Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it? • Hacker News Board

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

#511

Post by Klonoar » Mon, Feb 14, 2022, 10:39 PM UTC

StillBored wrote: post #483

snird wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And she raised her pay while firing essential engineers: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/313658-mozilla-fires-2... I'm a firefox user for over 10 years. I think I'm now convinced there is no future, I'll have to start to adapt to another browser now. I'll give Vivaldi a try.

That was the layoff where they got rid of all the rust people? Its going to sound harsh, but they are loosing market share to browsers that didn't have to invent a new language to write a browser in. So, getting rid of those people was probably a positive impact for firefox since they were mostly just yak shaving instead of actually improving the end product. The users don't care if you wrote it in C++ or fortran as…

This feels like a gross mischaracterization of the intent and work that went into Servo. You say this as if nothing else was being done on Firefox concurrently even though this is demonstrably false - and in fact, portions of Servo were integrated into Firefox (see: Quantum).

Firefox keeps losing on technical merit because it is fundamentally impossible to keep up with Webkit and Blink, which are all backed by massive corporations and are throwing money at the engineering and project resources to actually move things forward.

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

#512

Post by hn-52 » Mon, Feb 14, 2022, 10:40 PM UTC

Brakenshire wrote: post #118

bentcorner wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a look at tree-style tabs. I started using them in FF and have looked several times at chromium-based add-ins and absolutely nothing comes close. Edge vertical tabs is your best choice if you must use a chromium browser, however it is a weak imitation of TST.

Multi Account Containers is also good.

Temporary Containers as well. An entire throwaway container by default. I can just accept all the cookies and closing the tab deletes them all. No management. Nothing else comes close.

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

#513

Post by bitwize » Mon, Feb 14, 2022, 10:41 PM UTC

First of all I would structure Mozilla as a software development organization rather than a social justice organization. Current Mozilla leadership seems to believe they're running a UN NGO, rather than stewarding a software project; and the software itself has suffered because of this shift in priorities.

Secondly I wouldn't worry about browser market share. Mozilla's place is to supply browsers, and Web and internet tools, that are open source and free of corporate control. Market share is something for for-profit corporations to worry about; under my Mozilla so many other things would take priority: security, standards compliance, maintainability (the goal would be a "long now" browser that can exist and be maintained even if the foundation itself goes away), portability across platforms. Even with 5% market share, if Mozilla offers a viable alternative to corporate browsers for those who need one, that's a strong niche userbase to keep going on.

The current Mozilla organization is too unfocused to reliably provide a viable alternative to Chrome. That may ultimately be what kills Firefox.

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

#514

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Feb 14, 2022, 10:41 PM UTC

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.

[deleted]

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

#515

Post by dmead » Mon, Feb 14, 2022, 10:42 PM UTC

sources on it losing marketshare?

I've used firefox since it was called pheonix and have no plans to switch away.

I'm unaware of the actions of the company though, outside of starting rust development.

Why do people pick up chrome? do you want to fund ad sales?

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

#516

Post by panta » Mon, Feb 14, 2022, 10:43 PM UTC

autoexec wrote: post #412

panta wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree, and imho firefox should even bet more on user privacy (for example adopting strong measures against fingerprinting, and migrating away from google as a default search engine).

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

#517

Post by freeopinion » Mon, Feb 14, 2022, 10:44 PM UTC

StillBored wrote: post #490

freeopinion wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Mozilla and Firefox are cherished by a lot of people who would like to see them thrive. But I think if given a choice, most of those people would prioritize the survival of a viable competitive web browser. The name of the product and the sponsor of the product are less important. So a related question might be, "What would it take for a Firefox fork to succeed?" If you think the CEO of Mozilla is a cancer, a…

Well a large part of the problem with a fork is that you don't see a lot of random drive by contributions. As a possible contributor myself a couple times, firefox is a development nightmare because it doesn't have a good autoconfig system that lets one download the code and start being productive quickly. Then like chrome, i'm betting most people can't actually built it in reasonable time on their laptops since it b…

And these are what is holding Firefox back?

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

#518

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel » Mon, Feb 14, 2022, 10:45 PM UTC

rpnx wrote: post #473

My thoughts on this are that every time I see a news piece about Firefox it's about "social justice", some code of conduct controversy, or something else utterly unimportant to web browser selection. Being "Open Source" does nothing for me when Firefox engages in the same crap as other closed source browsers, like Pocket. Mozilla also allowed social issues to take precedence over retaining good engineers. Whether you…

A good time to remind everyone that when you donate to "Mozilla", you're donating to the Mozilla Foundation, which is the social justice part, not the Mozilla Corporation, which is the browser part.

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

#519

Post by selfhoster11 » Mon, Feb 14, 2022, 10:45 PM UTC

softwarebeware wrote: post #31

Firefox is losing marketshare because Chrome is the default browser on Android devices and Android devices are the number one device in the world. Most people don't even know how to change their default browser. I don't think Firefox needs saving. Those who use it are active and committed to it.

> I don't think Firefox needs saving. Those who use it are active and committed to it.

Don't be so sure. I stuck to Android though thick and thin since 2.1 or 2.2, but my next phone will be an iPhone, because I bloody had enough of their nonsense.

Firefox is harder to replace, if only because it's the only counter to Google's browser monopoly (so I consider it a moral imperative to keep using it), but if they keep reducing openness and end user control, I will eventually snap and abandon them. And if I'm nearing this point, then many have already passed it because I have a remarkable tolerance for shitty FOSS software. A family member already requested I throw out Firefox and install Chrome, and I complied because honestly, I can't fault them.

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

#520

Post by autoexec » Mon, Feb 14, 2022, 10:46 PM UTC

PeterisP wrote: post #448

jacquesm wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

As a browser maker your "concerns" should really be web/internet standards. If websites and webapp builders aren't complying with standards and are building their stuff to only work in non-standard compliant browsers that's a separate problem that no web browser can solve.