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Firefox on the brink?

brycewray.com

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Re: Firefox on the brink?

#551

Post by indymike »

rbanffy wrote: post #546
indymike wrote: post #540

A quick look at Mozilla's product page with 12 products of which five are different browsers, explains why the decline has happened: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/products/ That's a lot of products to support. Add to that this list of 27 discontinued products: https://killedbymozilla.com/ And you can understand why the struggle is real for firefox. It should be the best, bar none at this point.

All the browsers are probably counted as Firefox. A better guidance would be to count based on engines (Chrome, Edge, and Safari are all variations on WebKit) and have a device preventing an engine monopoly.

> All the browsers are probably counted as Firefox.

Firefox for iOS uses WebKit as the rendering engine, and the others are significantly divergent from Firefox proper and take significant development resources away from the core product, so I disagree with counting the products as a single browser.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#552

Post by Certhas »

mcfedr wrote: post #530
paulryanrogers wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only amount of money that can claw back market share is a number big enough to buy Google. Google controls the leading web properties and pushes its browsers through there.

Features. Be as good as chrome and id use it.

That's absurd. Firefox has been at parity with Chrome for a long time, both are extremely mature technologies. Sometimes one is ahead of the other in one way or the other, but they are largely identical. The exception is when Google or Microsoft "accidentally" break their websites on Firefox.

It's pure fantasy to insist that the market share of Firefox is primarily driven by technical merit. Otherwise, you couldn't explain why Firefox is still at 20% in Germany, for example.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#553

Post by marricks »

jdlyga wrote: post #90

Firefox needs to focus all their effort on making a good web browser first . If the browser is slow, has a clunky interface, or lags behind on features, then people won't use it. Mozilla focus way too much of their attention on privacy and non-browser related projects. Look at how much attention that The Browser Company has gotten for their Arc browser on Mac. Their primary focus is great UI and making an excellent b…

That would be my personal preference, laser focus on their browser, but Perhaps they didn't because it's already good and the reason they're falling is combating monopolies. Safari/Edge are defaults in their space and have OS's that can nudge.

Google owns huge swaths of the internet and can nudge people as well and break other OS's on whim.

Mozilla probably felt the need to have other offerings and leadership to winback something when "being a great browser" wasn't enough in the past 14 years.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#554

Post by xwowsersx »

I use Firefox. I started using it because I liked the Multi-Account Containers and I've just stuck with it. I am absolutely shocked that FF's market share is ~2%. I had no idea it was that low, wow!

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#555

Post by neilv »

Instead of government leaving it up to "market share", in an industry with decades of documented history of underhanded anti-competitive behavior, how about:

1. All government Web frontends must be compliant with one of the government-defined profiles of browser features, which are defined in terms of W3C (not WHAT, not Chrome) open standards. With sufficient penalties to motivate compliance.

2. As a practical matter, developers of government Web-based systems -- in addition to developing to documented open standards, and using open standards-based libraries/frameworks -- will be motivated to test with multiple browsers, including Firefox, because that's the most likely way that end users will discover and report noncompliance with the standards and profiles.

3. Government "apps" for non-Web platforms, such as Apple iOS and Google Android, are strongly discouraged. Furthermore, such non-Web apps by default are not compliant unless complete comparable functionality is available via compliant government Web frontends/apps. (To get permission for exceptions in extraordinary circumstances, there will be an onerous and uncertain process, and thus the motivation is to invest in the open standard Web platform for any "extraordinary" platform facilities that might be needed.)

(Also there would be regulations about backend implementations; that's just about browsers.)

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#556

Post by nightpool »

neltnerb wrote: post #501
hs86 wrote: post #117

I switched over after the Manifest v3 debacle, and after a couple of months, I wonder if the implications of using a browser with a lower market share are overblown. I haven't encountered any site that misbehaves, and the only missing feature so far is within the Google Drive web app because it uses a Chrome-only extension [1]. Maybe the ongoing standardization of the web shows its effects here, and using a standard-…

I have had several sites refuse to work properly (American Airlines maybe? It was some airline) with every single add-in disabled and with every security feature I could find disabled. I am with you that it's super rare, I have only had to open chrome due to it being that bad a few times, usually I just need to disable javascript blocking or enable more cookies. But there are legitimately sites that are just so badly…

I just bought tickets on AA a few months ago with Firefox and didn't have any issues

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#557

Post by aboodman »

hs86 wrote: post #117

I switched over after the Manifest v3 debacle, and after a couple of months, I wonder if the implications of using a browser with a lower market share are overblown. I haven't encountered any site that misbehaves, and the only missing feature so far is within the Google Drive web app because it uses a Chrome-only extension [1]. Maybe the ongoing standardization of the web shows its effects here, and using a standard-…

Speaking as a library developer, Firefox is expensive for us to support in https://replicache.dev and https://reflect.net due to lots of long-open bugs, particularly in the storage system. Firefox also generally has the slowest performance which affects us.

I'm not bagging on the team, it's frankly amazing they've been able to mostly keep up, it's just a fact that maintaining a competitive web browser is a gargantuan task that requires a large team and investment.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#558

Post by Steltek »

isodev wrote: post #476
culi wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

on iOS all browsers are forced to use WebKit And how could Firefox possibly complete against default browsers? Is it even worth the investment?

The rendering engine doesn't really matter - nothing is stopping Mozilla from implementing a better browser app than Safari. Safari is _really_ good and a very high bar to catchup to, even if you don't have to implement the rendering engine and Mozilla is not exactly known for their friendly and refined UIs. Vivaldi on iOS is much younger by comparison and looks a lot better than Firefox.

Mobile browsers aren't sufficiently differentiated enough for a significant amount of people to bother changing the default. Does anyone really think Samsung Browser would get close to 1.6% if it were a free and unbiased choice?

Apple sets the rules, gets special access (new releases, features, platform changes, countless other things), and relentlessly captures their users into the Apple ecosystem/moat. You seem to think swapping the rendering engine is a trivial task but you're asking them to practically create a new browser. And for all that effort, you're still competing with an opponent that's basically cheating. I'm not sure why Firefox/iOS even exists, frankly.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#560

Post by zamadatix »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #527
whakim wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always see comments like this on HN, and I struggle to understand why. Firefox is plenty fast. Its interface is extremely similar to most of its competitors. It works well. What special sauce do you expect Mozilla to implement that'll suddenly change their fortunes? It's a browser, after all. And why do you think that such features aren't being implemented due to lack of resources or muddled priorities - surely Moz…

> I always see comments like this on HN, and I struggle to understand why. I think its OSX and Windows people talking past each other. On a Mac, Firefox is pale in comparison to Safari.

For a long time it was absolutely awful on Android as well. Not sure about Android, but at least on macOS Firefox has about identical performance as of this year now. They did a lot of work, some macOS specific, in recent times.

That said your average person isn't trying out every browser multiple times per year to see how fast it is today.

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