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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?

#491

Post by brimble »

I think it's too late for anything to save them now, but integrating a social overlay on the entire Web, built directly into the browser, is one play that I think might have kept them relevant if they'd started at least a decade ago and really nailed the execution.

It'd have to be something that gives you a reason to use FF over Chrome or Safari or IE/Edge. A social approach has "virality" to it. "Oh we're all posting on this Tweet in FF-Social, that's why you're not seeing the replies. Go get FF and join in. Here's the invite link for our group."

Some add-ons and (earlier) wrapper sites tried similar things, but I think FF is one of the few companies that might have wanted to try this, had (at one time) the critical mass & goodwill to pull it off, and had the right vehicle for it.

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

#492

Post by selfhoster11 »

heyitsanewacco wrote: post #200
horsawlarway wrote: post #33

This is my personal opinion only, so take it with a grain of salt. ---- Mozilla can't save Firefox. It's not that Firefox can't be saved, but rather that Mozilla as an organization is not capable of doing so. My take is this - Despite a history of being relatively privacy friendly, the vast majority of funding for the organization comes directly from Google (To the tune of ~90% of their total funding, straight from G…

The unsaid part is that Google keeps Firefox alive so that they are not hit by anti-trust over in-browser search. That's why FF will always trail Chrome, its the designated loser. If it weren't for anti-trust, Google would have bought out Mozilla years ago.

You can't buy out an open source project. If Google bought it out and started messing with it, there would be an immediate outcry and Firefox would end up with the community fork winning out, just like it happened with MySQL and OpenOffice.

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

#493

Post by ThalesX »

cartesius13 wrote: post #489
soapdog wrote: post #438

The amount of people in HN who think they can do a better job at being the CEO of every company; or being the president of any country; or being better than whoever is trying to something, astounds me. Dudes, if saving Firefox was so easy that could be described in a single comment like that, it would have been saved already. There are more people at Mozilla than the CEO, she is not responsible for all decisions. She…

>There is a huge intersection between people who are often saying they know how to fix Mozilla and those using non-Firefox browsers. If people here who cares about Mozilla would volunteer, and also use the browser, Mozilla would be in a much better shape I have to agree with this. You see everyone on HN talking about the importance of Firefox in the fight against Google's monopoly but yet when you read comments about…

> There is no excuse to use anything other than Firefox if you claim to care about things the open web, software freedom etc.

What changes if I use it more with metrics disabled?

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

#494

Post by Ironlink »

jozvolskyef wrote: post #455
dralley wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The real (and often downvoted) answer is that Mozilla compromised on their core values. A "death by a thousand cuts", as it were. I expect it's downvoted because it's laughable. 99% of browser users don't give a shit about those things. If a poll were to be taken of the HN users who switched to Chrome, I doubt even a quarter would cite that as the reason. It was indeed a death by a thousand cuts, but the thousand c…

> * Youtube, Google Meet and Google Docs refusing to work properly on Firefox One vote for Google Meet being the reason. I didn't want me dropping out of meetings and rejoining in a different browser to become a regular thing.

I use Google Meet with Firefox on my M1 Mac every day. The only thing that doesn't work for me is camera backgrounds. Would be nice to be able to share audio when presenting, but I almost never present.

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

#495

Post by selfhoster11 »

nicoburns wrote: post #126
assemblylang wrote: post #81

One 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 use Firefox mobile for the past 3 or so phones. To be blunt, it sucks. The only reason I haven't switched to a Chromium derivative is because I don't want to migrate my bookmarks, because they don't have as good ad blocking support, and out of sheer stubbornness.

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

#496

Post by cassianoleal »

Crono wrote: post #435
cassianoleal wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Chrome there's an icon you click to switch. Honestly, if someone would create a FF extension that was just that, it would probably cover 90% of what's considered superior in Chrome.

Its called "Profile Switcher for Firefox": https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profile-switc...

That looks quite good. It's a little over the top with having to install external software though.

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

#497

Post by jokethrowaway »

1) Quit the internal politics 2) Quit the "for the people, not for profit": money is how people in a society find consensus on what needs to happen 3) Build something useful and charge for it

More specifically, if I were Mozilla I would build a semantic web browser capable of understanding what's important on a page (it boils down to text, images, videos, comments and forms), extract it, render it in a NATIVE, CONSISTENT and LIGHTWEIGHT (as in CPU / Mem - no electron, no HTML, JS, CSS), user defined way. Nobody wants today's 10GB webpages and 300 popups. Test it on the most popular websites, sell on a subscription basis for people tired of interacting with crappy websites and modern frontend apps. And, of course, offer an option to see the real page in a normal browser for when things don't work or you actually care about seeing someone's design or about running someone's code.

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

#498

Post by ErikCorry »

dylan604 wrote: post #90
ErikCorry wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think they don't have enough cash to save FF, when they get $400m a year from Google?

Googs just gave them $400m which means they have soooo much more than $400m. FF has to pay all of its budget with that, so hiring lawyers to take on Googs with that same bucket of money will never work. Googs will continue to give Moz $400m, but then turn right around and spend $401m on their lawyers to fight off whatever Moz can afford.

OK I was imagining them competing with a better browser, not with lawyers.

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

#500

Post by selfhoster11 »

temp0826 wrote: post #50
nikanj wrote: post #13

Every time I restart Firefox, I get about 8 different prompts for "See what's new!" "Reset your Firefox profile now!" "See our new diversity initiative now!" etc. It feels like opening a Windows Me installation from 2000. I just want to get browsing done.

That's...not the case (and never has been) for me. You only restart it when you get an update (in which case that wouldn't be very often)? Or you did something whacky in about:config? Or maybe a bad extension. Dunno, not normal

Maybe you have an old profile. I often see this kind of messaging when starting up Firefox on a freshly installed OS.
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