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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?

#531

Post by nicoburns »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #334
akdor1154 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Out of interest, what hardware do you have? I had a Samsung S7, and the difference between Chrome and FF was minimal (Chrome was slightly faster, but only just). That's quite an old device, but I wonder if somehow it being a high-end device when it was new still counts for something...?

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

#532

Post by dleslie »

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…

> If people here who cares about Mozilla would volunteer, and also use the browser, Mozilla would be in a much better shape.

> Want to fix Mozilla? Take an active part in it.

Why would I volunteer for an organization that pays its CEO something like 70x the average American salary?

It doesn't operate itself like a nonprofit. I don't want to put my free time into a project that exists to pay for someone's private villas.

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

#533

Post by panarky »

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…

> I don't give a shit how nice the developers who made my web browser are

It sounds like you do give a shit that they care about "social justice" and you don't want to use their browser because of that?

Or are there specific features / functionality / performance / security issues that prevent you from using Firefox and are somehow caused by the worldview of the developers?

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

#534

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

selfhoster11 wrote: post #495
nicoburns wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It has gotten far better in the past years, although it still has some pretty crippling bugs and tiny yet incredibly annoying UX issues (e.g. can't easily wipe the cookies for the site you're currently on, try opening a URL from your clipboard in incognito).

But Firefox has gotten sufficiently close that the overall experience of Firefox with an ad blocker beats Chrome with ads.

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

#535

Post by paulryanrogers »

carapace wrote: post #111

> Why is Firefox losing marketshare? For myself, I am moving off of Firefox right now (I don't yet know to what though, recommendations welcome) for one reason: they keep changing the UI in ways that I find irritating and then deprecating the methods to change it back. For me it's really that simple. There are other issues I have with FF but that's the one that got me to the point where I'm ready to abandon FF entire…

> so what is the differentiator that makes it compelling?

Is a focus on privacy and independence not enough?

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

#536

Post by selfhoster11 »

jjcm wrote: post #92

Here's my perspective on this - Chrome has established itself as the baseline. The baseline is no longer the W3C standard, it's Chrome due to all of the experimental future W3C spec items being in Chrome. Chrome leads the spec, and with its 70% market share developers allow it to. Firefox will always be playing catchup because of this, regardless of their market share. This leaves three main reasons for using Firefox…

Mistreatment of users is quickly eroding 3. for me, and I deeply care about 2. A family member already explicitly asked for assistance in migrating away from Firefox.

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

#537

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

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

May be OS-specific, or it may not happen when you've set Firefox to restore previous tabs when restarting, or there may be a way to turn it off.

I don't remember seeing many of these on my actual machine (I did get the color scheme nonsense if I remember correctly), but I'm constantly seeing these in dev/testing VMs where I just installed it for testing and occasionally keep it updated.

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

#539

Post by antod »

alpaca128 wrote: post #153
sockaddr wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently switched to Linux and only installed Firefox. When you force yourself to use it, it's doable. I think only once in the last 6 months did a website not work (my dumb HOA website). Other than that, it's more than sufficient. It crashes sometimes but if that's the price for not having coercive software controlling my life, so be it.

I can't remember Firefox crashing in recent years and that includes times I approached 2000 open tabs. Though after using the same profile for over 5 years now it has trouble remembering the color scheme for whatever reason.

I never had Firefox crashes until Ubuntu 21.10 which I think made Firefox a snap, now I get crashes when it tries to load fonts. And I get that colour scheme thing now too.

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

#540

Post by [deleted] »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #35

I wouldn't try to save Firefox, I'd try to save the benefits of an open web (I'm assuming some variant on that is their actual mission statement but not checked). Firefox itself is just one in a series of reinventions. I am at peace with using a Firefox branded chromium fork in some future date as I think a balanced corporate sharing economy similar to Linux is probably the best we can hope for. On that theme, some k…

[deleted]
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