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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

As we read this, let us reflect that this reasonable and mature position resulted in a ~2% market share [0]. Still respectable at 1 person in 50, I suppose, but not trending in a way people are going to feel proud about.

Mozilla accepted Google's framing on what a web browser should be, and ended up in a world where it only makes sense to use chromium-based browsers since they better implement that vision. Firefox was always going to be a niche browser once Google got serious, but at least it could have been an interesting niche. Possibly it could be compared to Emacs - some people just love it because it was that customisable but it doesn't get a lot of love in the mainstream.

Now it is just unimpressive. Which is remarkable given the wide range of impressive things it could do up to 2016 that it cannot do today.

[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/worldwid...

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> As we read this, let us reflect that this reasonable and mature position resulted in a ~2% market share [0]

Throwaway since I used to work at Mozilla:

You are 100% wrong in your analysis, metrics have shown over and over again that people didn't use XUL addons (even if you add the people disabling telemetry).

The real culprits to Mozilla's market share downtrend are:

1. Google started advertising Chrome on every single property they own (e.g. Google search) and made deals to pre-install Chrome on new computers. On mobile devices with Android it's even worse: if the default is good enough, why change?

2. During that time Firefox was playing catch-up: for a long time it was multiple times slower and crashier (and still is to a small extent) due to its older architecture. Meanwhile, Google with 2-3x more engineers on Chrome can deliver a better browser and pump out new w3c standards every month.

3. The Mozilla leadership reacted too late, too slow and with the failure of Firefox OS they've become risk averse and they'd rather become irrelevant than dead.

I shall clarify:

There is nothing wrong with having an irrelevant share of the market. Most software I use has a market share in the 0-2% range.

However, Mozilla screwed up quite badly because their response to being pushed out of the mainstream was to gut everything that would have made them an interesting niche player. Their niche could have been "OK, this isn't Chrome but you get an IRC client and a bunch of crazy capabilities that are fun at lan parties. We'll train the next generation of devs by giving them cool capabilities to experiment with!". Instead, the niche is the worse version of Chrome.

> metrics have shown over and over again that people didn't use XUL addons

Now the metrics show people don't use Firefox. Funny thing, life. I think it was a bad time to make a metric-driven decision.

There is a huge difference between a world with a usable 2% browser (20% in Germany) and a 0.02% browser you are describing, that would in all likelihood also be incapable of actually keeping sufficient compatibility with Chrome to still actually, you know, browse the web.

This sounds terrible.

I'd be happy with a Firefox that didn't have stupid UI mistakes like making it impossible to tell which tab is selected. Or which didn't lose all my tabs in a crash. Getting the basics right matters.

> You are 100% wrong in your analysis, metrics have shown over and over again that people didn't use XUL addons (even if you add the people disabling telemetry).

And yet, the anecedata here on HN suggests that you are probably surrounded of those people that did use them. Deciding that suddenly the longstanding demographic of Firefox users - tech people - are no longer relevant to the company strategy was a shitty move, and it drove them away.

I did use them and transition was way smoother than I feared.

I did use a few of them and I am still irritated every time I run Firefox that some simple things don't (and AIUI can't) work any more. At least real ad blocking still works and they're probably not foolish enough to change that. And there are still some significant privacy advantages without the old plugins like having the option for separate search and location bars.

I still miss Tab mix plus.

I am aware there is some mucking around that I could perform to maybe get it working, but it probably involves changing some settings that I'm not sure I should.

I wanted to chime in here that I agree with (1) as well.

In the time before Chrome, Firefox market share grew in part because of how aggressively Google and the rest of the web advertised for them. However, that market share peaked and shrunk after Chrome was released; Google shifted _all_ of their advertising from Firefox for Chrome.

> metrics have shown over and over again that people didn't use XUL addons (even if you add the people disabling telemetry)

How do you know?

I have been the person who made the final decision about default browsers for a company several times. You'd better believe after you killed xul I never chose firefox again.

What is really astonishing is the denialism that Mozilla as an organization, and it's individual employees and contributors, engage in, along with the associated toxic positivity and emotional abuse heaped upon the userbase.

Mozilla has made a number of obvious mis-steps, but not only is there virtually no acknowledgement of the negative impact of these mis-steps, but they are often falsely lauded as successes, when they are obviously massive failures.

The user is then confronted with language typically associated with emotional abusers, such as "We know how much you love Firefox!". Googling the words "you love" against Mozilla's website turns up hundreds of bizarre examples.

Private: it connects to Google servers for "safe browsing" and was pushing hard for dns over http to circumvent the user supplied name server.

Security: as soon as it starts it connects to e100.net.

Configurable: say what ? (configurability died with the XUL).

I only use it as a Chrome replacement, when webpages don't play nice in PaleMoon or Seamonkey.

I need to set up a PiHole to make it behave but a minicomputer with ethernet interfaces and a resonable price is hard to find.

It is just not that serious.

> As we read this, let us reflect that this reasonable and mature position resulted in a ~2% market share

I would disagree.

Many other changes together lead to this outcome.

Many by Mozilla, some not by Mozilla, some you could say Google actively abusing their power to sabotage them.

AFIK the amount of people stopped using Firefox because of XUL isn't to big, you could say a vocal minority.

The problem is compatibility with websites in aspects unrelated to XUL, mostly due to it being way to hard to be bug and feature compatible with chrome and even back then most web applications being written for chrome only.

Two major pain points which make people stop using Firefox would be 1) media support, which partially is the fault of stupid patent issues and partially because programs relaying too much on non standardized aspects 2) CORS, mainly due to Chrome last minute deciding not not implement the standard as standardized and forcing an exception into the standard to still be compliant.

The 2nd point is I think the most common reason I run into cases of web sides not working at all. While I very well do understand that Mozilla devs don't want to make their browser less secure, I don't think they have any other choice and should have done so years ago.

The 1st point is complicated as it involves patents to codecs and the pain of video codec drivers as well as companies like Slack or Teams refusing to even _try_ to work with Firefox when it comes to video calls even through it should work in most cases. This is a major problem and against all best web practices (also a lot of smaller companies which have way less resources have Firefox support for such use cases....).

But IMHO the web needs a cut, it's unacceptable that it's way easier to write a production ready new OS from scratch then a browser which is an essential tool.

> AFIK the amount of people stopped using Firefox because of XUL isn't to big, you could say a vocal minority.

The amount of Firefox's entire userbase isn't "to big" either, that is part of the problem. They can't put out a good web browser to give the silent majority something they want, they can't make in interesting web browser to give the vocal minority something they want.

Why are they building this web browser? Who is supposed to use it? The only argument I've heard is from people who want to support an open rendering engine, which has to be a smaller group than people who want support for weird extensions. And the Chrome-based engines are open already making the whole thing a bit moot.

The Mozilla corporation turns out not to have an interesting plan for Firefox. So cutting extension developers out from trying new things was a massive blunder that has basically doomed them to their current path - they don't know how to make an interetsing web browser and they've locked anyone else out from using their toys. Konqueror of all browsers spawned this massive ecosystem of successful spin-offs [0]. Mozilla failed to do anything useful.

Thank goodness the KDE devs were on their game, I suppose. Turns out in hindsight they were building the OSS flagship and foundation of the modern internet.

[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Timeline...

> AFIK the amount of people stopped using Firefox because of XUL isn't to big, you could say a vocal minority.

The vocal minority is making the mood for the silent majority. Of course are there multiple reasons for the drop of Firefox, but public awareness is probably the strongest for this. If the laymen hear how much Firefox sucks now, instead of the praise of how secure and awesome it is, they will have no reason anymore to cope with the flaws.

That interesting niche is at the Pale Moon browser initiative and their very interesting derivatives. Pale Moon still runs XUL.

Correct, which completely disproves the idea that FF adoption is in any meaningful way driven by (the lack of) XUL support.

If that was true, we'd expect to see forks like Pale Moon be _way_ more popular.

I disagree. The XUL forks serve their purpose well, but their lack of popularity is more due to being built by a very small team of volunteers, who've taken on the thankless and gargantuan task of maintaining the aging codebases of both Firefox and XUL addons, backporting security fixes from upstream, all the while fighting against limitations imposed by Mozilla as mainstream Firefox moved on.

There's no reasonable chance that such a project could ever build a user base to register as even a blip on the market share graphs.

Some people avoid it precisely because of this doomed factor. Personally, I can't rely on nor trust that a project of that scale is able to navigate the security minefield that modern browsers are, and fix all the routinely discovered issues, let alone those that remain hidden and unreported. So choosing to use it is a conscious acknowledgement that you're sacrificing security for those other features, and very few people are willing to make that sacrifice.

The premise in the comment that started this chain is that Firefox's declining market share is caused by a lack of XUL support.

The only way this can be true, but for Pale Moon and similar to have almost no userbase, is if the majority of people are leaving FF for lack of XUL support and going to Chrome/Safari, which makes little sense to me.

People don't know about Palemoon or Seamonkey or Konqueror or other web browsers. They knew about Firefox because it evolved from Netscape -> Mozilla.

Again, this is completely irrelevant to the point that I'm making. It would be possible for people to find out about them if they actually cared about XUL support so much they quit using FF for it.

Well, i use PaleMoon. Firefox is only for sites which don't work with Palemoon.

> Which is remarkable given the wide range of impressive things it could do up to 2016 that it cannot do today.

Like what?

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