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Ask HN: Why does Firefox have such a low market share anyways?

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Re: Ask HN: Why does Firefox have such a low market share anyways?

#11

Post by newoldhead »

numbers_guy wrote: post #5

Actually, why does Chrome/ium has such a high market share even amongst tech savvy people? I don't see the appeal.

for most, i would assume it's largely just that during the time of the naïve web, there was a period where google kind of was the company, so people started using it for everything (think shortly before and then during the early google+ era). 10 years later almost every normie who didn't start using apple products uses gmail and chrome simply because they legacied into it from when they were younger and less aware of the negative aspects of the practice.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Firefox have such a low market share anyways?

#14

Post by nathan_phoenix »

pwg wrote: post #2

One of the reasons: Massive advertising by Google to convince people to "try chrome". It is only relatively recently that visiting a google property was not met with: "Google X is best used in Chrome -- install Chrome now." (with "install chrome" being a link to the installer. No such massive advertising campaign ever existed to try to convince folks to "install Firefox".

That and the fact that most people saw Google search as the first web page when they opened a browser (or if not then most just navigated to it) sure was a killer combo.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Firefox have such a low market share anyways?

#15

Post by thesuitonym »

Good points have already been raised, but don't neglect the rise of smartphones. When you get a Google phone that already has Google's browser installed, and it works relatively well, why would you change? Add Chromebooks into the mix, and those meet a lot of people's needs, why change?

Then, if you get a laptop, you'll want to have all of your passwords and bookmarks synced, so instead of using Edge, you grab Chrome. never even thinking of Firefox.

Finally, in the early 00's, Firefox users had a reputation for letting you know about it. Forums of the day were full of signatures with a Get Firefox link in them. You don't really see that level of fervor anymore, because the difference between Firefox and Chrome today is nowhere near the difference between Firefox and IE back then.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Firefox have such a low market share anyways?

#16

Post by barbariangrunge »

Firefox should act like a startup in the growth phase. Pretend it has X users and is ready to grow, instead of acting like it has X users that it's trying to hold on to.

If Firefox were a growth startup, we'd see all sorts of strategies coming into play: recommendations, ways to invite friends to try it, gamification, doubling down on what differentiates it, focusing on a niche then expanding that niche, trying to stand out and be more memorable, etc.

For example, Brave is doing some of those things

The nice part is that, because it's owned by Mozilla, users don't have to worry about a bait and switch at the end of the growth phase

Re: Ask HN: Why does Firefox have such a low market share anyways?

#18

Post by doodlesdev »

barbariangrunge wrote: post #16

Firefox should act like a startup in the growth phase. Pretend it has X users and is ready to grow, instead of acting like it has X users that it's trying to hold on to. If Firefox were a growth startup, we'd see all sorts of strategies coming into play: recommendations, ways to invite friends to try it, gamification, doubling down on what differentiates it, focusing on a niche then expanding that niche, trying to st…

   > The nice part is that, because it's owned by Mozilla, users don't have to worry about a bait and switch at the end of the growth phase
lol. Do you mean this seriously? Could you expand further because I just don't see where you're coming from.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Firefox have such a low market share anyways?

#19

Post by cinntaile »

newoldhead wrote: post #11
numbers_guy wrote: post #5

Actually, why does Chrome/ium has such a high market share even amongst tech savvy people? I don't see the appeal.

for most, i would assume it's largely just that during the time of the naïve web, there was a period where google kind of was the company, so people started using it for everything (think shortly before and then during the early google+ era). 10 years later almost every normie who didn't start using apple products uses gmail and chrome simply because they legacied into it from when they were younger and less aware of…

A decade or so back Firefox was just so fucking slow and Chrome wasn't. So I switched. It's fixed now so I switched back.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Firefox have such a low market share anyways?

#20

Post by SoftTalker »

cebert wrote: post #8
seren wrote: post #4

I am still using Firefox as my main browser, but some sites are broken with Firefox and working fine with Chrome. So unless you are particularly motivated to stay on a given platform, practically it does not really makes sense as a user to stay committed.

I use Firefox as my daily driver and have not encountered any sites that work in Chrome but not Firefox.

OWA (Outlook Web Access) shows me the antiquated "lite HTML" interface with Firefox on my OS. If I change the user agent to claim to be Chrome on Windows, it shows me the modern UI (which works fine, however it gets the time zone wrong).

Accessing Google Docs, Sheets, etc. works OK with Firefox, but if I claim to be Chrome some things don't work. So they are defintely serving up something different to Chrome vs Firefox browsers.

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