For me at least, I switched away when they started shoving their political views in my face. I get enough of that from all other aspects of life, I don't think my browser should be telling me how to think.
Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
441–450 of 949 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#442Firefox is losing market share because there is so little to differentiate it from its competitors.
In its heyday, Firefox grew popular as the browser that saved us from the manifestly inferior Internet Explorer.
Nowadays, Chrome, Edge & Safari are nowhere near as bad by comparison, meaning users have far less reason to switch from defaults. And I’m counting Chrome as a default just because it is pushed so hard.
What to do then? Find a point of differentiation that gets people excited.
Here’s an idea: a radical return to the idea of the browser being a user agent. That is, fully on the user’s side.
Ads blocked by default. AI to warn of potential native advertising. Auto-flagging of dark patterns. Auto-flagging of any form of deceptive practice. A database of sites known to engage in shady tactics. Reader mode that works everywhere.
Firefox: your personal internet bodyguard.
Sadly I don’t think it can happen until the organization is weaned off Ad money, and it can’t do that until it tackles the complexity of the web which demands so many developers. Which probably means making a stand against further scope expansion of HTML/CSS/JS.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#443Earlier quoted context omitted.
With containers you can. It's literally opening a new tab. If you have two profiles open at the same time like described you can easily switch desktops. The clear seperation of work and private browsing sessions helps me as well.
What is easy here? In Chrome, on macOS, it's command-` to switch windows and command-shift-m to open a new window in with a specific profile. Also, links always open in the profile that is currently in the foreground. Is that possible in Firefox? Last I heard it isn't, but I haven't checked in a while.
Yes, there is but I don't know if it works for macOS since it works for me in Windows.
Set the profile you prefer to open for links as a default profile and make sure to tick the option to automatically use the default profile without opening the profile manager. Then for the second profile, you need to use the shortcuts for that with the argument like this
firefox.exe -P ""
And make sure you leave it as capitalized P, I believe that is the argument. Then apply the setting and click the shortcut. It should be opening links to the default profile that you set in the profile manager.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#444I would like it if Firefox had a built-in website editor.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#445They 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…
I'm 100% onboard with Chromium being the universal de facto standard for the web as long as it's open.
Really, all I want from a browser is Chromium, full features without disabled APIs, with a few extras like Sync, P2P stuff, and codecs, fully open.
Right now, I think anyone with name recognition and marketing ability could probably develop a winning browser for 50k or so. Just... take chromium, add sync, and an ad blocker for high bandwidth video ads. Done. You have made the world's best browser, the rest is business stuff.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#446Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If I understand what you're reporting correctly, then that's something your OS "included a couple of years back".
If you install Firefox from Mozilla's site, it won't have these update problems. What's happening is that your package manager is swapping Firefox's bits out from under it while it's running. Firefox's built-in update system doesn't do that.
Which is not to say that I think you shouldn't be using a packaged version of Firefox. Personally I'm running Nightly so I don't have the option anyway. Generally speaking, I vastly prefer sticking to my package manager's stuff.
I just wish the package managers would fix their Firefox updates. (I don't know what the right fix would be, and I imagine it could be hard.)
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#447Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
$1m is senior engineering manager compensation in the valley at several companies just a short drive away from Mozilla’s offices. It’s far below CEO compensation. Anyone who is capable of succeeding as the CEO of Mozilla would be giving up millions of dollars they could easily make elsewhere in the valley if they took only $1m as their comp.
So? Not the entire world is US-based. Tech salaries in USD are way out of whack compared to elsewhere.
I also bet that for the type of challenges facing Firefox and with my proposed reforms, a motivated senior engineer who knows what they are doing would be just as good or better compared to a standard CEO.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#448Earlier quoted context omitted.
>99% of browser users is not relevant You should do that math again. >And I suspect that the FF users of old care very much But do they? Firefox's rise was largely due to IE6 being pure trash, and the average user of a web browser in 2008 being a lot more knowledgeable than the average user today. Marketshare, by definition, is the share of the market. The market has expanded dramatically, but desktop browsing itself…
> You should do that math again. No, I don't. Even if it is one percent (which I highly doubt) and that one percent is committed enough then that's enough of a core to guarantee the success of the project. It doesn't need a team of 1000 to build a browser, much less to keep an existing one patched and rolling along.
Quite on the contrary, even a team of 1000 won't be sufficient to maintain compatibility if your marketshare is so low that website and webapp builders ignore your concerns.
A non-Chromium browser needs to maintain a critical mass of users to be sufficiently large to ensure that the world wants to stay compatible with it, and having 1% of marketshare is not sufficient for that, no matter how committed these users are - if firefox drops to 1%, then it becomes irrelevant and the project has failed at its goals as the "web standards" become equivalent to whatever chromium does.
Browsers get influence to keep the web as we want it to be mostly based on the quantity of browser users which websites want to attract and keep; without that all the best code in the world is useless and doesn't even give you a seat at the table, much less a strong say for how the de-facto standard web practices will change.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?
#449Earlier 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…
It might be that they need to pay that amount to attract top CEO talent. But then again, I'm not sure if Mozilla should be large enough to need a top CEO. I mean effectively reducing it to just the Firefox team would be fine with me. And then it's maybe 80 people to manage in total. So that's one regular office building and you're done. It doesn't sound like the CEO will be critical for anything in this company.
Unfortunately that is up to the people writing the checks. Their goals and the goals of Firefox enthusiasts are not particularly aligned.