[_noqo]

I understand why this spark conversations about the current Firefox market share situation.

But I also believe that Firefox's dominant past plays against when it comes to analyzing the product right now.

Firefox is amazing, it works wonderfully, it continues to improve, respects privacy, adopts Mozilla's ethical values.

Yes, not many people use it, but criticizing this point so aggressively I think it is also influenced by the culture aiming at hypergrouth, dominance, monopoly, "Move fast and break things".

I am very happy with what Firefox does for me right now. Imagine a situation in which Firefox does not exist and today the product comes to light, it would be a great celebration, and the market share would be zero.

Thanks Firefox, I love you very much, although there are few of us who use you and maybe that doesn't change.

[cbsmith]

> Yes, not many people use it

It's a good 300 million people. Might be small in the grand scheme of things, but it's that's bigger than all but a handful of countries.

[est31]

To be precise, it was 289 million on July 1st 2018, and 248 million on July 9th 2019. It was 239 million on August 24. Yes, the numbers are huge. Any product that has this many users would be considered a major success, but the trend is still troubling.

[stebann]

Anybody has some idea why that trend? Firefox is wonderful. I don't understand why more people aren't adopting this amazing browser.

[MegaButts]

Why would the typical user make the effort to download Firefox when they're already happy with Chrome? The typical user isn't on HN with strong opinions on privacy, has little notion of what constitutes a tech monopoly, covets convenience, and has already configured their one browser extension but doesn't remember how (and it turns out that same browser extension isn't in Firefox).

For most people, they can already see the internet in Chrome, or Safari, or maybe even Internet Explorer. Why would they switch when they don't even know what they're switching to or why?

Meanwhile Chrome has the full force of Google behind it, and Chrome is actually one of their important projects that they aren't going to abandon any time soon. It's really Chrome vs. the world, and Chrome is winning.

https://www.w3counter.com/trends

[boomboomsubban]

>Why would the typical user make the effort to download Firefox when they're already happy with Chrome?

Why would more users make the effort in 2018 than in 2019? This doesn't explain the trend though it's probably an accurate assessment.

[wolco]

Part of the answer is in how they collect those numbers.

[Silhouette]

Firefox 57 launched at the end of 2017 and was very much a love-it-or-hate-it change. Some people saw a significant performance improvement and that was important for them. Other people didn't have a problem with its performance anyway but saw the entire ecosystem of extensions that made Firefox different thrown under a bus.

I'm firmly in the latter camp, and if it weren't for the security implications I'd still be running pre-57 Firefox with the full set of extensions I found useful. If I didn't need to use all the major browsers anyway because of my web development work and I wasn't so untrusting of Google in terms of privacy, I might easily have decided at that point that Firefox no longer had any compelling advantage over Chrome and switched. Presumably some people did.

[rapind]

I prefer firefox, but I'm on a mac and it runs pretty hot. I believe they're improving this though. Once performance is solved it'll be my default browser.

[pcwalton]

Some fixes for this have landed in Nightly. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522

[kirb]

I’m pretty sad that it took a long time to solve this. I know there was a lot of work put into bringing Firefox back up to snuff, but this single issue seems to have caused a lot of trouble. This Bugzilla link is light grey for me, so I’ve visited it before, most likely a year or two ago. Since then I’ve been running Firefox with the gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque flag set to false, which doesn’t even cause any issues aside from sharp corners on browser windows, and HTTP auth prompts having a black background instead of a nice macOS blur. That was the best workaround available, one I almost wish they could have made some compromise to enable by default in the meantime. I’m glad it’s been sorted now, but this seemed like it should have been a release blocker to me when I first started switching back to Firefox during the Quantum betas.

[fabrice_d]

Major issue is that the trend is going down: see https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

[smitty1e]

Need to figure out a subscription model to ensure that a non-Google browser continues to flourish.

Also, K. Lars Lohn is the man. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSfe5M_zG2s

[cronix]

I've seen thousands of Chrome ads in my life. On TV, on FB, on other ads on other websites, etc. I really don't think I've ever seen a FF ad. At least, I really can't recall seeing one. From what I've seen, the public has just not really heard of them. It's mostly just us geeks. It's hard to get market share when your audience doesn't even know you exist. And then you have Android, which comes with Chrome and has a much larger worldwide audience than iOS. I don't know how this is different than windows shipping with IE in the 90s, except Alphabet is allowed to continue while MS was not. Android has about 76% of the world market compared to iOS's ~22%. iOS has been in a slow decline most of this year as well, while Andoid is going up by as much. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide

[jonny_eh]

Here it is plastered on the San Francisco Bay Area's commuter train (Caltrain): https://twitter.com/gocaltrain/status/697135271280685056

[userSumo]

Interesting, i have never seen a browser ad in my life... is that in US or something?

[cronix]

Just searched real quick on YouTube. It wasn't only in the US. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ak8UKuQvM98

Here's one from 10 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAoKG5RW8Lk

[lucb1e]

Netherlands too, and I saw Google ads in Germany as well but not sure for which product.

[tauchunfall]

There were Google Chrome ads in Germany, e.g. here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/tinto/5336283196/

[lucb1e]

> Firefox's dominant past plays against

I'm sorry, what? It was either the underdog of MSIE or of Chrome, it never was dominant the way the actual dominant browser at the time was dominant. The peak was 30%, and when Chrome took over from MSIE, it had 21% with MSIE and Chrome at 30% each.

[electronstudio]

You have a short memory. Netscape Navigator 3 had a >75% market share. Mozilla, which became Firefox, was a total rewrite, but that rewrite was done by the same people and was released as Netscape 6 - 9.

[lucb1e]

A majority of early adopters (of computers and internet connections in general) running some early version of this doesn't seem very relevant. I really don't think this ancient history (browser history does not go back much further than this) is working against Firefox today.

[jrochkind1]

What's it got now?

[fabrice_d]

About 9.5% on desktop, and 4.5% globally.