compete against the likes of Google, Microsoft, and Apple, yet they are not those companies either. The scope of their business interests are minuscule in comparison. Heck, their share of the markets that they do compete with those companies in pales in comparison. So yes, there is an element of arrogance in her claim.

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

#415

Post by hackerfromthefu »

godelski wrote: post #213
garciasn wrote: post #62

Earlier 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…

Legislation is the answer for privacy. The tech ship has long sailed to the point that invasive stalking is 'too cheap to meter'.

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

#416

Post by pjerem »

My opinion is that Google deliberately "killed" Mozilla by giving them almost infinite cash.

Mozilla can’t go anywhere because as a business, they have no incentive nor any culture needed to survive. They are spoiled by Google whatever they do.

They are like someone so rich that they don’t have any more goals in life. They are still there but they goes nowhere.

Ofc I’m talking about the company, not the employees that did put hard work into the great product that Firefox still is.

It’s too bad because the web have a great need of a Mozilla-like company/foundation.

Mozilla could have been the anti-Google and they could make tons of money by just providing some cloud services (mail, calendar, storage,…) but they just can’t see it because anything will be harder to monetize than their deal with Google.

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

#417

Post by selfhoster11 »

jonassalen wrote: post #365
Jensson wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The professionals that work in those nonprofits do. If you want a capable manager or SEO, you need to pay a correct market price.

If I cared badly enough about the mission and it wasn't a for-profit enterprise, I'd take the pay cut. The non-monetary part of my compensation (the feel-good factor and the actual good done in the world that I can't get in a for-profit enterprise) would more than make up for it, at least for a couple of years.

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

#418

Post by phrz »

maverick74 wrote: post #404
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…

Quoted post unavailable.

In corporate leadership, homophobia is not a "personal view," it is a matter of governance and directly impacts talent acquisition. Further, Brave browser is a Chromium browser that does little to stop the browser engine monopoly at risk here—it does nothing meaningful for browser diversity. Not one comprehensible point is made here besides, I suppose, treating Eich's firing as a political issue.

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

#419

Post by hackerfromthefu »

Brakenshire wrote: post #131
ameminator wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's a bit too far - for example, Thunderbird is a great web client. I do think they should have found a way to hold onto the Servo team and make that engine more useable and better than the base chromium engine. If they had been able to keep the Rust foundation on board, it would have also made sense. However, I do agree that their leadership has made terrible decisions and they've absolutely focused on th…

The obvious thing to do was continue to invest in Servo. If they could have produced a parallel layout engine, which could provide app like animations without fiddling on desktop and Android, and then make that easy to embed, they could have made real inroads into blink/webkit.

Yeah but Mozilla has been subverted, since the current CEO got on they are a lightning rod for Google against browser monopoly legal attention, while trying everything possible to neuter them from being a real threat.

Thus she cut the thing most likely to provide a real threat to chrome.

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