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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?

#191

Post by supertrope »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #36

Android, chromeOS and google in general push chrome. Windows pushes edge (i.e. chromium). Apple pushes safari (i.e. webkit). So what do you expect new users to pick?

Defaults are powerful.

Windows > Edge

iPhone > Safari

Google.com > Chrome (also YouTube, Gmail, G Maps, ChromeOS)

If you ask a regular person what browser they use you'll get answers like Facebook, Bing, Internet Edge, The Google, iPad, Foxfire. The browser, operating system, brand, search engine, hardware, email, ISP, and website are all part of a magic glowing machine to them.

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

#192

Post by reaperman »

WorldMaker wrote: post #157

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…

> 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.

Am I mistaken in thinking all that's needed is the User-Agent request header? I don't think FF generally fakes this.

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

#193

Post by JohnFen »

WorldMaker wrote: post #157

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…

> Anecdotally, everyone I know that used Firefox has stuck with it or deepened there reliance on it

I find this interesting, because I literally don't know a single person who uses FF regularly anymore, even amongst my hacker friends. 10 years ago, 100% of them did.

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

#194

Post by karmakaze »

If I had to pick one thing, I'd say distracting projects at Mozilla. I say this as an outside observer without much to base it on other than the products and announcements I read about.

Don't get me wrong I love the niche work that gets done on the side. What I don't think is a good idea is trying to do more than one big thing at a time, e.g. Firefox OS phone. As I say this it seems to have made its way as TV firmware, so maybe not a waste.

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

#195

Post by Berniek »

bawolff wrote: post #137

Because firefox let itself be defined by its competition (chrome). Everything in firefox in the last 10 years feels like they are just copying chrome with a bit of a delay. You don't win the market by doing the same thing as the market leader (Especially when the market leader is as well funded as google). You need to find a niche and execute on that.

Sort of... But Firefox is open source, so anyone can contribute. Mozilla accepted money from google to "just make google the default search engine". But they also accept contributions in programming (its open source after all) from google, Microsoft & others employees.

The google/Microsoft contributors whether working after hours or as part of their employment have some influence in the direction of Firefox.

That may be deliberate or benign (a really good direction by google, in a workers mind, will bias their thinking in other projects and visa versa)

That is one disadvantage of open source. A foundation can't avoid that unless you setup like Greenpeace and don't give the riff raff any real say.

Firefox users are "captured" by any adds on google search even though they may advertise chrome.

People that comment here are interested, most users of browsers ARE NOT. It is so much easier to use the default. Google knows this, Twitter knows this.

One of the more brilliant ideas in Firefox was containers, chrome could not implement them because of architectural constraints but rather than build on that beautiful idea, Firefox went in a slightly different direction that Chrome & Edge could follow and still protect their advertising revenue.

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

#196

Post by mdaniel »

WorldMaker wrote: post #152
btreecat wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

the opposite is true, too, since "Clear History" in Chrome Profiles behaves correctly and (AFAIK) is scoped just to that Profile unlike our container friend: https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers/issues/3...

I still use them because combined with https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/open-url-in-c... ( https://github.com/honsiorovskyi/open-url-in-container ) is a game changer for my workflow but it does make me sad that issue has been open for so long

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

#197

Post by bawolff »

Berniek wrote: post #195
bawolff wrote: post #137

Because firefox let itself be defined by its competition (chrome). Everything in firefox in the last 10 years feels like they are just copying chrome with a bit of a delay. You don't win the market by doing the same thing as the market leader (Especially when the market leader is as well funded as google). You need to find a niche and execute on that.

Sort of... But Firefox is open source, so anyone can contribute. Mozilla accepted money from google to "just make google the default search engine". But they also accept contributions in programming (its open source after all) from google, Microsoft & others employees. The google/Microsoft contributors whether working after hours or as part of their employment have some influence in the direction of Firefox. That may…

Just because anyone "can" contribute doesn't mean every patch is accepted or that product decisions are delegated to corporations with competing products. Firefox still bears responsibility for its own product decisions, not to mention how firefox is marketed.

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

#198

Post by poorlyknit »

reaperman wrote: post #192
WorldMaker wrote: post #157

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…

> 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. Am I mistaken in thinking all that's needed is the User-Agent request header? I don't think FF generally fakes this.

You are underestimating the laziness of the Adtech industry.

"But we've already got Google Analytics, why would we implement server-side code (<- so complicated!) just to log some stupid header?"

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

#199

Post by ezekg »

fooker wrote: post #119
ezekg wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a weird reply. I think I'd especially notice any glaring problems, seeing as I use it every day for web dev. The only issues I've had is that devtools will sometimes completely crash, giving me a white window, requiring me to close the tab to restart devtools. But that's been rare and I can't remember the last time it happened. I completely de-Google'd my life 2 years ago, and I only have Chrome installed so tha…

>I only have Chrome installed so that I can test things cross-browser when needed Read my grandparent comment carefully. Suppose you have two products A, B. They are roughly feature equivalent but B has a 10x more engineering effort put in towards QOL improvements and fixing the long tail of performance issues. You are not going to notice this if you generally use A and only once in a while use B. OTOH, if you use B…

I used Chrome for 8 years prior. I didn't miss a thing after the switch except my autocomplete/history, which I built back up over a few weeks.

You sound like you haven't actually used Firefox recently. If you have, then maybe give specifics.

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

#200

Post by juujian »

barbazoo wrote: post #78
rozap wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google meet works fine on firefox. The GCP console is an affront to the web on any browser, though.

Google Meet doesn't support visual effects in Firefox, e.g. background blurring

Interesting, zoom doesn't support that in Linux, either. So I decided that I don't need that feature.
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