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Comment by sergiotapia | Hacker News Reader

>Firefox peaked at 31.82% in November, 2009 — and then began its long slide in almost direct proportion to the rise of Chrome.

It will be a sad day when Firefox is truly dead. But what did Mozilla expect? They spent so much time and energy on activist bullshit that doesn't really matter for THE BROWSER.

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I think there are plenty of decisions worth consideration, but this is nothing to do with why Firefox is declining. It's because if I buy an iPad it comes with Safari and doesn't really let me use anything else (only a skinned version of Safari). If I buy a PC it's Edge. If it's an Android device it's Chrome. A Mac? Safari. Firefox is the default nowhere, and in this world because Google has almost limitless marketing power and owns one of the world's most popular websites they can push Chrome to mean that on PCs and Macs there is a strong push for people to move from the defaults to Chrome.

Firefox works great for me. It's just incredibly hard to get anyone to use it.

Maybe a better execution of Firefox OS would have helped.

Nowadays KaiOS profits from it.

Maybe it was never really about the browser, but the platform. Safari dominates all Apple devices. Imagine if all computing was truly open and we could run any app anywhere. Would Chrome have had a reason to exist to begin with, or would Firefox have become truly ubiquitous?

> Imagine if all computing was truly open and we could run any app anywhere.

This was accomplished in the 1990s by Bell Labs with Plan9 and later, at the application layer, with Inferno.

It was additionally accomplished in the 1990s at the application layer by Sun Microsystems with Java and its applets.

Frankly, the history of computing is littered with well-engineered solutions to this problem and many of its variants.

The fundamental issue here is that businesses are involved and giving a business a monopoly over something so fundamental is usually a bad idea. The WWW succeeded because it grew somewhat organically.

The financial statements are also currently on the front page. That's a nice hot take, but the number that really stands out is 25% of revenue on management, a full 50% of salaries.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38530382

Although it would be a shame to not have a company behind it, couldn't a derivative of Firefox continue to exist with community support? It's not like Firefox is so lacking today that a lot needs to be done to compete with Chrome. If I didn't update my Firefox installation for a year, I likely wouldn't notice or care. It's a really good browser no matter what other people say, IMO. Mozilla either giving up on Firefox or kicking the bucket might even be a good thing for the Firefox codebase because it could open up opportunities for new companies to own a derivative and work on it.

The browser itself is good these days. All these complaints are themselves activist bullshit that doesn't really matter.

Is it? Firefox has had this sheen of "jank" for the past 6 years.

Have you used it? I've used it as my primary browser for both personal use and web development for years and it has not been janky, at all.

I don’t know where that comes from, Firefox has worked just fine for ages. The only place it sucks is on iOS.

What exactly do you mean?

I use Firefox as a daily driver and it just works.

Well, yes and no. It does matter because if they had spent that money and effort on the browser and made it possible to donate directly to the browser project then there is a fair chance that those numbers would be better.

It was the explosion of mobile browsing that did it.

Activist bullshit, and redirecting the dwindling funds to making sure their CEOs always have a minimum of 3 yachts on standby.

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