Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

621–630 of 949 posts

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

#621

Post by Melatonic »

travem wrote: post #593
Melatonic wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Firefox daily and I have no idea what the hell you are talking about. What does Mozilla have to do with "cancel" culture? Is there some huge news article I am missing out on or something?

Likely rooted in the experience with Brendan Eich who had a long history with Mozilla, was appointed as CEO and then (due to his personal political contributions, mainly Proposition 8 related) essentially forced to resign as CEO due to the accompanying backlash - https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/brendan-eich-steps-down-...

According to wikipedia he now an "ardent" anti-masker for Covid and now people are trying to get him to step down from Brave browser. Does this guy just not learn?

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

#622

Post by troyvit »

selfhoster11 wrote: post #307
vimy wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does everyone always forget about Safari in these discussions? Safari has a respectable marketshare on mobile / tablets. Not as good on desktop but it’s not a lost cause.

It's not a relevant browser. The last time I have seen Safari installed on a Windows machine was likely 2013-14, if not earlier. It doesn't have an Android version (which makes it less relevant on smartphones). It doesn't support Linux, which lots of the power user/tech trailblazer crowd is using. It's not open source, unlike Firefox or Chromium. It lags in features (which to be fair, isn't bad when they impact priva…

A lot of people use it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit#Installed_base

I mean nobody super exciting, but Steam uses it for their software, Adobe CSS uses some of it, etc.

It's more than an Apple thing.

[Edit]: Sorry, nobody outside Apple uses Safari, but a lot of people outside of Apple use WebKit, Safari's engine.

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

#623

Post by selfhoster11 »

dmead wrote: post #515

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?

Statcounter lists FF market share as sub-5%. I'm inclined to believe that, since a lot of people I know have switched to Chromium derivatives, or straight up grew up on Chrome. Heck, a person recently requested my assistance with moving to Chrome and named Firefox as the reason. And that's someone I put on Firefox many a year ago.

Firefox is getting unbearable for average users. It's getting unbearable for me, a geek who has infinite patience for FOSS as long as it serves my goals. Well, Firefox no longer serves my goals. I'll keep using it for as long as it remains usable, then I'm switching to Vivaldi. At least it cares about power user use cases.

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

#624

Post by zerocrates »

paxys wrote: post #52
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…

You are answering the question "how can Mozilla make more money", but that wasn't what was asked. Mozilla as a whole is profitable already, and revenues have been growing close to 100% year over year. As a company they are in great health. Except that's not what users care about when picking a browser. Google has too much money, tech, marketing and too big an existing user and device base to make any kind of direct c…

I know you're saying this not the question being asked, but what's your source for their revenue growing anywhere near that rate, or indeed at all?

As far as I can see their revenue peaked around FY 2017 at $562 million. In 2018 that number was about $450 million and short of expenses, they were short of expenses again for 2019 but for a $338 million settlement from Yahoo/Verizon.

The most recent reported year, 2020, saw a slight drop in their search income but a sharper cut to expenses (mostly by cutting about $60 million in "software development" expenses), putting them back on track, in a way.

They've had a steady increase in subscription income, but it's still dwarfed by the current search deal (in 2020, just shy of $25 million in subscriptions vs. over $440 million from search).

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

#626

Post by dylan604 »

ErikCorry wrote: post #498
dylan604 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can have the best product and still receive little traction because the competitor is a megaCorp with huge marketing budgets and able use its size to make it harder for the little guy with the better product to compete. At that point, legal recourse tends to be the only action left. Googs isn't afraid of this, because they know Moz can't compete financially.

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

#627

Post by presentation »

dleslie wrote: post #532
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 vill…

Not specifically about Firefox but: if nonprofits can’t pay for talent then you get what you pay for, crappy talent for important positions. That said many people have your mindset so that puts all nonprofits at a disadvantage against any for-profit initiative as far as getting talent goes. You shouldn’t need to martyr yourself to do something good.

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

#628

Post by simondotau »

tored wrote: post #552
eigenrick wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this post assumes that Firefox is an inferior browser, and that the cause is mismanagement. But is Firefox an inferior browser? I think it used to be, but over the last couple years, it has made massive improvements in features and performance. I use it in both desktop and mobile, and I prefer it over Chrome. As a software engineer, I rely heavily on my browser for work. For me, the multi-account containers i…

Firefox is inferior still. It has problems with memory, performance, rendering and battery drainage. Every year I switch to Firefox and use it as a main browser. It usually goes for a month and then I need to switch again because Firefox has too many glitches. Firefox has had a bad policy of not fixing the basics first before new features. I do use Firefox as my main development browser still but that is because I’m…

That's funny, because I've had the same experience as you—but in the opposite direction.

In my experience, Chrome has problems with memory, performance, rendering and battery drainage. Every now and then I try to use Chrome (or a derivative) as secondary browser and I give up because it has noticeably higher latency for simple web page loads, and more likely to suffer irritating repaint flashes.

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

#629

Post by thrwawy283 »

I will continue using Firefox because of tab containers, and the Temporary Containers extension. Nothing in Chrome comes close to that, even with extensions like it. It's not total privacy, but it's something every browser should support. I think Chrome has the ability to run separate user profiles from the command line, which is something I hope Firefox can do. I'd love to run "default settings" as one user profile, and my own settings as "here's this paranoid dude". Usually I jump to Chrome or Edge when my privacy extensions get in the way of using a banking website, and I don't want to tune umatrix.

There are 3 things I think Firefox needs to support: CEF, Rust, Dev Tools

Something that gets brought up over-and-over is the Chrome Embedding Framework (CEF?) or the API designed to embed Chrome. Firefox isn't as easy to embed as Chrome, and would benefit greatly if it could be oriented to interface with this API. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_Embedded_Framework Firefox needs to support being a fast and light applet. Forgive me for saying the words we do not use.

The 2nd is Rust. Rust was the best thing Mozilla could have supported, but instead they axed the dev team and gave it to the Linux Foundation. That's probably a good thing in the long-run. Rust is a really innovative paradigm shift in language design, and it will be so much bigger than Firefox. However, the development of Firefox technologies with Rust should have continued. We were so looking forward to Servo. Chrome is perceptibly faster, but we were on track to wipe the board with memory safety. I personally would use a "correct" browser over a fast one.

The 3rd is dev tools. People develop with Chrome for amazing dev tools. As an easy example, if you look in the Firefox Network dev tool/tab you can add a column to show the value returned with a common response header. In Firefox you can only choose to show these 6-8 headers. In Chrome you can add additional (custom) response headers, for things like X-Application-Whatever. It's very nice to show your application's custom headers in the dev tool window like that. I've been asking for it for a while on Mozilla's bugtracker. I don't know where to jump in and add it myself.

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

#630

Post by selfhoster11 »

butlerm wrote: post #260
pdimitar wrote: post #148

At least in my eyes and I suppose in the eyes of other techies and open Web idealists: Because Mozilla became just another classic corporation that's laser-focused on extracting value for shareholders and executives and nothing else. A year or two ago an article about Mozilla made the rounds here: executives collecting fat bonuses (and some leaving afterwards?). Some mere months later they fired a lot of people. Is t…

A board of directors is more important for a non-profit organization than for a for-profit one. They are part time, serve in a non-executive role, and are in charge of the overall direction of the enterprise, and for a non-profit organization are usually supposed to represent the general, public interest since non-profits have no shareholders to represent. The Mozilla Foundation is a 501(c)(3) and so that goes double…

What enterprise? It's not rocket science, they are building a web browser. They are supposed to have just enough layers of management to be a thin wrapper between Firefox developers and the outside world. Collect donations, make sure developers are working on Firefox and get paid on time each month. That's all the community needs and that's all the community is asking for.
Post reply on HN