Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 245 posts

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

#171

Post by BizarroLand »

winternett wrote: post #102
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 l…

Firefox does sync if you sign in. Extensions, history, the works.

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

#172

Post by genocidicbunny »

fooker wrote: post #170
genocidicbunny wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree, I'm just trying to address the incredulity that perhaps for some people, Firefox might not have problems, or (gasp!) for some, Chrome might be the one with problems.

I'd argue that the market share reflects the ratio of these two `some`s. Unfortunately the party with the deeper pocket tends to win in these cases as long as they care to.

Which is why it's even more frustrating when Mozilla ends up wasting a bunch of money on some boondoggle or other. They don't have the warchest Google has, they need to be smarter with how they spend their limited resources, especially since their income is proportional to their market share.

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

#173

Post by aednichols »

nsvd wrote: post #105
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?

Yeah, the current yearly contract payment they get from Google seems to remove any sense of urgency or need to grow market share. I obviously don’t know the details but I haven’t heard of performance incentives or anything, because if Firefox grows it’s bad for Google.

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

#174

Post by markx2 »

harpiaharpyja wrote: post #87
damnesian wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can't use uBlock Origin on iOS?

nextdns.io works very well on iOS.

I use it on desktop/laptop also and have added many rules - on my profile/account at nextdns.io - with no issues.

It is very much worth a look.

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

#175

Post by klardotsh »

IMO it's in some parts a marketing problem others have already discussed quite well, and in other parts, almost every update (and I slowed them down by moving to the ESR channel, because the breakneck speed of the main releases was getting old) surprises me in some new, almost always user-hostile, way. I don't know who's at the helm of Firefox but good lord do they despise their users (and especially the power users that almost certainly make up the vast majority of their remaining marketshare - I don't know too many "normies" (if you will) who know or care what Firefox has been up to lately - actually, a lot of folks don't even know (or remember) what Firefox is). Rather than doubling down on being the resistance to Google's creepware and internet monoculture, Firefox seems to like to spend its development bandwidth finding new ways to advertise Mozilla's latest acquisition, creating new time-limited themes, redesigning parts of the UI that weren't broken to begin with, or really anything but fronting a real opposition to Google.

If qutebrowser didn't devour all my RAM I'd have stayed moved over to it on one of my past 5 attempts to move from FF to QB. Instead, my options are FF (or maybe I'll move to LibreWolf, hm), or... Ungoogled Chromium I guess.

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

#176

Post by DropInIn »

Back then there were fewer browser in the common scope of awareness.

My 60 year old dad installed brave long before we ever discussed the browser, and he's darn near tech illiterate.

Same with several other browsers and other family members.

I would hazard a guess that it's simply due to greater variety in total, with chrome/chromium never represented due to dev choices.

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

#177

Post by mahathu »

markx2 wrote: post #174
harpiaharpyja wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't use uBlock Origin on iOS?

nextdns.io works very well on iOS. I use it on desktop/laptop also and have added many rules - on my profile/account at nextdns.io - with no issues. It is very much worth a look.

Is using this for your DNS a privacy issue?

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

#178

Post by dahwolf »

Firefox was even over 30% at one point. It's a fine browser, but that 30% was in the desktop era where the only competition was a stagnant IE.

Then mobile happened and Firefox failed to secure a seat at the mobile OS table. Nor does it have any big web property to push the browser. So neither on mobile nor on desktop does Mozilla have any leverage.

It's not an engineering problem, it's a leverage problem. But even in engineering Mozilla can't out-compete Google. There's no way out of this sink hole.

Such is the technical analysis, but I want to compliment it with the normie analysis: nobody gives a shit about browsers. They're free and all do the same thing. Hence people go with the default and stick to it for life.

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

#180

Post by worldsavior »

Firefox security is very very bad. I don't know about it's speed, but AFAIK chrome is one of the fastest and lightweight on laptops.

But mainly it's Firefox security. Though I'm not really sure how many people are actually informed about Firefox security.

They are also totally reliant on Google. Google can decide to tell Mozilla to use only Manifest V3 and other because of their funding. People are worried about that.

It's also known for the privacy concious people that Chrome browser doesn't send telemetry or anything similar when you disable it through settings.

P.S. Not an advertisement for Chrome.

Post reply on HN