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Comment by malermeister | Hacker News Reader

> Firefox has never even held 10% browser share

Firefox held 32% market share in 2010.

It rose because Internet Explorer sucked and us technical folks made our relatives switch along with ourselves.

Same story with Chrome: pre-Quantum, Firefox was getting pretty slow and Chrome was the new, fast kid on the block, so we changed browsers and dragged the tech-illiterate along.

It's time for this to happen again. The Chromium monopoly is bad for the open web, and now that Google has consolidated power, they're using it to push ads.

It's time we switch back to the only viable, truly open source alternative and drag all our acquaintances along.

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>It's time we switch back to the only viable, truly open source alternative and drag all our acquaintances along.

I can tell you with absolute certainty it won't happen, at least so long as we're talking about Firefox as the alternative in this kind of manner, and here's why:

Both the Firefox and Chrome usurpations happened organically without too much ideological dogma getting tossed around. It just happened: IE6 sucked ass, Firefox was great, usurped. Firefox (read: Mozilla) became putrid after usurping the throne, Chrome was great(ish), usurper usurped. It was all ultimately just happenstance, the commons did commons things.

Contrast now, where Firefox is being thrown around by a select handful as the supposed returning saviour with dogmatic fervor. As a witness of the original usurpations, I will say this isn't what happened ~15 years ago and it is impossible to force something to become a thing.

Chrome will eventually be usurped, but it's probably not going to be Firefox and it's going to happen regardless whether anyone forces the issue or not.

I've said this on here before:

Ad blockers need to make no attempt to function at all with MV3. They should maybe even go out of their way to not work. Any ad blocker installed on chrome should just bring up a message that said (not 100% truthfully) that ad blocking can't be made to work on Chrome, please go to Firefox to continue ad free browsing.

This will shift a lot of users. Especially the more technical ones who then tell their less tech savvy friends and when they go home for Thanksgiving they can just install Firefox on dad's computer so he stops falling for stupid scam ads.

This can work, and I think work pretty well. This does not mean that Firefox is the end all, be all. That hypothetical usurper browser you mention can still swoop in and scoop up the new Firefox users as well as the poor saps who stayed on Chrome.

Ideology, much less deception, is not how you convince the commons on something as mundane as a web browser. Firefox didn't usurp IE6 because it was FOSS, Firefox won because it was straight up better.

Likewise, any contender to Chrome today must demonstrate objective, practical superiority (and be honest about it). The commons don't know nor care what FOSS is, arguing FOSS to the commons is a fool's errand.

I appreciate gorhill, a trusted name, took the initiative to release a MV3 adblocker, because that simple act stopped fools like you who would readily deceive users to force an issue.

Also, pro tip: Deception doesn't last for long, and once it comes to light you are never regaining that lost trust and respect.

Gorhill himself said the MV3 version is significantly worse.

It's not ideology or deception, MV2 is just better for ad blockers.

It's just a matter of correctly conveying that to the masses.

As long as the few people with the skills to make a (very watered down, thanks to Google) adblocker for mv3 don't. Then for the average user the statement "you can't block ads on Chrome" approximates to true.

If the hobbled ad blockers get made anyway then the effect pushing to Firefox will be lesser but still there. Especially since ad networks will not be able to restrain themselves from abusing the initial crack in the door and users find themselves staring at more and more ads.

15 years ago people were using PCs to surf the internet.

Now a huge portion of net traffic is mobile devices. Those are far more locked down. It is not as easy to install and use a new browser on IOS or Android devices.

People around here seem to forget that for a large number of internet users a phone or tablet is their primary interface.

Idk about iOS, but on Android it's just go to Play Store, install browser and tap on "make it default"? What's the difference with PC here?

I'm using Firefox on Android right now, including ublock. I just got it from the Play Store.

It might be trickier on iOS, but that's not a technical limitation and imo an antitrust case waiting to happen. We'll see if the Digital Markets Act forces their hand.

To be fair, the problem was predictable already in 2010, so switching to Chrome was a bad idea in the first place. I understood it for webdevs, Googles tools were a bit better very quickly, even if that was a domain for FF previously.

Chrome still fails to render a lot of scaled images though: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37906602/blurry-downscal...

I doubt most users will go back though.

> Same story with Chrome:

A bit different story with Chrome: you remember the installers that added toolbars to your MSIE? That's where Chrome went.

There’s clearly a bad source of data out there. Here’s Mozilla celebrating 25% in 2009

https://blog.mozilla.org/metrics/2009/11/09/firefox-hits-25-...

By 2010 there was some dispute as to whether or not they ever surpassed 24%

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/03/firef...

I remember reading that article when it was originally published :) It was all downhill from there.

This is very true and I think it is often understated, the influence that we developers have over the spread of a certain trend or technology through the mechanism you described.

Now imagine if you're a company that have 50k or 100k developers on payroll. Even that alone will actually spread your influence if you indoctrinate them right, might be worth hiring them just to double down on that influence, even if you may not necessarily need them.

It is a little surprising it was only 30%. For a while their a significant portion of websites only worked on FF, and most said something like "designed for FF" at the bottom.

Chrome is good enough that tech-illiterates won't see the benefit.

The only reason mozilla switch "worked" is that at the time it was a significantly better browser

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