Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?

news.ycombinator.com

61–70 of 949 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?

#61
Everybody is moving to mobile and almost nobody uses Firefox on mobile. However, Firefox mobile does support extensions. Is that something that could emphasized? However, Firefox speed on mobile is much slower than Chrome. That should probably be improved upon.

For desktop there's not much of a distinguishing factor left. Chrome is good enough. I like Firefox for the privacy, but is that enough of a distinguishing factor for regular (less privacy conscious) folks?

Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?

#62

They should focus on saving Firefox. - Cut out all (or at the very least, most) initiatives that don't serve the goal of promoting Firefox's market share or sustainability going forward - Donate the major money drains that aren't Firefox to the Apache Foundation or another worthy custodian - Fire all inessential staff that don't want to work on Firefox. - Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not…

>> We as a community, cannot afford to let Firefox languish until the only browsers in the world are Chromium derivatives. The diversity of truly independent browser engines is far too important to give up without a fight. There are a lot of people oh HN who agree with that but then use a different browser for whatever reason. I feel like these people are being very hypocritical and should use what they want to succe…

They offer nothing I cannot get elsewhere and thus I have no reason to switch.

When it first came out, Firefox was faster, lighter and offered way better function than the alternatives at the time. Since then, competition has been fierce in the browser market and they’ve done little to distinguish themselves in any major way from their competitive set.

Until they do something so vastly incomparable in the market, they gonna continue to falter.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?

#63
I want to be done with Firefox so badly. I just don't want to go to Google.

There's this really obnoxious issue where search in the address bar has taken a complete dive recently.

For example, if I want to go to reddit.com/r/videos and it's a page I go to often, I can't just type "videos" because the suggestions that come up are links to threads I've visited recently. None of the suggestions are to reddit.com/r/videos which I visit far more often than a thread I've visited just once.

And it triple annoys me that this used to work just fine but then they recently changed it when they put in those stupid paid suggestions / ads.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?

#64
post #28

Take a hint from Brave, which is growing fast. Go all in on privacy and ad blocking.

That would surely be bad for their 0.5 billion/year deal from Google. Not going to happen.

They're not getting that money for the ads. They're getting it to be a decoy for anti-trust investigators. Which is not hampered in the slightest by adding a default adblocker.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?

#65

They should focus on saving Firefox. - Cut out all (or at the very least, most) initiatives that don't serve the goal of promoting Firefox's market share or sustainability going forward - Donate the major money drains that aren't Firefox to the Apache Foundation or another worthy custodian - Fire all inessential staff that don't want to work on Firefox. - Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not…

Cutting organizational expenses might be good for unrelated reasons, but I don't see how that increases the market share of Firefox, and I can think of a few ways it could decrease their market share.

I guess the idea would be to only cut organizational expenses that aren't serving the purpose of increasing firefox market share.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?

#66

They should focus on saving Firefox. - Cut out all (or at the very least, most) initiatives that don't serve the goal of promoting Firefox's market share or sustainability going forward - Donate the major money drains that aren't Firefox to the Apache Foundation or another worthy custodian - Fire all inessential staff that don't want to work on Firefox. - Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not…

If all that is left is chromium, then you can kiss what is left of web standards good bye. Google will set the standard, taking input from any other tech player big enough to have a seat at the table.

Its bad enough ISO certification boards and official positions of the W3C can be bought or corrupted. Let there be only one engine, controlled by Google? And even the pretense of a open and fair playing field goes away.

Open source and open protocols were not resistant enough to for profit corporations.

Now our standards are dwindling, open source projects and standards boards re completely co-opted, and the conversation on mailing lists and forums sounds like the never ending squabbling and finger wagging from your Fortune 500 HR department.

Foss and open standards have been captured by capital. And it shows in the culture.

Hell, it shows in the conversations around places like this.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?

#67

Maybe it has to do with its competitors being a 1.7 trillion dollar company and a 2.5 trillion dollar company! Winning against those requires not only better technology AND marketing AND consumer favor, but also leverage in the legal processes that enable/disable network effects. So anti-trust is unfortunately one of Mozilla's biggest hopes.

> Winning against those requires

I think the point here isn’t winning, it’s surviving. They need to maintain enough market share to keep going, but they don’t need to be the dominant browser. The goal of avoiding a monoculture can be achieved with a smaller marketshare.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?

#68
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's exaggerating a bit bit his point still stands. After an update there's at least one extra tab about the update, and sometimes more like the recent-ish stupid color scheme feature.

Exaggerating isn't particularly helpful, makes me thing the problems the OP has with the browser are more based on perception of "culture" or something rather than the actual product

It's not about perception. The browser's job is to display webpages and otherwise get out of the user's way - Firefox constantly fails at that, much more than a lot of paid, proprietary software even.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?

#69

They should focus on saving Firefox. - Cut out all (or at the very least, most) initiatives that don't serve the goal of promoting Firefox's market share or sustainability going forward - Donate the major money drains that aren't Firefox to the Apache Foundation or another worthy custodian - Fire all inessential staff that don't want to work on Firefox. - Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not…

I think that's a bit too far - for example, Thunderbird is a great web client. I do think they should have found a way to hold onto the Servo team and make that engine more useable and better than the base chromium engine. If they had been able to keep the Rust foundation on board, it would have also made sense.

However, I do agree that their leadership has made terrible decisions and they've absolutely focused on the wrong products.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?

#70

I would: - Prioritise getting the new extension framework fully functional. And continue innovating on the capabilities that are exposed. Especially on mobile where the new fenix engine is still limited to a small whitelist of extensions - Sort out the multi-profile story. Container tabs are great, but the chrome model is also a great fit for many workflow (e.g. different people in a house or home vs. work profiles).…

Chrome’s Profiles are the #1 reason I use it over Firefox. If Firefox had as complete of an implementation as Chrome then I would consider switching, but until then Firefox is a non-starter for me. I use all 3 of these profiles all day every day for work: * one personal profile logged into personal Google * one work profile managed by the company, logged into company Google * one development profile with all the debu…

headscratch I used profiles with Ff for ages... what is the difference to Chrome's?
Post reply on HN