Ask HN: Why does Firefox have such a low market share anyways? • Hacker News Board

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

#241

Post by rekabis » Wed, Jul 19, 2023, 4:20 PM UTC

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…

Stealing passwords from browser password vaults is trivial these days for most any malware, which is why password managers like BitWarden have become much more popular. And those can sync across browsers and systems much more reliably.

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

#242

Post by aristofun » Wed, Jul 19, 2023, 9:33 PM UTC

barbazoo wrote: post #12

aristofun wrote: post #7

Because it's not as good as it used to be. Due poor management I suppose. Chrome is far for ideal too, but at least it works for user and developer without much pain.

Could you be more specific?

It specifically sucks now in almost every aspect it used to rule 10 years ago.

Starting from performance, dev tools and finishing with annoying and shitty ui “enhancements”.

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

#243

Post by gerimate » Thu, Jul 20, 2023, 1:36 PM UTC

I gave Firefox a try this year. I was actually excited to try something new after Google Chrome. Then I noticed the tools I use on the daily acting weird, as I work most of the time via browser. Wanted to export an image from Figma, it was a blank png file. Wanted to share an image on Instagram, the image was flipped upside down. And when I wanted to watch Youtube videos autoplay had to be turned off from browser settings. So after a week I went back to Chrome.

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

#244

Post by pllbnk » Thu, Jul 20, 2023, 5:14 PM UTC

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 ?

Back when Chrome was fresh, it was pushed very hard by Google through their home page and other related services until it became dominant. It was also the time when Firefox suffered from certain quality issues which really helped Chrome. So, it wasn't the ecosystem thing because Google was, and to some extent still is, the de facto home page of most people, regardless of the OS.

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

#245

Post by sparrow1029 » Mon, Jul 24, 2023, 12:41 PM UTC

Arech wrote: post #77

fooker wrote: post #22

Use Firefox for a day if you are a Chrome user, you’ll quickly realize the experience is far subpar. JS stuff is slower, random websites break, the UI feels a bit sluggish. I understand there are ideological reasons to support Firefox, and that some of these issues are easily attributed to other parties. But for users, there aren’t too many reasons to switch over from Chrome or even Safari, like it was the situation…

Never noticed any of that. (I have to use Chrome from time to time on 2 machines (one is fresh powerfull laptop and the other is a decade+ old PC) due to embedded Google Translate feature, and always happy to switch back to Firefox, which is much more convenient and tunable (and has a killer "Simple Tab Groups" extension)

Simple Tab Groups _IS_ a killer extension! I couldn't find its equivalent in the Chrome store. I haven't noticed any of the Firefox-specific issues that other users in this thread have mentioned that weren't due to extensions I had installed on FF. For the rare case of a website where the devs clearly only tested in Chrome, I will open Chrome to interface with that site and then go back to FF.