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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

The general tech community is a tiny fraction of their user base, though. Put simply, they don’t care.

I subscribe to the idea that the tech community overlaps with the definition of "early adopters", who become zealots driving everyone else's adoption

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle

I agree. But I think the early adoptors mattered back in 2008.I reckon, with the dominance they now have, they are fine with some developers moving to firefox while still having time to react if they pull too many "normal" users with them. Especially since Mozilla isnt exactly peak popularity in terms of vision either.

IE was also absurdly dominant back then. I appreciate the fact that we now live in a world where everything is integrated, so the costs of switching are higher, but it's not impossible

Sure but IE back then was also severely lacking in pretty much every regard and stopped any tangible development. At least every developer I know back then switched away from it primarly because of developer tooling available in other browsers secondarly because of lack of other features.

With todays major browsers landscape the differences are much more subtle. From a developer productivity perspectice I don't think it matters that much anymore, none is really a 10x or even a 3x browser over the others.

So I don't see a huge developer exodus happing for Chrome as long as they don't completely cripple their web dev experience.

Agreed. I've turned my wife, daughter, and Mom, none of whom are tech oriented at all, into Brave converts on mobile.

Unfortunately, that helps exactly zilch. Brave, along with all other Blink/Chromium based browsers and frameworks, further entrenches Chrome as the platform.

Either use Firefox on Android or give up. For desktop, you have at least Firefox, Otter Browser, and Epiphany as options.

I see your point, but I wasn't listing my example as helping or hurting any cause, just how 'techies' can have influence on the broader community. If it helps, you could replace the word Brave with Firefox, for example. If I show three people, and they show three people, etc, we can have big influences on market shares.

Now as a reply to this specific comment, I've tried Firefox multiple times on Android and always hated it. So I obviously can't advocate people use something I hate. But I do wish there were more...options.

I'm a browser junkie. I have about 20 browsers installed in my macOS - some Firefox-based, some Google-based, others weird little ones, and of course Safari.

I really try to support everything that exists, especially non-Chrome.

And yet, I am not excited to download Otter Browser. Its website and SourceForge (i.e. the very fact they're using Sourceforge) do not inspire confidence that they're not modern and up-to-date enough to actually be safe to even use (browser attack surface is massive). Am I wrong in translating this first impression to a judgement on safety?

...and you can keep using IE too, or even the NetSurf/Dillo/etc. if you want to be really against "big browsers".

The problem is they don't need early adopters anymore, almost everyone already adopted their thing.

I subscribe to this idea too. Unfortunately, I think Google is too large, too influential, and too entrenched for the standard tech adoption life cycle to be the dominant factor.

This is actually my worry with the new direction of Firefox on Android which I assume is mostly a push from the Mozilla 'Foundation'/corp.

It feels like they are just force-feeding the 'UX features' of Chrome and ignoring all the feedback from the tech community.

Things like truncating url sub-domains and hiding the url address bar with dynamictoolbar are not necessarily wrong features. However, to me they should always be opt-in, they should never be fixed defaults as what we have now in the latest upgrade of Firefox for Android.

Firefox used to be about freedom and customization. If I want to break it by messing with about:config then I should be able. If I want to break it with a non-compatible add-on then I should be able to. This whole UX mindset of padding the room and "we know better than you what you should want" feels very dismaying especially for a project that exists because of community contributions.

Exactly. Those that care and / or know enough to care are a tiny fraction of the population, in the same vein as those who care enough to use Linux instead of Windows.

Google knows that with their high usage numbers (partly thanks to Android and Firefox's mistakes in the 2000s to mid 2010's, they can do pretty much anything and will still keep their Chrome browser popularity. This is thanks to Android and the general population across the world who don't care enough about their privacy. Plus, if someone uninstalls Chrome where will they go? To Brave (Chromium), Opera(Chromium), Edge(Chromium), Vivaldi(Chromium), or Firefox.

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