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Comment by Etheryte | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure whether to agree with your last statement. While historically, Firefox lost troves of market share to Chrome, currently they seem to be fairly stable [1]. While tech boards are definitely a small fraction of users, the general notion around Firefox seems to be more positive recently than say, a few years ago, so I wouldn't be surprised to see them take back at least some of the lost share. While Chrome is currently a very dominant player, it's around the same level of usage that Internet Explorer was historically so market shifts of that scale are definitely possible.

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-2010...

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Well your example is kind of perfect.

Around 70% of the Firefox users are blocking trackers. And Statcounter is using trackers for their stats.

So the stats are very misleading.

They might even prove that Firefox is very privacy aware.

It would be good if Cloudflare would publish browser stats.

They collect stats from user agents that are likely to be more accurate and probably cover more of the web than Stat Counter.

Plus Google may want to keep them alive like MSFT with Apple or Intel with AMD to keep the regulators away.

Well, that's true, "may".

Why, though? As far as I can tell the only part of Google that competes with Firefox is Chrome, and Chrome doesn't seem to be profitable, or even intended to be profitable. As far as I can tell Chrome's just a moat to keep people from using the Facebook app instead of a web browser. So... why? Tell me why I'm wrong, teach me something today.

They might face regulation e.g. in the EU (but also the US) based on antitrust or competition laws, as they would effectively be dominating the browser market. That would limit their freedom to operate, so I can believe that it's in their best interest to "allow" competitors like Firefox to capture a small market share. Effectively they could kill them easily as a large percentage of Mozilla's revenue (I think more than 50 %) comes from the Google search deal, and I don't think that deal is really vital to Google. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation

But if Firefox only competes with Chrome, and the regulators are angry because of Chrome, why would Google not simply shut Chrome down? I mean that I don't see any reson why Chrome needs to compete against Firefox.

I can see arguments why Google needs to compete against Facebook: Those two compete for advertising customers. Funding one, two, a few browsers makes sense if the goal is to keep eyeballs on the web rather than letting Facebook tempt them into a walled garden. But why would Google care which of the browsers has most success? And if Google doesn't, why would regulators care?

Chrome is a strategic tool for Google that they use to funnel users to their services, collect data and influence web standards in their favor (among other things).

Google keeps Chrome around because the alternative is just too risky for their core business. If (for example) everyone used IE then Microsoft would be able to shut out Google's ads.

That's what I thought too (ie. that Google is critically dependent on web browsers that don't discriminate against Google somehow, and is paying for two such browsers). But so many people say that Chrome and Firefox are competitors that I'm curious to hear arguments for that.

Owning a browser is a business as every search engine wants to be the default. I think google is forking several billions a year to be the default on Safari and is probably Firefox’ primary source of revenues.

I don’t know if Microsoft has any other motivation for Edge other than being the front end for Bing.

It's not just ads. It's also Microsoft's ecosystem around Windows and Office. From Outlook, Sharepoint, to XBox, to 3rd party automation tools like BluePrism, UIPath, AutomationAnywhere that are tools built around IE and are getting a lot of traction in corporations at the moment. And probably a lot more tools I don't know about.

You are asking why controlling the default search engine and the client infrastructure for tracking users is valuable to Google?

No, not at all.

I am asking why people (appear to) think that Google's own browser is competing against the other browser that Google also funds.

Otherwise it would lose market share and money.

Why?

I may be stupid here. Please excuse if so. But I don't see why Google would lose market share in a market that provides income if Firefox' market share were higher and Chrome's lower.

>Why would Google not simply shut Chrome down?

Because they'd get less tracking info and have a harder time tracking people across the web? That seems the biggest point here.

firefox users are also much more likely to use a search engine other than google too, so more than just the browser is affected. Search is Google's primary money maker so firefox users not using google search would cut into their ad revenue. I would think Google would won't to eliminate firefox, but in doing so they would just prove firefox users' point as far as privacy/openness is concerned.

I had no idea Firefox users are much less likely than others to use Google as search engine. Interesting. How much is much — do you have numbers for it?

EDIT: I'd also like to know whether this is a robust difference, in the sense that someone who has both Firefox and Chrome is more likely to search using Google when running Chrome than when running Firefox. Do you know?

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