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Comment by ghusto | Hacker News Reader

> You can't honestly say that about Firefox nowadays

That's the big problem. Looking at this only from an average user perspective, it's absolutely right, and "oh yeah well that doesn't work as well as in Chrome because Google pushed an overly complicated unnecessary feature into the standards that requires a company the size of Google to actually maintain and develop it", will only get you blank stares.

I hope I'm wrong, but can't help feeling this war is lost. I can't see how you compete when the rules are being written out by your adversary.

For what it's worth though, Firefox for _me_ is better than the other options in every way; container tabs, easy privacy options, clean interface, etc. I love it.

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Google is a convenient scapegoat, but the current state of Firefox is 100% Mozilla's fault, and until you realise that you will be far away from a solution.

Man, as soon as you visit google without chrome you get asked if you want to install Chrome.

It's not even close to a fair game.

Not saying Mozilla doesn't have some faults, but Google is just playing a different game.

As soon as I visit every website I am asked to install an app. That doesn't mean I install any. People will only switch browsers if they are discontent with what they have.

I think people's general dissatisfaction with bloated sites and slow internet will make them try Chrome when Google, a company they mostly trust, tells them its better. Then Chrome will prompt them to become the default and for a lot people that will be it.

Every website =/= Google.

At this point in time, people wholeheartedly trust Google. Chrome works well enough for the majority of people.

Would Firefox improvements make such a difference in comparison to Chrome? With the current processing power we have on our hands and laptops, I doubt people would care.

As a marketer, the only way to go about this would be "the path of privacy", and maybe try to get traction in the EU market where privacy is being valued to the point of having proper legislation in place.

If Firefox became the standard for privacy, I can see large public organizations start to make the shift, even if it was for compliance reasons. Then maybe people who use those browsers at work will start to use them at home.

Of course I'm pulling this out of my ass, but it's A path I can see as an hypothesis.

People who have Firefox installed are not being hypnotized into switching to Chrome. Switching to Chrome involves figuring out an entirely new application for dubious marginal benefit. Or at least that used to be true, until Firefox completely remade their only product to be an imitation of their competitor; now the difference is unnoticeable (other than Firefox is slightly worse.) This is not something Chrome did, this is something Firefox did.

Firefox was a superior browser in almost every way to Chrome, the only selling point to Chrome was that you could crash a tab without crashing the entire browser. Firefox conquered massive engineering challenges and aggressively fought its own users for its current position as an also-ran/historical footnote.

edit: and an indication that Firefox doesn't care is that so many Firefox remoaners feel like they can't switch because they rely on Tree-Style Tabs, and Firefox not only doesn't hire the developer and pull the project in-house, they actively sabotage the project through UI intrusions and inflexibility about those intrusions that require the kind of technical confidence to fix that average people don't have (or want.) And they periodically break even that.

I think Tree-Style Tabs will be as seamless as they were on Firefox 5 years ago on Chrome before they will be so on Firefox again.

>People who have Firefox installed are not being hypnotized into switching to Chrome.

They don't have to, because there's a whole market beyond Firefox users, that's where I'm getting.

Edge is the default browser for Windows, but when you visit google, you're asked if you want to download Google browser. Google is a known brand, at this point, after years of people talking about chrome, unless you don't know much about the internet you'll default to chrome.

Other instance: Android, default browser is Chrome for the majority of phones.

Google has years of hammering Chrome into people. Even if Firefox because up to your standards, the struggle would be the same.

> People who have Firefox installed are not being hypnotized into switching to Chrome.

I have personally set up Internet users who I started out on Firefox, and that I later found out were using Chrome as their primary browser because in their words, "[X Webapp] told them to install it", and then it got set as their default.

> Firefox was a superior browser in almost every way to Chrome, the only selling point to Chrome was that you could crash a tab without crashing the entire browser.

In what ways was Firefox clearly so much better?

I know it once had more UI customization (XUL era) but much of that was dropped because of maintenance costs and security concerns (line of death and add-ons conflicting). Today I still use TST and the biggest lingering difference I see is it now has a name block which isn't easily hidden. (Though with userChroms.css it may be possible to do so.)

> Firefox conquered massive engineering challenges and aggressively fought its own users for its current position as an also-ran/historical footnote.

I regret that I have but one upvote to give. I still use Firefox, but from switching from a secure password-sync system to driving out Brendan Eich to the Mr. Robot fiasco to deprecating the powerful old extensions to almost completely eliminating extensions on Android to constantly changing and damaging the UI (at least on Debian the packagers eliminate a lot of the nonsense), it increasingly feels like either they don't want me to use it — or they simply lack adult supervision.

> doesn't work as well as in Chrome

Did you mean Firefox there?

No: it would be "Chrome", as the feature doesn't work in Firefox as well "as in Chrome" due to requiring the aforementioned army to develop and maintain.

I guess I missed the second "as".

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