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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?

#101

Post by arp242 »

2Gkashmiri wrote: post #10

Network effect I'd say. If tomorrow opera, brave, edge switched to Firefox, people won't notice but Firefox share would rise dramatically. Extensions is another issue. Today, any tom dick and harry who want to create a browser extension only build for chrome "why not". Firefox comes from complaining users who don't want to switch otherwise they don't bother. Its the same chicken or egg thing. Low market share of Fire…

> If tomorrow opera, brave, edge switched to Firefox, people won't notice but Firefox share would rise dramatically.

Once of the problems Firefox has that it's actually quite hard to do this. You can't "just" take WebKit or Blink and make your own UI for it. But you can build a Blink-based browser in literally a minute or two with basic C++ or Python skills.

I don't know what technical issues are preventing this, but IMHO this has been a major hurdle, and a huge strategic mistake.

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

#102

Post by winternett »

thesuitonym wrote: post #15

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…

FireFox doesn't synch with saved passwords that Chrome has.. Remembering tons of passwords across many sites, and having to do TFA all over again is excruciatingly painful. This is how people get locked in to so many monopolies today, and probably why log-ins are so difficult overall, yet still not working very well to secure accounts.

There is too much hassle in software these days, it used to be about making your life easier, but so many companies put out products contradictory to that, creating entirely new problems.

A web browser is just like a TV pretty much. People don't really care about what the brand is, they care about reliability, picture quality, compatibility, features etc... FireFox is like buying into a whole other TV before your current one is broken.

Firefox could jump ahead if it radically changed how we can view painful web sites, like turning a video blog page into a convenient scroller, by adding tools to categorize and search bookmarks, or possibly by letting us block the display of keywords we don't want to see. They should also perhaps create their own search engine to counter Google's strangle hold... By turning FF into more of an Internet assistant, it would become a far superior web TV than Chrome, and that would likely encourage wider adoption perhaps...

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

#103

Post by fooker »

vlod wrote: post #99
fooker wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. What do you expect users to do here? Use Chrome or try to force a few thousand websites to test on Firefox?

Oh man, just got a flashback to when everyone coded to IE because everyone used it so there wasn't any reason to code to standards. That was not a good time.

Do you remember how Firefox got over this?

By replicating IE's bugs and beating them at their own game. Now Firefox, for some reason, doesn't want to do this.

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

#104

Post by vlod »

fooker wrote: post #103
vlod wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh man, just got a flashback to when everyone coded to IE because everyone used it so there wasn't any reason to code to standards. That was not a good time.

Do you remember how Firefox got over this? By replicating IE's bugs and beating them at their own game. Now Firefox, for some reason, doesn't want to do this.

Hhmm. I don't remember FF ever trying to reproduce IE6. I remember having to do special hacks to handle IE.

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

#105

Post by nsvd »

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…

Don't you need capital you can burn to be in a growth phase, like a startup would be?

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

#106

Post by NoboruWataya »

cxr wrote: post #90
NoboruWataya wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla doesn't have VC backers that expect double-digit returns. At the top of the Mozilla structure is a non-profit foundation. Mozilla still has an incentive to make money, of course, but it does not require outsized returns and it is by its nature less inclined to place profit above mission or user experience.

You seem to have fallen into a time machine where it's not 2023 but instead... I dunno... 2010? (I'd have said 2013, but even that would still have been too generous; there's no defensible reason for crediting 2013-era Mozcorp as deserving of the warm fuzzies involved here, either. By then, it had managed to do what Netscape failed at—consolidating power within the distributed and independent mozilla.org project and…

No warm fuzzies here - just a factual summary of Mozilla's legal status and ownership. The boards of most tech companies today have fiduciary duties to shareholders who expect a significant return on their investment, which is not the case for Mozilla.

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

#107

Post by Saphyel »

damnesian wrote: post #82
thesuitonym wrote: post #15

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…

I am a developer on a team of developers for a large data and interaction-rich website and we've watched the stats morph over the past 8 years from 23% mobile to 23% desktop. It's been a very swift revolution. I do a lot of QA on my phone now. I have been a Firefox proponent for at least ten years and resolved to do most of my QA on FF since I was most familiar with its features. Something that is very irksome about…

your problem is not FF, it's the iphone, replace your phone and you'll have the browser you want with the extensions you want. Don't blame the innocents.

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

#109

Post by Klonoar »

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".

>No such massive advertising campaign ever existed to try to convince folks to "install Firefox".

I know HN tries to resist comments of this nature, but man do I feel old now.

Firefox's entire success pretty much owes itself to a campaign like that dating back to the early to mid 2000s. Hell, there was a massive NYTimes ad in 2004!

https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2004/12/mozilla-foundation-pl...

Edit: "there as" -> "there was"

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

#110

Post by Klonoar »

vlod wrote: post #104
fooker wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you remember how Firefox got over this? By replicating IE's bugs and beating them at their own game. Now Firefox, for some reason, doesn't want to do this.

Hhmm. I don't remember FF ever trying to reproduce IE6. I remember having to do special hacks to handle IE.

Opera replicated a significant amount of IE's "features" for compatibility reasons.
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