Hacker News Reader

Comment by tleb_ | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com