[FirmwareBurner]

Joke all you want but Firefox's market share agrees with me as most users value convenience above all else.

At least Google knows not to be intrusive and not fuck with the UI so often. Chrome looks almost exactly like it did over 10 years ago. Why can't Firefox imitate that quality of life feature? It's not that hard to not change shit at the surface.

They've been bleeding market share for years including faithful long time users who enjoyed the 'old, boring' Firefox but don't agree with the current direction of imitating Chrome at every step.

Old Firefox = Windows 7

New Firefox = Windows 11

[viraptor]

Google mainly knows how to display ads. The raise of Chrome wasn't so much about features at the time as about people being bombarded with "install chrome" ads. On Google results, in Gmail, in Adsense, everywhere. There was an absurd amount of money sacrificed (not really spent since the ads were internal) to gain the users. I'm not sure any other aspect can be reliably compared in that scenario.

[paldepind2]

Do you have any data to back that narrative? I know Mozilla is pushing that explanation, but from how I remember it Chrome gained market share because it was technologically superior to Firefox when it was released. It had a much more modern UI, much faster JS implementation, sandboxed tabs, etc. All features that it took Firefox years to copy. Some would say that Firefox has never caught up.

I find the ads narrative pretty hard to believe. Back in the days, Firefox could compete with IE, which was the default in Windows, by being technically superior. It seems very likely that Firefox's users, who had gone out of their way to install Firefox, would also be very willing to go out of their way to install a new better browser even in the absence of ads.

[viraptor]

Ehh... UI was comparable. Chrome was a bit faster.

For the ads, see some snapshots of what that campaign looked like at the time https://searchengineland.com/googles-jaw-dropping-sponsored-... It was a massive push of basically spammy links all over the internet.

To be clear, I'm sure some people switched for the features. But given the scale of the sponsored push to every internet user, we can't really say features were the reason for most people. There's no way to run the experiment the other way.

[paldepind2]

Thanks for the link. That certainly shows that Google was sponsoring an aggressive and fairly ugly ad campaign.

> UI was comparable.

They were not at all comparable. Here is an image of what Firefox looked like when Chrome was released [1]. Here is an image of what Chrome looked like at release [2]. Barring some design tweaks Chrome looks roughly like any modern browser whereas Firefox looks ancient by modern standards. It has the app menu, no integration with window decoration, a separate search box, tabs below the address bar, etc. Lots of things that Firefox would copy over the coming years. There's a reason Chrome was named after its Chrome–the UI was a huge selling point.

1: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/25581533/141687681... 2: https://blogoscoped.com/files/google-chrome-browsing/search-...

[viraptor]

The bookmarks could be turned off in FF and many other things changed with extensions. Overall... I can see how someone could say they're different, but it's a "meh" for me. Yeah, they're different but not in a meaningful way for me.

[dathinab]

it also really helped that in difference to today wen Chrome was new it's performance gain over FF was often quite significant (same for security)

while that isn't really true anymore in any relevant way it's still stuck that way in many peoples heads

And sure part of the perf issues where quite often not well behaving FF extensions, toolbars etc. also often installed by unrelated programs preexisting installed on the same computer and that FF needed some major refactoring/rewriting just because it was quite a bit older (which are done by now but had inevitable but sad effects like XUL extensions being gone).

[prmoustache]

> Chrome looks almost exactly like it did over 10 years ago.

I suggest you look for screenshot of Google Chrome in 2008.

Market share is what it is because google is pre installed in the majority of the mobile market, that firefox had bad performance rep in some areas, and that google is a synonym of internet in the mouth of the majority of people nowadays the same way explorer was a few decades ago.

Most people don't care about those UI changes.

[Izkata]

2008: https://techcrunch.com/2008/09/01/first-public-screen-captur...

2016: https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/google-chrome

2024: https://flathub.org/apps/com.google.Chrome

They're basically the same, nothing like what Firefox has been doing. Buttons went flat, bookmarks moved to the right, and two dropdowns got combined into one menu. Tabs haven't changed at all.

[prmoustache]

Tabs do not look as on your supposedly "2024" screenshot nowadays.

And most people don't care how their tabs look and are used to dropdowns menus being reorganized and losing or getting added entries. People are used to software slowly but gradually changing. It is not like mozilla went from original phoenix browser[1] to the current one in one release. These kind of changes only annoy a small fraction of people with some special disorders.

[1] whose simplicity and colored buttons I loved personnally

[1317]

your 2024 screenshot is outdated; here's a more recent one: https://www.google.com/chrome/static/images/heroes/browser_n...

[dathinab]

> market share agrees

that's not how it works the marked share is there for reasons which have little to do with that, at least when it comes to "non technical people" (i.e. not HN crowd)

1. what matters the most is what is pre-installed (like iOs Safari, Android Chrome, etc.)

2. then what matters a lot is mind share, Chrome still has in many peoples minds the image of "the good alternative", "fast", "reliable", "modern UX". While many people still think about FF as slow and clunky even through a lot of this opinions came from well over 10 years ago

3. What also a huge amount is if you can use it for all task you do. Due to apps like Slack, MS outright refusing to fully support Firefox or for example Notion having had egregious FF only bugs a lot of "normal" users have over time moved away and just never come back. The most sad thing is if you look at the technical details it's seldomly FF fault. E.g. basically every time I looked into it when some media player (and I think it was also the case for Notion as far as I remember) didn't work it was because the sites not being standard compliant with CORS. Another (older) example is FF missing media codecs due to licensing issues which Apple/MS fixed by having an OS and Google by having a ton of money. Or polyfills for bleeding edge sometimes not yet even standardized Chrome features being slow. Stuff like that is in my experience kinda true for close to any (systematic) issue of a sites not working correctly on FF.

Lastly when it comes to non technical people the overlap of people which would stop using FF because of stuff like that and the ones which anyway wouldn't use FF because they use some fancy chromium derivative like brave is quite high.

The reason they are bleeding market share is not because they updated to a new UI.

It's because it's today hardly possible to run a browser which isn't either chromium or webkit based.

[hobs]

I would agree that most people would be glad to give up their privacy for minor convenience. if I was a developer of Firefox I might care that its marketshare is falling, but truthfully nobody needs to be married to a web browser, or take its rise and fall too seriously.

Still not going to use a Google browser though, that's just a self own.

[FirmwareBurner]

The rise and fall reflects user popularity. And Firefox is less popular than ever, with both the new generation who grew up only knowing Safari and Chrome, and also with the old generation who they pissed off by trying to copy the shitty parts of Chrome instead of staying true to what made them popular in the first place such as speed, light weight, and getting out of your way by not charging the UI every 6 weeks.

[yoavm]

Sure, maybe everyone left Firefox because of the "what's new" tab and the UI changes. But maybe it's because Safari is default on some devices, and Chrome has the world biggest marketing company behind it.

[FirmwareBurner]

Of course Google won the browser war mainly because they're World Heavyweight Advertising Moneybags World Champion, but Firefox also did itself no favors by annoying it's old and faithful userbase with often, unnecessary and unpopular UI changes a while ago.

[medstrom]

But your premise that one is more intrusive, isn't even true. Like others said by now, Chrome does the same thing if you don't open it often.