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Comment by twblalock | Hacker News Reader

Firefox's market share has not increased recently. According to the data I can find, it is slightly down over the past several months. Chrome is still just over 60% on both desktop and mobile.

So, why would Google be worried about Firefox? If anything, they would be worried about Safari, which is the primary mobile competitor to Chrome and is being marketed on the desktop as having increased performance and strong privacy features.

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I’m not being coy by phrasing this as a conjecture; it is just a hypothesis: perhaps Google is worried that FF could gain mind share under technical people , who might then cause a ripple effect by installing it for everyone whose computers they “manage” or influence (friends & family). Which could up being a lot of people, in the end. I have a feeling that’s how MSIE originally got dethroned.

I'm pretty sure it was Chrome that dethroned IE, not Firefox. It had really good marketing, and nontechnical people started to adopt it rapidly because it had a really clean interface and was a lot faster than IE or Firefox were at the time.

Here's a chart of browser market share from 2009 to 2017: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m...

It seems pretty clear from that chart that the rapid decline of IE was accompanied by the rapid rise of Chrome. Firefox seems to have peaked in popularity in 2010, when IE was still a lot more popular than Chrome. Chrome ate both their lunches.

People say that Firefox did the hard work, because back then the web was just entirely built for IE. It was much harder to steal market share from IE at that point, because the web that you were able to display, if you were not IE, was just broken. You had to be so much better than IE at everything else to get people to use your browser despite the web being broken. The small differences between browsers today would not suffice for that.

So, the total number of percentage points that Chrome ate up is bigger, but it would never have gotten off the ground, if Firefox had not shaved off market share beforehand.

> It had really good marketing

Good marketing? They put a freaking ad for it on Google.com! They still have it and there's no way to even disable the nagware. I've clicked "No" to it I don't know how many hundreds of times over these years.

Because Firefox is actually great now. I just switched back to Firefox as my primary browser. I suspect others will do as well.

So long as you don’t need to use the developer tools, because a 1950x and 64GiB of RAM aren’t enough to make that run snappy.

Firefox is excellent when it works. I've experienced pretty long loading times for a bunch of websites. I have experienced these for sites like gmail, youtube, a bunch of blog sites and Udacity. I know this is a Firefox problem because, the load times didn't persist when I immediately switched to Chrome. This is not consistent though, and Firefox is fast and really light on memory usage which is nice, as long as I can see the page in the first place.

Well, at least two of the sites that you mention are Google property, so it's not certain that Firefox is at fault there, just because it works better in Chrome.

While I can make a choice between Chrome and Firefox, I'm not really going to stop browsing some websites just because I switched browsers.

Are you basing this comment on Firefox since Quantum? Things have changed dramatically in the past few months.

Yes, I have the latest version.

Firefox market share is actually shrinking, though. It’s not even holding ground with the new features.

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