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Comment by cwales95 | Hacker News Reader

Something has to change. Firefox is a GREAT browser. I think a lot of these things boil down to poor marketing. Things like these have to appear 'cool' and appeal to people. There has to be a reason for people to go out and actively want to download Firefox. Something akin to Apple's privacy adverts is how I'd go about it.

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They've been trying that and it just pushes people away. I stopped using Firefox when Mozilla tried to score social brownie points. And the numbers seem to collaborate with shrinking and shrinking marketshare, especially after these campaigns. Since on the flip side of what you said, why would people swap from Firefox to chrome, Chrome doesn't bring anything shiny.

I agree with some of what you said about social brownie points. Advertising can be really off putting (I'm very anti-advertisement but I'm not really their target audience since I mostly use Firefox these days). However, they have to do something to get the word out. There needs to be a reason for people to care to install Firefox.

For one, Ubuntu should stop breaking Firefox with Snap, even though I think that is a relatively small user base. (There are some suggested fixes but I think the simplest is to bypass Ubuntu's packages and just download FF directly from Mozilla).

I agree. I'm not a Firefox fanboy. It has literally run better for me than Chrome for a few years now.

I'm always surprised to read claims that Firefox is the same or better than Chrome.

I switched to Firefox recently and many sites don't quite work: for example the pull request popup menu on GitHub appears off screen so can't be clicked on; the "new post" panel in Discourse is obstructed by the keyboard; FastMail alert box buttons don't work, and many other such annoyances.

It can be used as a main browser but it does have problems. I wouldn't bother with it if it wasn't for the manifest v3 situation

I use GitHub frequently and have never came across that issue; can't speak for the other sites though. If you're sure it's not the website's fault I'd encourage you to submit feedback: https://webcompat.com/issues/new

There's an open issue about it, so hopefully github should fix it eventually. It's on firefox mobile

Firefox mobile is its own beast. I experience a whole host of issues on it, but have never had issues with Firefox on desktop. Only reason I use FF for Android is for uBlock, but it's so unreliable I'm dying for a better option...

These days desktop and mobile is kinda joined at the hip because users expect things like tabs and history to sync. So if Firefox has many problems on mobile to the point where users are actively deterred from using it, that hurts Firefox on the desktop as well.

My experience is that Chrome winds up being consistently slower than Firefox, and I’ve gotten multiple friends (who aren’t techies) to switch because they’ve tried it out and agreed that it was more performant.

I am regular and long time user of Fastmail in Firefox and I'm surprised at your report of issues in Firefox. Can you describe the steps to reproduce the issues you found?

Using the Android mobile app, create a Fastmail link and add it to your home screen. Open the app, try to block a sender - it asks you to confirm and it's not possible to press either buttons.

The same workflow works fine in Chrome.

Yep I can confirm that certainty doesn't seem to work in a reliable way in Firefox on Android. I could only get it to work by tapping the button several times. Either it's not responding quickly enough, or the input field only works if you tap in a specific spot. The general performance of Fastmail in Firefox on Android is quite poor as well -- despite it being fairly snappy in desktop Firefox on Linux/Windows. I use the native Fastmail app on Android which performs much better -- I presume it uses a version of Chrome under the hood.

> obstructed by the keyboard

You seem to be talking about the mobile version?

Yes I should have mentioned it's the mobile version

When Google Chrome came out, what made it stand out for me was their impressive developer console.

This lead developers to switch from IE/Firefox where you had to install a plugin for developers, into using Google Chrome that had a native and more advanced tool for debugging.

*For me this is the key*.

If you provide a browser that greatly improve the developer's experience, they (the developers) will move to use it, making it the best compatible browser to use, which will then make the rest of the crowd to use it because the overall experience is better there.

I just hope the team at Firefox will realize this before Google ...

I absolutely agree with you. Firefox must stay.

But.

I've been using both Firefox and Brave as my browsers, and Firefox is eating my memory way more than Brave (I have around 60+ tabs open at Brave, and just a few at Firefox). (I'm on Linux Fedora 36 with the latest versions available in the repository).

This is why I'm not using it much, but it saddens me.

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