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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?

#941

Post by soundnote »

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 don't think that's true: Brave is actively building independent revenue-generating services so they have a footprint on the web instead of just being a company that makes a window to the web.

And they are growing. The big thing there is just positioning, and being aggressive in the right places.

That's the fundamental problem with Mozilla: MS, Google and Apple can leverage web footprint and physical platforms to market their products and generate revenue for browser development. Plus Apple's happy to take money from Google. Brave's building some kind of revenue-generating platform that stands on its own.

I don't know if Mozilla has a vision in that kind of way.

Hell, Firefox OS? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS

This rant is pertinent: http://dpldocs.info/this-week-in-d/Blog.Posted_2021_09_06.ht...

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

#942

Post by soundnote »

grey_earthling wrote: post #837
account42 wrote: post #831

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have set up Firefox to my liking but UI reworks and new anti-features mean that I have to invest significant time for each update to just get things back to how I like them.

I agree. More than this, it's not just “I don't like change and I have to tweak Firefox to my liking”; it's “I don't trust that Mozilla is acting in my interests; I expect that any changes are to my detriment”.

When my browser developer is happy that others decide what I see on the net is when I bail.

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

#943

Post by soundnote »

afavour wrote: post #112
nwah1 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could pivot to compete with the Big Tech conglomerates in general. Provide their own suite of integrated tools, search engines, communication platforms, and so on. But with a privacy-focused and ad-free approach. DuckDuckGo already proved there is an appetite for something like this. They could go further, and remain relevant and viable in the way that DDG is, even if they never again are the most popular browse…

> DuckDuckGo already proved there is an appetite for something like this. An appetite, yes. But not a major one. A privacy-focused, ad-free approach would be hugely appealing to the HN crowd. But I’m less convinced about the public at large.

DDG is tracking free, not ad free. They show you ads based on your searches.

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

#944

Post by soundnote »

panarky wrote: post #533
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?

I give a shit that the people building my tools are injecting their politics into my tools in places where they don't belong. Browser makers being happy to decide what I should see on the web will make me bail.

Now, there are of course parts of politics that are pertinent to the tool in question - privacy issues for browser developers, for example, or tracking.

Both the Brave and Vivaldi teams have people I know I disagree with politically. But I like their products, and I like the companies? Why? Because whatever the companies' employees views, the two companies' politics are about user control and privacy, and they walk the talk. Both in their own ways that reflect the people making the tool, but insofar as the companies are political, they are political in a very, very narrow way.

Basically, they understand their job is to make hammers and not to sermon about flower arrangement. Mozilla (and much of the tech sphere, sadly) is increasingly the reverse.

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

#945

Post by soundnote »

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.

Brave's ad blockers are built-in, can do CNAME uncloaking and won't suffer from Manifest v3.

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

#946

Post by soundnote »

account42 wrote: post #918
gkoberger wrote: post #274

I used to work at Mozilla, and here's my opinion. There's no need to save Firefox. When Firefox came out, it was a breath of fresh air. Because of Mozilla, every browser is now really, really great. Even Microsoft's browser is standards compliant and open source! Yeah, I get the arguments that Webkit is too pervasive and Chrome is too tied to Google and all of that... but in my opinion, Mozilla wanted a world where e…

> a world where every single consumer had the choice between numerous high-quality browsers, and that's the world we currently live in! I strongly disagree. There are numerous browsers than can render websites well enough but not a single one that puts the needs of user first before everything else.

Vivaldi

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

#947

Post by soundnote »

dmead wrote: post #862
selfhoster11 wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Brave and Vivaldi are the best of the bunch IMO. Brave for maximum privacy, Vivaldi for customizability (they have all the toggles).

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

#948

Post by kasabali »

chasil wrote: post #842
kasabali wrote: post #817

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This claim is totally fiction. RedHat has no magic Mozilla sauce, they simply ship Firefox ESR and upgrade it every year. You'll have the same breakage in the end, just yearly instead of monthly.

Yes, because "big updates" regularly trash Firefox in Red Hat. This happens all the time. What a fiction indeed.

They trash just as much as the ESR release you'd download from mozilla.org would.

In other words, you don't need to switch to RHEL to use Firefox ESR. It's the same version you can install on any other distro or Windows.

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

#949

Post by pwdisswordfish9 »

selfhoster11 wrote: post #219
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know… you don't have to wait for the company to collapse.

Perhaps we have to. Look at what happened to youtube-dl - even before the DMCA takedown, nobody was doing anything about the leadership being AWOL despite the huge PR backlog. Then, when it was taken down, various forks popped up, including yt-dlp which became a natural potential successor. They injected lots of potential, because the main authority was absent and they seized initiative. Even after youtube-dl came ba…

That’s rather inaccurate; yt-dlp grew out of youtube-dlc, which was started by the author of this ticket: https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/26462>, filed in August 2020, some time before the DMCA in November 2020.
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