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Comment by tapoxi | Hacker News Reader

Faster on one benchmark, but they don't have a consistent history of performance wins. The bigger issue is that nobody is embedding Gecko. Every Electron app is another developer targeting Chrome. Applications that embed a webview? Chrome. Any new web browser that wants to deliver a new experience (like Arc, or even Brave) is built atop Chromium.

The problem is that "not pushing hostile web standards" and "more flexible ad blocking" clearly isn't stopping the insane bleeding of the userbase. These are people actively migrating away from Firefox in droves.

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I would argue that Electron webapps shouldn’t really count towards the browser marketshare. If would be nice to have a Firefox version, but it doesn’t matter precisely because the end user is not choosing the browser - the company pushing the product is. And let’s be honest: nerdy HN users aside, Joe Schmoe has no clue Teams is a web app running in an emasculated browser at all.

every time someone uses electron they buy into the chrome ecosystem -- when they run into problems they write mailing list posts or stack overflow questions that other people can read to help them when they have the same problem, and if they actually want to contribute bugfixes or features upstream they go into chrome not firefox. also if they have a webapp version the webapp version that's running in chrome works exactly the same as the same code running in electron without really having to do any separate testing so which browser are they going to push to be used internally?

> I would argue that Electron webapps shouldn’t really count towards the browser marketshare.

Perhaps not, but if you're writing your desktop app in Electron, you'll be benchmarking your performance optimizations against the Chrome engine. If that same code is used for your web app, you're optimizing your website for Chrome.

Mozilla can pour resources into making Firefox more performance, but the real-world ecosystem will change behavior to improve Chrome's performance on their webapp with little concern as to whether it hurts Firefox's performance.

(I assume people use largely the same code between Electron and their webapps, and that optimizations for Electron translate reasonably well to optimizations for Chrome.)

1. I use firefox in Windows, Linux, and Android. I am NOT suffering.

2. Most people aren't actively choosing their web browser. For example, my wife uses the Samsung web browser on her phone because that is the default.

3. Most people think Google is the internet, can't distinguish between the browser and the google webpage, etc.

4. A dwindling marketshare percentage does not directly imply old userspe are moving from Firefox to another browser, it could imply that new users don't know/use firefox

>4. A dwindling marketshare percentage does not directly imply old userspe are moving from Firefox to another browser, it could imply that new users don't know/use firefox

You're right that it could theoretically mean that, but unfortunately monthly active users have actually fallen by ~20% since 2019 according to Mozilla:

https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

It may also just mean more users are opting out of telemetry. Given Mozilla's privacy focus in their marketing and their UX, it may not be a shock that a large number of users are also opting out of even Mozilla's telemetry.

I do.

Keep moving the goalposts, Firefox is going to go real far this way.

Google is _forcing_ Chrome, onto everyone. Gecko is fully embeddable on Android, through GeckoView. Nobody uses it, because the default WebView is chrome. androidx.browser is Chrome. And if you want to delegate to the browser while still staying in an app context, the feature is called Chrome Custom Tabs. Everything is made to make people forget about Firefox's existence. Google actively harms Firefox performance on their websites, while happily displaying a "it's better on Chrome" everywhere you browser. They force the WHATWG's hand on 90% of features. There's articles every month on new-obscure-feature-that-is-only-implemented-by-chrome-and-requires-an-army-to-implement, pushed and paid for by Google, which dumbass webshits are going to go and implement because obviously their VC backed startup _really_ needs WebUSB and WebMIDI, as well as Google's shitty, unfinished implementation of WebGPU.

Google is a cancer that grows everywhere, killing everything it touches. Firefox smoking a cigarette from time to time is not responsible for that.

Google sucks. Your position seems to be, though, that because Google sucks, we can't talk about the self-inflicted wounding of Firefox and other buffoonery that happens under the Mozilla Corp umbrella—since Google sucks so much more. There's a word for that: whataboutism.

> self-inflicted wounding of Firefox

This makes no sense. The parent argument is that Chrome wins due to aggressive bundling and free ads on Google. Neither of those are self-inflicted wounds. The claim is that Mozilla doesn't actually have self-inflicted wounds.

The claim is that we have to blame Firefox's failure on bundling and google.com banners, and can't discuss how hostile and bizarre they've been. We also can't discuss that 80% of their revenue comes from Google, for nothing, and that the other 20% of their revenue is the entire return on 100% of their investment in the browser.

> The claim is that Mozilla doesn't actually have self-inflicted wounds.

Not in the comment I was responding to; you would have to be arguing that "Firefox smoking a cigarette from time to time" doesn't describe a type of self-inflicted wound—and for you to be right—for that to be true. (Whether you genuinely think that or not is one thing, but you definitely wouldn't be right about it, in any case.)

The entire comment I responded to belongs to the flavor of apologia that takes the form, "it doesn't matter if X is bad, because Y is worse".

>it doesn't matter if X is bad, because Y is worse

In the case of Mozilla and Google, yes. Mozilla's leadership fucking sucks, and I've written at length about how the entire Foundation board is a bunch of useless MBA clowns that are here to suck from the golden teat.

But it doesn't matter, when the alternative is Google having absolute and total control of the web. Mozilla, for what they're still worth today, still have a weight. Write an article titled "Mozilla opposes API proposal X from Google for privacy reasons" and people will at the very least give it a listen. RFCs from them are listened to. The WHATWG has to at least pretend to hear them out.

Go on. Let Mozilla die. See what the web looks like when Google can push every API they want, unopposed. WEI would look like a walk in the park. Apple could say nuh uh we don't want to, and Google would do the exact same thing they did with Firefox: snuff it out. Microsoft wouldn't even need to be pressured to work with them, pissing off Apple sounds like a lovely distraction for them. Little by little, websites would stop working on Safari (not that they work quite well currently, most Safari users are doing it because of a complete lack of technical knowledge and it's the default browser, with three nerds on HN saying it's because it's better for their battery life), APIs unsupported because Apple isn't interested in the open web.

At best, you end up with an Apple Web, and a Google Web, both of them sucking ass in their own right. At worst, Apple becomes irrelevant because of their focus on native apps. Most of which are already Chromium wrappers anyways.

So yes. Pinch your nose and go in. Mozilla is worth the support, no matter what. Their leadership already sucks, what's the worst that could happen ? They keep sucking, but take back marketshare ? Good. For once, give them support instead of being the worst user in the world, the one the just shits on them for not being good enough, while flocking to Google anyways.

You seem to be replying to an argument no one is making (e.g. "Don't use Firefox"). Not sure why.

maybe don't forget that firefox probably would have died a much sooner death if mozilla hadn't been google's pet charity project though. mozilla has yet to demonstrate really being a self sustaining organization

Corporations (and the wealthy in general) don't do charity. The tacit objetive of every corporation is and will always be profits über alles. Every time you see a corporation donating money to some cause there's an ulterior motive that ultimately grows their bottom line. The most common motives are: pay less taxes (or none at all), PR move to improve their public image, and, finally, publicity (sometimes because of controversy).

Now, of course, Google's financial relationship with Mozilla is no exception. The stated reason is that they give money to Mozilla in exchange for having Google as the default search engine, but its actual purpose is to mitigate claims about Google having a monopoly on the browser market and thereby avoid anti-trust laws.

If Firefox were to gain the majority of the marketshare Google would no longer have an incentive to give them money. Mozilla wouldn't be happy about that because they'd lose their biggest source of income. And Google wouldn't be happy either because they make money through web ads and harvesting data to sell it to ad companies, and there's no better way to go about doing that than creating their own web browser and a whole ecosystem surrounding it, and then making sure it's the most popular one.

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