Actually, why does Chrome/ium has such a high market share even amongst tech savvy people? I don't see the appeal.
Chrome Dev Tools is better than Firefox Dev Tools in my opinion. Chrome has more extensions too.
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?
#22Use Firefox for a day if you are a Chrome user, you’ll quickly realize the experience is far subpar.
JS stuff is slower, random websites break, the UI feels a bit sluggish.
I understand there are ideological reasons to support Firefox, and that some of these issues are easily attributed to other parties. But for users, there aren’t too many reasons to switch over from Chrome or even Safari, like it was the situation during the IE6 days.
Re: Ask HN: Why does Firefox have such a low market share anyways?
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting, I have not come across any broken websites in a while. Or well, there was a booking website recently where I switched to Chrome to have my booking go through. But it would need to be a lot of those instances before I would even consider switching to Chrome. You have any (anecdotal) stats on how many websites are broken? What kind of sites are those?
Same, it's mostly Google sites that work better with Chrome, like the GCP console.
Google meet works fine on firefox. The GCP console is an affront to the web on any browser, though.
Re: Ask HN: Why does Firefox have such a low market share anyways?
#24Chrome is better. That's why. It's faster. JS loads quicker. Websites break, for instance Tidal streaming. There are three million tech support threads on the internet of people who can't use Tidal on Firefox. Firefox on desktop can't even translate pages yet, I have to use a janky third party plugin.
As a fairly normie internet user, unless you have a hate-boner for Google or some arcane developer niche use case, I don't see a reason to use Firefox anymore.
Re: Ask HN: Why does Firefox have such a low market share anyways?
#25[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Why does Firefox have such a low market share anyways?
#26The rise of Chrome in the early 2010s really cut into Firefox's marketshare. This is anecdotal, but I remember Chrome running very fast on my Macs in the early 2010s. It was much faster than Firefox of that era and was quite competitive with Safari. Firefox's performance did improve drastically later in the decade, but from a marketshare standpoint Chrome had already gained significant ground.
In the past five years or so I switched back to Safari on Macs and to Firefox on Windows and Linux. My reasons had to do with three factors: (1) Chrome's memory usage, (2) privacy concerns with using Chrome, and (3) my concerns that Chrome would become the monopoly web browser, similar to the "bad old days" when Internet Explorer 5 and 6 were dominant, which held back the Web until Firefox emerged sometime around 2004. Firefox is a good browser and I hope that it will continue putting up a fight against Chrome to keep the Web from being completely dominated by Google.
Re: Ask HN: Why does Firefox have such a low market share anyways?
#27Google wanted more control over the Internet, so they created a browser that they controlled and pushed it on people by leveraging their monopoly in a separate area. You know, the kind of thing we used to think was bad in the 1990s.
Leveraged their monopoly ?
How does that work exactly for Windows, MacOS and iOS in your mind ?
Re: Ask HN: Why does Firefox have such a low market share anyways?
#28Use Firefox for a day if you are a Chrome user, you’ll quickly realize the experience is far subpar. JS stuff is slower, random websites break, the UI feels a bit sluggish. I understand there are ideological reasons to support Firefox, and that some of these issues are easily attributed to other parties. But for users, there aren’t too many reasons to switch over from Chrome or even Safari, like it was the situation…
I've been using Firefox for the past 2 years and I've had no such problems.
Re: Ask HN: Why does Firefox have such a low market share anyways?
#29I 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.
Google slides didn't work properly for me on Firefox a few days ago, all fonts displayed as some ugly serif font. Though I assume this is Google being underhand and malicious rather than Firefox not working properly.
Re: Ask HN: Why does Firefox have such a low market share anyways?
#30Google wanted more control over the Internet, so they created a browser that they controlled and pushed it on people by leveraging their monopoly in a separate area. You know, the kind of thing we used to think was bad in the 1990s.
I think it's hard to say it's some sort of monopoly thing. Browsers are free and they take about 41 seconds to download and install. That's an extremely low switching cost.
Unless you have a chromebook, it doesn't come preloaded on your Macbook or PC either. Consumers make the deliberate choice to go install Chrome instead of Firefox, and it's because they prefer Chrome.