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Comment by yalogin | Hacker News Reader

I really hope Firefox takes a bigger share of the market now that google has its reputation dinged a bit. The internet needs it and the world deserves a browser that can be configured to honor user privacy. Google got the market share purely based on its good reputation and sure also with a good product but mainly because of its reputation it was given a chance. Now it’s time for that share to go down.

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> Google got the market share purely based on its good reputation and sure also with a good product but mainly because of its reputation it was given a chance.

The exact opposite is true.

Google's market share came, first and foremost, from having the best product in each space it dominates: search, browser, email.

The people primarily concerned about "reputation" are a vocal minority. That doesn't mean they're wrong -- but when we're talking about the browser choice of millions of people it's definitely wrong to suppose that reputation is the key factor.

I use Firefox as my primary browser. I've tried to get my wife and children to use it, but they always default to using Chrome. Why? Because it is Google's browser and they use Google for so many other things. They can't see anything that Firefox does better than Chrome, so why should they use it?

Interface is simple but powerful enough and we got used to it and don't bother when you get nothing better by using another browser and for some reason font rendering (especially with Asian characters), Chrome looks tiny bit better, even than Safari. The only concern is privacy but I'm using Chromium.

One can use Google products on Firefox without any issue afaik, so I'm a bit surprised that someone would switch back to Chrome for this.

Oh, I know. Firefox is about all I use. But they didn't switch back to Chrome, they just were never really willing to try Firefox.

Google pushed Chrome a lot on its pages though, it wasn't just something that spread by word of mouth because it was so good.

Intriguing. Which browser and email would that be?

> Google got the market share purely based on its good reputation

But also based on everyone using google.com for searching and google prompts you to download Chrome when you go there.

I don’t see a way back for Firefox now. To gain market share they’d have to be better than chrome and at best they’re as good - and the more sites build specifically for Chrome, the worse the position Firefox is in.

I really want this to happen but I keep hitting sites that just don’t work in Firefox. I’m willing to maintain two browsers and switch for Mailchimp, craveTV and a few other places but most people are not.

As small company, I can target Chrome and Safari and cover the vast majority of my potential users. Adding QA and Dev for Firefox just gets harder and harder.

>but I keep hitting sites that just don’t work in Firefox.

Sites that literally do not load in Firefox? Which ones? I'm genuinely curious here, since I've never hit such a site.

This bug [1] in recent versions of Firefox broke websockets for some sites (I don't know how many, but it included [2]). It was a major bug in their implementation of TLS 1.3 in Firefox, but its symptoms were subtle. You could connect the first time, but reconnecting would then be completely broken until you restarted Firefox (due to some sort of caching). For years, the Firefox flex css layout implementation was unbelievably slow [3], which basically broke usability of some sites. For the web application I work on, we've had to contend with over 10 Firefox-specific bugs [4]. I think everything works fine today though.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1453204

[2] https://cocalc.com

[3] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1209697

[4] https://github.com/sagemathinc/cocalc/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&...

Two that come to mind: Microsoft's "Seller dashboard" for managing Office 365 extensions, and Google's "Cloud Platform" console for managing their services. Also, Apple's "iTunesConnect" is pretty glitchy unless you use Safari (and probably Chrome too). I guess you can see a clear reason why each of those pages behaves like so :).

Edit to add that I prefer Firefox in general for philosophical and practical reasons: I'm used to the dev tools and have a hard time navigating the Chrome/Safari alternatives, not to mention Edge/Explorer.

The only site I had issues with is AWS DMS (Data Migration Service). I can't confirm it's still half-broken with Firefox as I don't use this service anymore.

But, to be fair, I also had the opposite issue with some other AWS services where it was working in Firefox but not on Chrome

I literally said don’t work, so I’m not sure why you’ve changed this to “literally do not load”. I also listed two that don’t work properly and I need to switch to chrome to use.

I use Firefox for almost every site and am I Firefox fan, but you can’t pretend it works flawlessly for ever one.

Seriously, besides the occasional webgl demo I haven't experienced this either.

Which sites? I use Firefox as my primary browser and I've never had this happen.

I literally listed two sites in comment you are replying to.

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