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?

#861

Post by endemic » Tue, Feb 15, 2022, 3:32 PM UTC

pers0n wrote: post #858

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…

FF user since it was called the Phoenix Project. Donating money isn't going to help them. It might help them look good to some techies that follow that information, but otherwise most wont care. Mozilla needs to focus on other products to use in tandem w FF. Email service that is private, VPN (i think they have a partnership), Thunderbird, zoom like platform. They need office/business solutions most likely. Devtools,…

I know their phone project fizzled, but I wonder if there's a market for a Chromebook competitor. Position it as a privacy-respecting product for schools. Introduce kids to the idea that Chrome != The Internet.

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

#862

Post by dmead » Tue, Feb 15, 2022, 3:49 PM UTC

selfhoster11 wrote: post #623

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 gee…

brutal. the last figure I remember seeing was 30%. that must be ancient at this point.

is there a chrome derivative that isn't going to shed tracking data for everything? or is that what I should be looking to safari for?

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

#863

Post by topspin » Tue, Feb 15, 2022, 3:57 PM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #616

topspin wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"- Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not the money" That has to be the first on the list, because that is the prerequisite for everything else. Unfortunately there is no mechanism to achieve this within Mozilla. The people that need to go won't; they've got their trophy titles and they've feathered their nest as they want it. Thus Mozilla and Firefox with it are doomed. Solving that would tak…

> Thing is the market is producing this without Mozilla. Brave and others are delivering real alternatives to Chrome, Safari and Edge. And in the end, it's all WebKit derivatives under the hood. That is the danger. There used to be three major distinct engines (Firefox, IE/Trident, WebKit) plus a boatload of specialized ones (Opera)... and that competition bred improvements and features. These days it's all about wal…

"That is the danger."

As I said, I get it. Getting it doesn't fund stuff, however.

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

#864

Post by mrtranscendence » Tue, Feb 15, 2022, 4:02 PM UTC

ashwagary wrote: post #815

Throwawayaerlei wrote: post #704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless I calculated wrong 19% in the past 10 years. According to the https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm $100 in January 2012 has the buying power of $124.04 last month.

You seem to imply central bankers are honest and CPI is accurate. This is absolutely not the case and you should update your views. It used to be a 50% haircut every ~10 years, now its closer to a 50% haircut every ~5 years.

But the CPI is fairly accurate, and those who calculate it are doing their best with a problem that doesn't have one easy to compute answer. Regardless, I know just from personal experience that your numbers are way off. My grocery bills haven't gone up 50 to 100% since 2012; what I spend on clothes and software and veterinary visits hasn't gone up 50 to 100% either. The only thing that I might buy that contradicts this is a GPU, but that's an exception (and other computer hardware hasn't risen in price that much).

Also: as part of my job I can check prices in a major sector of the retail industry as far back as 2015, and I absolutely do not see such major inflation as you're arguing. Inflation is bad right now, but hasn't been that way for several decades.

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

#865

Post by mrtranscendence » Tue, Feb 15, 2022, 4:16 PM UTC

account42 wrote: post #824

twblalock wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a reward for failure, it's an insurance policy. Here's a CEO job offer: take on a nearly impossible task, for a salary that is far below the market rate. If you fail (and you probably will!) it might damage your career and make it harder for you to find another job. If you succeed, you will get prestige, but you still won't get a lot of money. What kind of executive would accept an offer like that? A golden…

> What kind of executive would accept an offer like that? One that cares about Firefox more than about making insane amounts of money that are so far past what you need to live a comfortable live.

As stated, the offer is for a job that's almost sure to fail and will damage the taker's career if it does. Combine that with undermarket pay and it's definitely a tough ask, even if you restrict yourself to those who feel strongly about Firefox's mission. If you buy into the notion that an effective CEO has a particular, rare set of skills in business strategy and people management, then your job gets even tougher.

Most people cheered when Pat Gelsinger came back to Intel and I bet he even believes in Intel's mission, but he likely wouldn't have accepted an 80% pay cut relative to other industry CEOs. And Intel's prospects are infinitely better than Mozilla's.

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

#866

Post by silicon2401 » Tue, Feb 15, 2022, 4:38 PM UTC

BlackLotus89 wrote: post #42

silicon2401 wrote: post #29

Firefox makes poor decisions. I've been trying to use firefox for years and just gave up this past weekend. As far as I know, there's no way to customize your firefox home view on android so that you have a permanent, customizable set of links, and nothing else. You can have "recent bookmarks" which disappear eventually, presumably once they're no longer "recent". Can you imagine being the one to approve such a bone-…

* Go into the settings, customize, home * Disable everything. * Visit an important page * Menu -> add to top sites Voila

I tried that and it doesn't work. It shows all your "top" sites, with "add to top sites" letting you pin some to the top of the list. I don't want a list of my top sites, I want a list of bookmarks. For some reason FF Android only lets you have recent bookmarks (temporarily) or pinned top sites + other top sites. It's absurd that such a basic feature isn't provided and a great example of the stupid decisions that firefox seems to enjoy making

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

#867

Post by sfink » Tue, Feb 15, 2022, 4:57 PM UTC

GeoAtreides wrote: post #802

sfink wrote: post #726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I work for Mozilla, but don't speak for them.) You're both right. It's a common story -- people use browser A, start noticing a variety of problems, switch to browser B and everything is so much better. After a while, they start noticing a variety of problems, switch to browser A, and once again everything is so much better. Those people are not being stupid, that is their real experience. Sometimes the problem is i…

How would resetting the profile help? It means losing addons and their configuration, the bookmarks, the open sessions and the tabs, the history, the about:config settings.

It means losing a lot of stuff, yes. It sometimes helps because some things slow down as state is accumulated. So resetting can speed things up, at the cost of losing all of your state.

But the comparison point is switching browsers, which also loses lots of state.

(In both cases, you can import a subset of your state into your new profile, and you'd probably get most of the performance advantages.)

I believe all browsers have been improving in their resistance to the accumulated state problem, but I also believe that all browsers are still susceptible to it.

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

#868

Post by dvogel » Tue, Feb 15, 2022, 5:25 PM UTC

utucuro wrote: post #804

dvogel wrote: post #710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What FF mobile fiasco are you speaking of? I am using FF mobile happily and have been for years. I haven't noticed any issues with it. Was there a business level fiasco or something?

One objective fiasco is the inability of FF on Android to keep multiple tabs in memory. Older versions were capable of it without issue, ever since the tab unloading feature, Firefox has been reloading tabs at the slightest pretense. Switch apps? Tabs get reloaded when you're back. Lock & unlock phone with Firefox in focus? Tabs get reloaded Switch tabs in Firefox? Tabs get reloaded... I wish I was just ranting, but…

That is interesting to me because that isn't my experience. I just tried the lock screen for example and I couldn't get any of tabs to reload, foreground or not. I'm on Android 10 running on a Moto G7. Maybe it's affected by vendor settings?

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

#869

Post by garciasn » Tue, Feb 15, 2022, 5:35 PM UTC

subsection1h wrote: post #826

garciasn wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad this exists (although it appears there are extensions in other browsers that do the same thing) but I never have more than 10 tabs open, so it's not something that would make me switch.

> I never have more than 10 tabs open How is that possible? Do you never compare things? Or do you only compare things for which there are fewer than 10 alternatives?

I cannot tell if you're kidding or not.

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

#870

Post by WorldMaker » Tue, Feb 15, 2022, 5:52 PM UTC

eternityforest wrote: post #541

WorldMaker wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need a better way to communicate this: Chrome doesn't "lead the spec", it "rushes out ahead of the spec". The developers using non-standard features need to be held better accountable for using non-standard features, and Google needs to be held better accountable for releasing non-standard features ahead of standardization processes. W3C is seen as no longer relevant to HTML specs having delegated "HTML5" to WHATW…

Apple and Mozilla can't be compromised with. They want certain powerful features to just not exist. They don't trust users to choose for themselves. They are trying to ensure privacy at all costs by making tools that could be used to spy unavailable, no matter what the purpose. If devs want to make something, Chrome wants to make it happen, and I want to use it, then I don't want Mozilla trying to block up the whole…

> They don't trust users to choose for themselves.

No, they don't trust advertisers and spyware companies (the two seem inseparable today) to choose for them. Google has a massive conflict of interest in being the web's largest advertising network owner and sometimes the web's largest spymaster, in addition to owning the web's most common browser.

> What's next, are you going to disable downloading executable files, probably the most dangerous browser feature of all?

Firefox has had a relatively consistent stance on that since 1990 something and always had warnings when downloading executable files and worked hard to make sure that malware can't just download executable files it wants when it wants. As someone who remembers the malware wars of the 1990s, it was a reason I switched to Firefox in the first place!

It still amazes me that Chrome just auto-downloads EXEs willy-nilly without warnings or user consent, because I still remember what it was like the last time a major browser did that by default.

> it's what devs want.

That's my point: devs as a collective are morons. Devs as a collective include a lot of people whose salaries pay them to build adware, spyware, malware, and worse. Devs as a collective lack a major ethics body or ethics reviews and so far no dev has had to stand trial for a clear violation of professional ethics.

Maybe the web shouldn't give devs what they want?