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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?

#221

Post by soundnote »

For me, it just lacked features, and the organization itself seems to be more and more focused on political advocacy rather than making a solid tool. I don't remember when Firefox last did a UI change that made me go "FUCK YES, that's awesome". Instead they publish paeans about how they hired a sneaker designer to do temporary color the-- sorry, colorways for their browser.

A lot of the other work is shit like how we need more than deplatforming (one of the examples linked by Mozilla was algorithmically preferencing sources Mozilla liked - conveniently Mozilla wouldn't have to dirty their hands by manipulating what we see on the Internet)

If a browser's mobile version is way, way behind, their UX team's ideas of good UX not aligned with mine, and they want to decide what I see on the 'net, why bother? There are other fish in the pond, teams focused on actually making good tools for users. They understand they're blacksmiths and make hammers rather than confetti paper.

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

#222

Post by soundnote »

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…

Brave literally started on Gecko and ended up switching because Gecko was a PITA to work with.

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

#224

Post by nateb2022 »

aednichols wrote: post #92

I was a diehard Firefox user in the aughts, running a bunch of extensions and recommending it to people. I switched to Chrome the first day it became available, because it was just so much faster. You don't need a monopoly or advertising to grow a product that sells itself that well. (Those absolutely did come later.)

> I switched to Chrome the first day it became available, because it was just so much faster.

This hasn't been the case for a long time.

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

#225

Post by nateb2022 »

fooker wrote: post #47
louzell wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has not been my experience at all. I was compelled to use Chrome at my last job (there was a bunch of internal tooling built around Chrome assumptions). I was there for almost five years, so I did a whole lot more than kicked the tires. My daily driver has remained FF, and I have not perceived any noticeable difference in perf because of it.

I tried Firefox a few weeks ago on a 2015 MBP plugged into a 4K tv, it could basically not play any high res video at any watchable framerate. Safari did the best, Chrome was close.

See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1716164

My guess is that Firefox was being served AV1 by YouTube. Intel chips prior to 11th gen have no hardware decode support for AV1, and so your CPU was overworked and bottlenecking.

Chrome and Safari probably resorted to H.261/H.263/H.264 encoded video from YouTube, and relied on the hardware decoder.

Easy fix: go to `about:config` and disable `media.av1.enabled`.

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

#226

Post by OhMeadhbh »

I agree, the browser has gotten better over the years. But I was lured away to Chrome because of its integration with Google services. I stopped using most of them and about a year and a half ago switched back over to Firefox. Sadly, there are some sites that seem to render perfectly in Chrome, but not at all in Firefox.

Also, FF was late to add meaningful JS debugging tools.

And I had kind of a bad experience working for Mozilla. Still... I have respect for the Firefox team and don't have a problem using the browser.

I'm a bit of an outlier, but it's a data point.

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

#227

Post by OhMeadhbh »

worldsavior wrote: post #180

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…

though strangely chrome uses the security libraries from firefox. hmm.

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

#228

Post by cxr »

NoboruWataya wrote: post #106
cxr wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not an explicit part of your comment, but the thread where this interaction is taking place contains a suggestion much stronger than a mere "factual summary of Mozilla's legal status and ownership" (and with all conclusions then left to be drawn by the reader). Viz:

> because it's owned by Mozilla, users don't have to worry about a bait and switch at the end of the growth phase

And with regard to your words on their own, the fact that "Mozilla"* "does not require outsized returns" is a separate matter from whether it is, in practice, "less inclined to place profit above mission or user experience". History has shown—in this decade, at least—that prioritizing mission (and/)or user experience is not actually part of its current MO.

Mozilla Corporation* is a fully taxable company. It has indisputably made exactly the sorts of business deals that anyone would expect from one (and would expect not to be planned let alone executed by a purely principles-based organization). There are ordinary businesses—i.e. companies that don't even have the sort of affiliation with a non-profit parent company the way that the Mozilla-the-corporation has with the foundation—that behave more ethically and more consistent with a principles-first approach than the way that Mozcorp does things in its current incarnation and has been doing for the last 10+ years.

* it's good to be specific

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

#229

Post by WorldMaker »

poorlyknit wrote: post #198
reaperman wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?"

Yeah, Google Analytics pioneered "JS and tracking cookies is all anyone needs for analytics" in ancient times and most other analytics companies followed that leader. It's the rare HN post indeed to see someone actually using classic web server logs in 2023 for analytics instead of JS+cookie trackers.

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

#230

Post by JohnFen »

reportgunner wrote: post #211
JohnFen wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> I literally don't know a single person who uses FF regularly anymore Perhaps the FF users don't feel the need to tell you ?

I see the browsers they use.
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