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Comment by cowtools | Hacker News Reader

Firefox market share is dying because of this mentality that is killing it. Self-fuffiling prophecy.

The standardization is in the standard, not the implementation. You do not need everyone to use the same implementation in order to have standardization: that just allows the implementer to bend the standard to his will.

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No, Firefox didn’t die because a few of us devs stopped using it and standardized around chromium. They died because chrome has outperformed them on speed and efficiency for a decade+ (I still can’t run FF on my Mac without my fans whirring to life). Not to mention things completely outside their control like chromes marketing budget.

I’m not trying to place tons of judgement on Mozilla though - just saying we all need to face the reality rather than living in denialism.

Yes.

While I was the first to jump ship, when Chrome got released, I really tried to like Firefox in the last ten years, but in the end Mozilla failed on so many fronts, that they lost me to Brave.

> I still can’t run FF on my Mac without my fans whirring to life

I haven't seen this behavior on a Mac since Firefox Quantum was released, FWIW. It's what got me to switch back to Firefox in the first place. (Sidebery and a few other nice extensions have helped keep me there.)

I didn’t use Firefox pre-quantum so I’ve only seen this behavior post quantum. I last gave Firefox a try about a year ago and while the fans weren’t as bad the battery life/power consumption just wasn’t comparable to safari or chrome based browsers

It isn't comparable to Safari for sure, but with similar tabs open, for me, Firefox and Chrome have similar (if not better for Firefox) heat/fan behavior. Leaving a Gmail tab open is cursed in both, though.

I would use Safari on a Mac if there was a decent way to sync browser history, etc. to Firefox on Windows, but--welp.

Firefox market share is dying because for the longest time it was slower than Chromium. These days in my personal experience, it's mostly on-par but there's not a whole lot of compelling reasons to use it.

I get the privacy angle, but I'm searching Google anyway. They have all my email since 2004, my photos since 2007. My phone is Android. Switching to Firefox alone makes a minimal impact on my overall privacy footprint and causes some websites to load slower.

In ye olden days you could make the argument that it was more customizable than Chrome, but since the shift to WebExtensions that differentiator is gone. What's wild is that they didn't think of the top 10 power user features (like Tree Style Tabs) and attempt native support for them, they just kneecapped extensions without offering an alternative.

How many users does a browser need to break even? 4% of a billion is still 40 million

That depends on how the browser makes money.

Also Firefox's market share is dying because of its built-in privacy tools blocking trackers by increasing opt-in and the conflict of interest that the largest analytics firm (Google) is also the largest advertising networks/firm (Google) and relies on some of the most ubiquitous trackers (Google) and owns the biggest competing browser (Chrome).

I believe that Firefox's market share is greatly under-reported and Firefox's dying at least somewhat over-exaggerated. But then all the headlines get to people and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in that way too that all the people that feel some pressure to abandon a "dying" ship only because everyone keeps telling them to.

> its built-in privacy tools blocking trackers ... Firefox's market share is greatly under-reported

Firefox doesn't block Google Analytics or other standard analytics providers by default: https://www.jefftk.com/p/firefox-does-not-block-analytics-by...

>> its built-in privacy tools blocking trackers *by increasing opt-in*

Enhanced Tracking Protection is one-click to turn on, and suggested as an option on first startup on a fresh install (modulo A/B tests and whatnot) and is a setting that syncs across your devices if you do turn it on just once. Anecdotally, most people I know still using Firefox as daily driver also have Enhanced Tracking Protection on. Enhanced Tracking Protection does block Google Analytics and other standard analytics providers. (So much so that some ad companies have started to treat Firefox as an "ad blocker" by default and have increasingly harsh warnings that sites are not supported in Firefox due to "ad blocker". ETP blocks zero ads, just trackers.)

No. Firefox has been dying for, what, a decade now (losing market share since 2013)? The only people using Firefox are the people who care about Firefox as a product and a competitor, which is (in the grand scheme of things), almost nobody. Everybody else left, often with decent enough reason. Google recommended Chrome, Chrome was faster for a long time, Firefox stagnated and put ads and sponsorships everywhere, and wasn't better in almost any respect for a normal user than Chrome.

Almost everything everyone accuses Mozilla of and uses as their reasons for leaving is far worse in a Chrome ecosystem. It boggles my mind how people can complain about X and then jump to chrome where X is just as bad or worse.

Ah... no? Firefox, before Quantum, was slower than Chrome, had worse battery life than Chrome, and (on a Mac) was way louder than Chrome. And by the time they mostly fixed these problems, there was basically no reason to use Firefox other than it wasn't Chrome - which, other than to a developer, is not a selling point to the masses.

Many mobile users have a phone with an internet icon that opens in chrome. As mobile rises firefox share declines.

... and crashed all the time, which is how they lost me. I care, I tried.

They shot themselves in the foot every 6 months for 10 years.

FF is inferior product and seems to waste the last money on things completely unrelated projects. Sooner or later it's a dead product or they start using chromium/webkit and go for the Brave/Vivaldi model.

Nobody cares about privacy. People use Firefox as a porn browser.

I use firefox mainly because it feels less creepy than chrome and works great with uBlock Origin.

I'm sure that die hard fans of any failing company said the same thing. Further proof that Firefox fans mentality is more akin to a cult than actual technical merits.

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