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

671–680 of 949 posts

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

#671

Post by guilhas »

cbxyp wrote: post #106

Because of the pivot from XUL and forgoing of the firefox extension model for a copy that is exclusively Chromium's.

I think there is still fallout from this. A lot of their core users had their long time workflows alienated

The announcement of XUL removal started a time of uncertainty for community developers that led to increase in addons bugs or being abandoned, that webextensions still struggle to match in quantity and quality

Together with constant UI changes, tab groups removal, occasional serious bug, bookmark bugs, firefox sync bugs, and in general being slower, just created a too unstable environment. And people were slowly forced to look at alternatives, forks or chrome like, palemoon, waterfox, icecat, librewolf, chromium, iridium, ungoogled-chromium, brave, opera...

I am still thinking in changing back to Firefox, as it is better with x2go which I started to use recently, but my main day to day is still in Iridium until I get time to change it

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

#672

Post by takeda »

pavlov wrote: post #549
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…

> "even assholes have a basic right to exist" The problem is when some assholes are actively engaged in denying basic rights from others. If you say "well those assholes have a right to exist", you're effectively saying "the assholes have more of a right to exist than the people they're trying to erase."

Not all assholes are denying rights from others, there is plenty of equal opportunity assholes.

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

#673

Post by selfhoster11 »

takeda wrote: post #667
selfhoster11 wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a point beyond which you're just beating a dead horse and turning it into a pulp. Firefox isn't dead yet, but... yet is the keyword.

Yes, but the reason it's losing market share is because people are stop using it, including technical people. I personally find it superior to Chrome.

People didn't stop using it in a vacuum. There were powerful internal and external factors for those reasons, and unless they can stabilise the internal factors (which are the only ones they can control), they are a sitting duck.

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

#674

Post by Nextgrid »

philovivero wrote: post #171
iso1631 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? I've never had that happen and I've been using Firefox for 2 decades. Occasionally I've had a grumble about it not being the latest version, but that didn't stop me. Short of the removal of flash I can't think of anything you could be referring to, so perhaps rather than exaggerating some actual concrete examples would be good.

Also been using FF for 2 decades, but can corroborate the experience you cannot. I have seen all those things he complained about. Diversity initiatives, new features, etc. For me it appears as a new tab on restart that I have to close, and it does feel like it's every single time I update, and sometimes between updates.

It is especially annoying on a seldom-used machine where the browser will typically be outdated every single time you start it up. To make things worse, the machine is rarely used and only gets powered on when you actually need to do a task right away, so the bullshit update notifications are infuriating. I can put up with the updates themselves for security reasons, but intentionally getting in my way for no functional reason is too much.

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

#675

Post by zerocrates »

panta wrote: post #516
autoexec wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

They recently signed a new deal with Google, and those deals more or less completely fund the development of Firefox, so I don't see a change there happening any time soon.

I think the major problem with a privacy focus from a business perspective is that not enough people care. So you have to spend both a lot of time and effort _being_ better at privacy and then also a bunch of time and effort trying to convince people that it matters.

For a minute there Firefox was running significant advertising against Chrome along these lines, and touting its improved speed, but I don't think it really moved the needle for them.

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

#676

Post by nailer »

mike00632 wrote: post #645
simondotau wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think supporting a mandate to wear a basic cloth mask is a hill anyone should be willing to die on. I'm fiercely, fiercely pro-mainstream-science, and there's no doubt that proper N95 masks (or better) are very effective against respiratory disease transmission. But mask mandates almost always permit basic cloth masks which lack strong evidence of efficacy. If we're not going to mandate an effective mask, I h…

Can you cite why you believe masks don't work? It seems at odds with the scientific consensus as described by the CDC.

Odd I thought the mainstream position was updated that cloth masks are largely ineffective. I’m not going to get into an HN citation war though.

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

#677

Post by zerocrates »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #266
CamouflagedKiwi wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last thing Mozilla needs is to spend more time pretending they're a big tech company and can compete with those guys. They should focus on Firefox (as GP said), not build a communication platform that will then fail versus Signal/WhatsApp/Hangouts/Teams/etc.

The decline of Firefox started with Chrome's JavaScript engine, who was years ahead of Firefox's performance. The focus on JavaScript-heavy websites was already growing, and Firefox was slow to catch up. Now they're about the same performance-wise, but the mind share lost was brutal. there was a period that the only advantages Firefox had over Chrome were memory use and extensions, and they had to get rid of the NPAP…

The basic problem for Mozilla is they poured a ton of effort into improving performance and marketed that heavily... and they basically didn't gain back share at all.

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

#678

Post by hemanr »

If mozilla could be written in Rust, maybe it will be the fastest and people love it? It got to be function based sale, nothing else. Free VPN with it, like Opera - that is why I use Opera event though it is limited in functionality. Add more features which people can use it beyond browsing. Change some thing fundamentally!

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

#679

Post by boomboomsubban »

horsawlarway wrote: post #251
boomboomsubban wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Mozilla needs a replacement funding plan because Google can essentially turn the lights off at any point by simply refusing to pay them for search at next contract renewal. And then Bing/Yandex/Baidu buys the rights, and all that changes is the amount they get. It'd drop if Google publicly vowed they won't bid on it anymore, but there's also the possibility that someone like Yahoo pays more than Google like what hap…

I think Google is fairly arbitrarily deciding how much money to give to Mozilla (and it's roughly their current OpEx) - They aren't just buying search, they're also buying "competition" in the browser space. Further, the kind of transition where Firefox might gain users from Chrome isn't instantaneous, and it turns out users have a preference here (most users don't want to have google removed from Firefox - they stil…

>Mozilla is quietly testing a program to use Bing as the default, just to see how loud the feedback is:

Or Mozilla is running market research to show that X% of users don't care about the default search to drive up the price. As the deal isn't arbitrarily Google deciding an amount to give them, it's a bid between the major search engines. Just like it is for Safari.

Post reply on HN