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Comment by secondcoming | Hacker News Reader

Out of all internet users out there, how many would choose Firefox just because it's written in rust? An insignificant fraction.

That said. I've been using Firefox as my main browser for years. I only use chrome when a website needs it or works better in it.

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If you stipulate that 'Rust is going to yield a lot of result when it comes to security, memory safety and maintainability' (see parent comment), then a great many Internet users out there would choose Firefox if as a result of being written in Rust it's more secure, memory-safe (less crashing/bugs) and maintainable (more and better features).

Maybe in the Hacker News bubble but that's not "a great many Internet users". People either use what is pre-installed, what they are used to or what their techy friend recommended them.

That "what their techy friend recommended them" does a hell of a lot of work. It pretty much drove Firefox up to 30% market share once, remember.

A counter point to that is that the impact of the tech sector on recommendations like that is ever shrinking - tech is normalized; everyday stuff where people feel comfortable making their own choices (and where the number of people that haven't made those choices pretty solidly yet is ever shrinking). The market is more mature, in essence.

Yap. People ask the internet now maybe more than their techie friends, and the marketers are probably as likely to be the ones amswering.

I think it's why Firefox's market share is declining too. I don't recommend firefox for non-technical users anymore because of its relative complexity and incompatibility with the modern web when compared to Chrome.

What complexity are you referring to? And do you actually encounter issues while browsing using Firefox?

I am curious as I don't relate to this and recommend Firefox to friends and family.

I've seen things that don't work quite right in Firefox. The Zoom webapp doesn't recognize some of my audio devices, but Chrome does. The Citrix gateway also fails to log in on Firefox sometimes.

I don't know whether those are bugs in Firefox or if Chrome is doing something funky that causes it to work but not Firefox.

Zoom is using experimental API in production. Just another on a list of their cowboy tricks.

I haven’t tried using Citrix for years. It used to work fine in Firefox, but given the quality of it I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve broken something.

I switched my wife to FF from chrome and completely uninstalle chrome. She hates the inconvenience of any minor glitches or peculiarities - I hear a lot about it when she doesn't like something. I almost forgot she was switched over b.c. I didn't hear a thing about it from her.

Firefox is already sufficiently secure and low-crash for my tastes. I guess it's possible that more features would benefit me, but I'm not convinced.

Neither Firefox or Chrome right now crash for me, they're actually both very stable and have been for a while, and memory consumption and performance bottlenecks seem to have largely moved from the browser engines themselves to the rich web applications.

I'm not convinced changes to the browsers themselves at this point is anything other than a very marginal improvement.

Changing languages is not a magic bullet. Browsers written in C++ can be just as safe and maintainable -- especially with the resources of large companies behind them, with tons of engineers and testers etc.

If you read GP carefully, they're not making the argument that users will choose Firefox because it's written in Rust, but rather that the improved security and performance brought about by Rust would be what attracts and retains users.

Are users very worried about browser security nowadays? It was a major concern a few years back, but I seldom hear that kind of complaint. I do hear about surveilance and privacy, but not so much about catastrophic failures.

Sometimes you just need the differentiator in your feature set. Then you let your marketing team go to work.

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