Firefox on the brink? • Hacker News Board

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#21

Post by bryanlarsen » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 2:35 PM UTC

sergiotapia wrote: post #4

>Firefox peaked at 31.82% in November, 2009 — and then began its long slide in almost direct proportion to the rise of Chrome. It will be a sad day when Firefox is truly dead. But what did Mozilla expect? They spent so much time and energy on activist bullshit that doesn't really matter for THE BROWSER.

The financial statements are also currently on the front page. That's a nice hot take, but the number that really stands out is 25% of revenue on management, a full 50% of salaries.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38530382

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#22

Post by unglaublich » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 2:35 PM UTC

BossingAround wrote: post #10

With Google trying to cripple adblocker extensions, I hope users will find their way back to Firefox.

Google cripples adblocker extensions because users won't find their way back to alternative browsers anymore.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#23

Post by irrational » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 2:35 PM UTC

dartos wrote: post #5

pjmlp wrote: post #2

Yes, the Web has turned into ChromeOS, with the help of many folks that used to bash IE.

There’s still safari at 34% usage. :badpokerface:

Only because of iOS, I assume. But it looks like Apple might be forced to open things up and allow other browsers to run on iOS. If that happened, I'd expect Safari to drop like a stone.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#24

Post by GeekyBear » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 2:35 PM UTC

My anecdata shows that Google's recent decisions on the direction of Chrome and changes at Youtube have technically savvy users abandoning Chrome for Firefox,

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#25

Post by BossingAround » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 2:36 PM UTC

dartos wrote: post #18

nequo wrote: post #3

I want Firefox to not be on the brink. I have had no problems with it on Linux over the last few years since I switched from Chrome. I do not wish to touch Chrome with a ten-foot pole.

Firefox regularly crashes for me on wayland. It slows down my whole system when it tries to load a page in first boot (but librewolf doesn’t for some reason) the HID and webgl/webgpu support is bad… It’s just not a very good browser compared to chrome forks or webkit based ones.

Sounds like a configuration problem. Firefox on Fedora/Wayland is very fast, haven't had it crash in a long time.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#26

Post by bryanlarsen » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 2:36 PM UTC

dartos wrote: post #18

nequo wrote: post #3

I want Firefox to not be on the brink. I have had no problems with it on Linux over the last few years since I switched from Chrome. I do not wish to touch Chrome with a ten-foot pole.

Firefox regularly crashes for me on wayland. It slows down my whole system when it tries to load a page in first boot (but librewolf doesn’t for some reason) the HID and webgl/webgpu support is bad… It’s just not a very good browser compared to chrome forks or webkit based ones.

I had that problem, too. It went away when I replaced my Nvidia card with an AMD one.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#27

Post by tompagenet2 » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 2:36 PM UTC

sergiotapia wrote: post #4

>Firefox peaked at 31.82% in November, 2009 — and then began its long slide in almost direct proportion to the rise of Chrome. It will be a sad day when Firefox is truly dead. But what did Mozilla expect? They spent so much time and energy on activist bullshit that doesn't really matter for THE BROWSER.

I think there are plenty of decisions worth consideration, but this is nothing to do with why Firefox is declining. It's because if I buy an iPad it comes with Safari and doesn't really let me use anything else (only a skinned version of Safari). If I buy a PC it's Edge. If it's an Android device it's Chrome. A Mac? Safari. Firefox is the default nowhere, and in this world because Google has almost limitless marketing power and owns one of the world's most popular websites they can push Chrome to mean that on PCs and Macs there is a strong push for people to move from the defaults to Chrome.

Firefox works great for me. It's just incredibly hard to get anyone to use it.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#28

Post by robin_reala » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 2:36 PM UTC

It’s not on the brink, it’s that Firefox shims GA[1] with Enhanced Tracking Protection, which is on by default.[2] analytics.usa.gov uses GA.

So you really can’t rely on usage figures that don’t represent the truth of your situation.

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/blob/413b88689f3ca2a30b...

[2] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-now-ava...

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#29

Post by dartos » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 2:36 PM UTC

lxgr wrote: post #6

> I am personally unaware of any serious reason to believe that Firefox’s numbers will improve soon. Hopefully the DMA can help? I’m not using Firefox on iOS mainly due to a lack of extension support.

I don’t think there is one.

Chrome got big bc it was radically different than IE and Firefox jumped on the lightweight trend far too late.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#30

Post by isolli » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 2:36 PM UTC

tommica wrote: post #7

What could get people to move to firefox? Is the only way really to have have your browser be popular is to have it either be installed by default, or being advertised on a page that people use daily? Would be crazy if facebook had a banner stating "switch to firefox now" suddenly

A lot of developers I know have moved to Firefox recently because of containers.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-use-firefox-contain...