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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?

#151

Post by WorldMaker »

0x073 wrote: post #83
blahyawnblah wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox's dev tools are much better than Chrome's

Firefox devtools where long time not comparable to chrome, now they are almost the same. There are now some features I prefer on Firefox and some I prefer on chrome.

The biggest difference was Firefox's best Dev Tools in those years were extensions and maintained via a wider community and updated on a different (sometimes faster) cadence than the browser itself. Good old Firebug was more capable than Chrome's Dev Tools at most points in time in that "long time not comparable" people believe existed, but Firefox didn't get "credit" for it until Firefox was finally pressured to move extensions like Firebug in-box and into the browser's normal deployment cycle. (I'm not sure that's necessarily the improvement people think it was.)

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

#152

Post by WorldMaker »

btreecat wrote: post #96
mdeeks wrote: post #40

Chrome used to be a lot faster years back so I switched. Firefox sadly has never given me a reason to switch back. Chrome is still fast and generally easy to use. (Maybe others here can give me good reasons to switch?) Chrome also has some obscure features I rely on that Firefox does not have (or just doesn't do well): * Firefox does not support Touch ID on macOS. I can't actually log into a lot of my sites * I can't…

I understand your dislike of the default workflow for Firefox profiles. Fortunately you can launch them from the CLI, so I usually creat an alias to my alt profiles then launch the browser from the shell.

Also Firefox Multi-Account Containers do things that Chrome profiles can't do at all.

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

#153

Post by Klonoar »

pwg wrote: post #142
Klonoar wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have already illustrated to you how you are not taking into account the differences between 2004 and 2023, along with how your original statement is just plain badly worded - if not outright incorrect, but I'm being charitable.

If your only remaining tangent here is to attempt to debate with the semantics of how "massive" is defined then I'm guessing we've reached the conclusion of this thread.

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

#154

Post by elishah »

utopcell wrote: post #27
acheron wrote: post #13

Google 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 ?

I assume that the previous commenter was referring to Google's monopolies in search, email, and video.

All of which they will use to yell at you to switch to Chrome, and will sometimes cause to actually be faster or more featureful when using Chrome rather than any other browser.

It's a pretty clear case of using your monopoly in one market to artificially prop up your entry into a different market, which is very much the sort of thing that has traditionally been frowned upon both legally and morally.

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

#155

Post by theandrewbailey »

missedthecue wrote: post #30
acheron wrote: post #13

Google 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.

In the 90s, Netscape was free and installing it was easy.

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

#156

Post by genocidicbunny »

frostiness wrote: post #62
floren wrote: post #32

Earlier 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…

I know it's just anecdata, but on my 2 year old phone, Firefox+Adblock+NoScript uses about 33% less power than the stock Chrome. I grant that my browsing habits aren't such that I tend to use a lot of media-heavy sites in the first place, so perhaps on those I wouldn't see such savings.

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

#157

Post by WorldMaker »

An opinion of mine is that Firefox's market share has to be greatly under-reported at this point. Built-in, on-by-default tracking protection disables some of the impact of exactly the sorts of trackers that report this sort of market share data. I think that's why the numbers vary so much depending on where you look. No other browser seems to have reporting problems like that.

Plus, one of the major sources of such market share data is and has long been Google themselves and they have such a massive conflict of interest there, but so many people interested in market share data rely on Google numbers because they rely on Google as their advertising landlord defining the markets in which they buy ads.

Ignoring mobile, I don't think Firefox's market share has "dropped" on desktops. Anecdotally, everyone I know that used Firefox has stuck with it or deepened there reliance on it and I know enough people that left Spartan Edge for Firefox when Edge went Chromium to wonder if the market share even went up somewhat though depending on your market share data nothing like that is visible either. (And others point out the problem with mobile marketshare and that being the majority browsers for people's time. Firefox on iOS looks like Mobile Safari because it is Mobile Safari and gets counted as such.)

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

#158

Post by genocidicbunny »

fooker wrote: post #80
frostiness wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's a bit perplexing to me that Firefox proponents keep denying performance issues for years. You can just compare it yourself or look at the some of the zillion benchmarks.

Are they...issues?

Like, I frankly couldn't care less if Chrome is capable of running some funky JS that is mainly used on sites that I don't visit a bit faster, or is capable of rendering some css animation that I would honestly prefer died in a fire a bit faster.

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

#159

Post by [deleted] »

missedthecue wrote: post #24

Chrome 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…

[deleted]

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

#160

Post by solarkraft »

Chrome is, for the majority of use cases, better. I say that as a Firefox user annoyed by fairly frequent glitches and slowdowns.

Normal people care about that. Google is also heavily pushing Chrome on their properties. That's enough to make a lot of people switch.

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