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Comment by scopeh | Hacker News Reader

Its 2023, how have we come so far with this nonsense. I would have thought Firefox would be king of the browsers by now. But nope, people love their data being sucked up and used by the big G.

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Mozilla focused on the wrong things for a few years

It doesn't really matter what Mozilla did. They never had the budget to compete with Google on browser advertising anyway.

If you look at the market share progression of the old opera and mozilla vs. internet explorer, and you compare it to the stellar rise of Chrome when it came out, it's really obvious that Chrome's success is due mostly to advertising.

Blows my mind that people think that there’s some magical way that Firefox could have competed. Chrome had ads on google.com, like the home page. No one except Google gets those ads. 90-second prime time tv spots. And they also scattered nudges throughout their entire website. Google ran a relentless ad campaign to get people to switch, and no browser on Earth was able to compete with that.

I agree Firefox never had a chance, but there is losing a battle and there is diving head first onto the floor. Mozilla played the few cards it had not that well.

Mozilla dug their own grave, to be fair.

Firefox is just less usable. It's slower and a lot of config options are missing. Stuff that is common in enterprises and has buttons in Chrome (e.g. "add the intranet search to your browser!") is hard in Firefox (you have to write and serve a specific XML file somewhere).

Also it has a big incredible redesign every 2 weeks, as far as I can tell from HN, while Chrome's UI is mostly boring and stable.

Yeah. For me, the main feature that has me use chrome instead is that it can remember my credit card details. I don't understand how it can be that firefox doesn't do this, it's so annoying.

Firefox has a "saved credit cards" feature. I'm not using it, so maybe I'm unaware of its limitations?

Firefox actually also does it, maybe limited based on location.

For instance here they announce it for UK, France, Germany (in 2022) and say it was available in the US/Canada since 2018: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-news/fi...

That's good news I guess. Any idea about why it's geographically limited? I'm not in one of those countries, unfortunately.

Firefox does do this.

Multiple solutions without any xml: https://superuser.com/questions/7327/how-to-add-a-custom-sea...

These are not solutions, these are workarounds. Adding a bookmark with a keyword, because the internal UI isn't good enough? Come on.

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