Alot of it felt like a timing thing --- Firefox was huge, swore by it etc, but then Chrome just kept getting faster. Eventually switching over was a no brainer and at the same time any new users/new installs started to lean towards Chrome also and the momentum happened. Why would any new user/install switch in droves after that? Marketing is a tough sell when users (a huge chunk who barely know what the browser is let alone care about its open source/privacy/whatever) are happy just surfing along inside Facebook and it "works fine".
Ask HN: Why does Firefox have such a low market share anyways?
141–150 of 245 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why does Firefox have such a low market share anyways?
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
True, there were Firefox advertising campaigns in the past. How many days did that NYTimes ad run? How does that compare in size to Google being able to spend somewhere around ten to twelve years constantly advertising "switch to Chrome" on every google property (search, youtube, mail, etc.)? The massive size of googles advertising to "switch to Chrome" dwarfs all of the Firefox campaigns combined.
You are shifting the goalposts by trying to say it's about scale and reach, but scale and reach in 2004 wasn't the same as what Google has now. Firefox more or less blanketed the web in advertising to get the switch done. Your point of "Google has a ridiculous playing field advantage" is noted and absolutely true, but you don't need to reach for the factually incorrect "Firefox has not had campaigns for switching" to…
> You are shifting the goalposts by trying to say it's about scale and reach,
Not at all, unless the meaning of "massive" has changed since I last looked the word up in a dictionary.
I said "no such massive campaign existed". Yes, campaigns did exist, but not with the "massive" size google was able to bring to their campaign.
Re: Ask HN: Why does Firefox have such a low market share anyways?
#143Big picture, I don't know. But I stopped using FF entirely a year or so ago because it reached a point where I could no longer put up with it without irritating me. I find its performance to be awful, it's much less usable, and it's harder to correct the various UI choices that I'm allergic to. These are problems that I didn't have, or that weren't as severe, before the revamp. It's clear to me that FF is set on thei…
Interesting, I've never had any performance complaints with Firefox (except for on Ubuntu where you're forced to use the Snap). May I ask what browser are you using now?
I'm using Brave at the moment. I'm still seeking a better browser. I'd love to lose the Chrome UI style, if nothing else.
> I've never had any performance complaints with Firefox
Lots of people don't. But lots of people do. My assumption is that Mozilla targeted their improvements at a particular sort of machine and if yours isn't close enough to that, then your performance is very poor.
For me, the turning point came last year (or the year before, I forget), when an update was released that caused FF to take between 3-5 minutes to start up. Nothing I did resolved this. That was the moment when I realized I just had to give up, that FF is unlikely to become a reasonable choice for me in the future. (Although prior to that, FF performance for me had been on a continual downslope ever since Quantum -- which itself didn't improve speed for me, but didn't harm it, either).
Re: Ask HN: Why does Firefox have such a low market share anyways?
#144Good 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 l…
I dont use browser password saving, but I just looked and FF syncs passwords.
Re: Ask HN: Why does Firefox have such a low market share anyways?
#145Big picture, I don't know. But I stopped using FF entirely a year or so ago because it reached a point where I could no longer put up with it without irritating me. I find its performance to be awful, it's much less usable, and it's harder to correct the various UI choices that I'm allergic to. These are problems that I didn't have, or that weren't as severe, before the revamp. It's clear to me that FF is set on thei…
Interesting, I've never had any performance complaints with Firefox (except for on Ubuntu where you're forced to use the Snap). May I ask what browser are you using now?
> (except for on Ubuntu where you're forced to use the Snap).
FWIW, "forced" isn't the correct term here. One can still download the .tar.gz and unpack it at will (or, I presume if determined enough, repackage it into a deb using fpm/nfpm). Just watch out for `chown 0:0` otherwise the 1Password extension tries to be cute and accuses you of malware and refuses to work citing a fantastically opaque error message
source: a random person on the Internet who loathes snap and whose hate for snap overcame his activation cost for downloading the standalone binary. I just have to remember to use Help > About a lot because their update notification is braindead (and that very point is on-topic for this thread: execution matters)
Re: Ask HN: Why does Firefox have such a low market share anyways?
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
> When you get a Google phone that already has Google's browser installed, and it works relatively well, why would you change? I know you're speaking in the context of the general public, but I've found that uBlock on Firefox Mobile does so much to make the web usable again that I'd never go without it.
On the other hand, as someone on an old android device, the performance difference between the two is massive and it isn't getting better. Some sites (usually the ones that are actually important such as restaurant menu) are perfect on Chrome and nearly unusable on Firefox, even with an adblocker. Performance already matters a lot on desktop browsers, but when battery life is thrown into the mix, it matters even more…
How old? My S10e isn't very new and FF works great.
Re: Ask HN: Why does Firefox have such a low market share anyways?
#147Very recently Chrome has really messed up on my Linux Mint machines, something to do with hardware acceleration. They don't seem to be in any hurry to fix so, I'm now using the Brave browser. Very decent experience so far.
Re: Ask HN: Why does Firefox have such a low market share anyways?
#148Re: Ask HN: Why does Firefox have such a low market share anyways?
#149One 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".
Chrome was started by Google as a push to improve the web, which was mired in the stagnation of Internet Explorer dominance. This was good and it worked, but now they are the new monopoly, controlling not just the majority browser but also the majority search engine, majority email platform, and majority online productivity tools. They naturally work to ensure that all that stuff works well with Chrome. Pretty much t…
> This was good
Was it though? It seems like a lot of "ends justify the means" from hindsight. Were all the dark patterns that Google used to insure Chrome dominance enough to justify the ends of "stop IE stagnation"? In the exact same time period Firefox did really well on word-of-mouth. It didn't need dark patterns, and ultimately lost to Chrome's dark patterns and it is harder to argue that that wasn't at least somewhat evil by that point because I think it is a lot harder to argue that the ends of "defeat Firefox" justify those means. I think it is getting harder and harder to justify that Chrome did all those evil things, whether or not you think that Chrome itself is evil.