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Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

There's a mystery here. People hate ads. Firefox is the only major browser (save Brave?) that properly blocks ads. Yet people don't use Firefox (indeed its popularity is in free-fall).

Why? Is it because they don't know about it? Or they won't go to the trouble of using any browser that isn't the one provided by default by the OS?

I'm not sure. I just don't get it.

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It's a damn shame. Using FF on android with a fully fledged uBlock Origin is so good. Makes the web usable. I don't know how people stand browsing with chrome.

I recommend FF whenever the topic of ads comes up and hope that word of mouth with eventually do its thing. Most people don't know about it in my experience.

Back when I first moved off of Firefox the answer was performance. A lot of users mass-migrated to Chrome because it supported a very similar set of extensions and was significantly more stable and performant. People like me evangelized switching to Chrome for everyone. Many copies of Chrome were installed by me.

Now the performance still hasn’t caught up to Chrome but it has improved, and uBlock Origin Lite does a decent job at a baseline level of blocking for most people.

The performance and stability with lots of tabs is actually outstanding.

I have used Firefox solely for over a decade. Recently I switched to Chrome to see what I was missing. I was horrified at Chromes memory bloat and the fact it puts tabs to sleep. Trying to click through old tabs was an absolute nightmare as it tried to quickly load back each tabs state and memory, and cpu spikes massively causing whole machine slowdowns, blank white pages, and app freezes.

People say that Firefox doesnt display some pages properly, but I am yet to see one and nobody has ever managed to show me a page that works in Chrome but breaks in Firefox.

Chrome is a glitchy mess compared to Firefox, and Firefox still has Manifest v2 and fully working uBlock. Its a no brainer for me, back to the orange fox I go.

orange.be doesn't work on Firefox. The support will tell you to use Chrome or Edge.

Really? What doesnt work? Im logged into it right now on Firefox and it seems fine to me.

I use Brave. I want Chromium under the hood.

Firefox on mobile is not good, tried it many times. I also don't trust Firefox Mobile security as much as I trust Brave/Chromium on Android.

Firefox on Android is excellent.

Firefox is also the only "major" browser not installed on any device by default. People with windows use edge, people with mac or ios use safari, people with android use chrome. People with linux use firefox but those are extremely few since none of the machines you buy at the store have linux.

It's really that simple. Marketing realism wins over technical excellence every single time.

Do you know why Valve invested so much into Linux? It's because Microsoft threatened to blacklist Steam from Windows unless they gave Microsoft a 30% cut of all sales. Why would Microsoft do that? Because they can, and it makes money on average (failed this time in particular though). Capitalism is a dog-eat-dog world.

> Microsoft threatened to blacklist Steam from Windows

That would never fly with consumers, Microsoft are big but not that big.

What would said consumers do about it? Nothing, that's what. No matter how much you think they should do, they won't. Just like your phone isn't a Linux phone.

I guarantee you if steam was blocked on windows, lots of gamers would do something about it. They are generally technically adept people, and if their multi-hundred pound library of games suddenly got taken away from them on windows, many would buy a steam deck or dual boot linux to get that back.

Yeah they'd probably run the same .exe files from their steam folders. And to buy new games, they'd go where games are sold. Which would be the Microsoft store. Which would be extremely beneficial for Microsoft.

There would be no update mechanism meaning games would get out of date with no way to apply patches, and no steam api for multiplayer games meaning nothing would work online.

You seem to not really know much about the subject so I will stop debating with you here.

That's why they won't do it all at once. First they'll introduce a special kind of more limited application where Microsoft has to approve them before you are allowed to install them. Then they'll have some editions of Windows only allow those limited applications. Finally they'll keep expanding that until only $$$ enterprise customers can run applications that haven't been approved by Microsoft.

These big tech companies are well acquainted with managing consumer backlash for unpopular changes.

> Marketing realism wins over technical excellence every single time

It is so annoying to see this idiotic mantra being repeated every single time a thread like this pops up. It's simply not true. There is no conspiracy, people aren't being manipulated by Big Tech to like Chromium-based browsers more. Those browsers are simply better and that's it. That's really all there is to it.

No, they're simply preinstalled and that's it.

It's so annoying whenever you say chrome wins because it's preinstalled someone makes a stupid comment about how it's not a big tech conspiracy. Did I say it was a big tech conspiracy?

> Microsoft threatened to blacklist Steam from Windows

Never happened.

The pattern I've seen is that people move to a new browser due to speed and bloat. When IE was king, people started moving to Firefox, because it was fast and lean. Over time, it didn't feel so lean anymore, and then Google launched Chrome with TV ads showing how fast it was. Now everyone makes fun of the system resources Chrome requires, but people probably don't see a viable alternative to move to. Firefox is likely seen as old, Safari is only viable on Apple platforms, and everything else is a coat of paint on either Chrome or Firefox. Maybe Ladybird will take users from Chrome when it's ready for general use.

It’s hard for me to imagine that most people care about speed. I think it’s more likely that they just don’t know how bad Chrome is (for the internet) and how evil Google is (it’s still the main search engine for most people). I think Chrome is familiar, and Google is good at locking people in, pretending that Chrome does things better (or even making sure other browsers are handicapped on the Google sites, like YouTube being slower on Firefox).

With Firefox, when it grew, most of what I saw was friends installing it on their friend’s computer. It felt very organic and word of mouth. It may have also been an answer to the pop-up hell of the era, but I’m more hazy on that.

> they just don’t know how bad Chrome is (for the internet)

I agree on this. Every time I’ve brought this up on HN I get a lot of push back from people arguing that Chrome is pushing the web forward and the other browsers are holding it back. I think this is a very short-sighted view.

Firefox needs word of mouth to grow. It needs tech people and firefox users to talk positively about it. But all they do is nitpick and spread baseless FUD its no wonder users drop.

I always tell people firefox is amazing because it really is. It has cool features, it looks cool, its fast, the company behind it is awesome.

Most people hate ads, but they don't hate them as much as they hate having to learn how to do something for themselves. Therefore, the default almost always wins.

It's a cynical view, but I'm confident that it has a great deal of truth.

"That's the way she goes"

> Or they won't go to the trouble

Some people don't even ask why the thing on the ceiling is beeping.

1. Firefox is behind on enough of web features that is hurts. Mozilla is explicitly against implementing some, which is even worse.

2. Nobody tests on Firefox anymore, so random sites can break.

There're some features unique to Firefox which I miss, but I like being on the be bleeding edge of tech.

Firefox has been getting noticeably better recently, so maybe I'll get back to it. If Mozilla changes its stance on local fs access and stuff, it'll be a strong signal.

By "web features" you mean things Google decided they wanted and neglected to put through the actual process. This is why Firefox is important; the alternative is letting Google control the Web like Microsoft did.

> Or they won't go to the trouble of using any browser that isn't the one provided by default by the OS?

Chrome isn't the default on Windows or Mac, but it's far more popular than Edge or Safari.

It's because it's been heavily advertised in Google Search, social media and numerous installers as an optional feature (checked by default).

to me it seems that "normal" (non-tech) people just dont bother even looking for better options. they dont know and dont care.

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