Ask HN: Why does Firefox have such a low market share anyways?

One of the reasons: Massive advertising by Google to convince people to "try chrome". It is only relatively recently that visiting a google property was not met with: "Google X is best used in Chrome -- install Chrome now." (with "install chrome" being a link to the installer.

No such massive advertising campaign ever existed to try to convince folks to "install Firefox".

The market has likely grown by a large amount in that time, and a big chunk of that growth will be on platforms that either ban, or strongly tilt the user's choice of browser.

That and the competitors being rich corporations that are happy to pay to convert low-information users probably accounts for most of it.

I've not looked recently but looking at actual user numbers has long told a different story, which no great decline except in relative terms when compared with rivals.

I am still using Firefox as my main browser, but some sites are broken with Firefox and working fine with Chrome. So unless you are particularly motivated to stay on a given platform, practically it does not really makes sense as a user to stay committed.

Actually, why does Chrome/ium has such a high market share even amongst tech savvy people? I don't see the appeal.

Because it's not as good as it used to be. Due poor management I suppose.

Chrome is far for ideal too, but at least it works for user and developer without much pain.

Network effect I'd say.

If tomorrow opera, brave, edge switched to Firefox, people won't notice but Firefox share would rise dramatically.

Extensions is another issue.

Today, any tom dick and harry who want to create a browser extension only build for chrome "why not". Firefox comes from complaining users who don't want to switch otherwise they don't bother.

Its the same chicken or egg thing. Low market share of Firefox means less users means less customers of extensions means devs will spend less time to build for Firefox and so on.

Firefox extensions often feel like someone actually spent some time and thought into building it, there isn't much crap but chrome store is the dirt bag free for all

Google wanted more control over the Internet, so they created a browser that they controlled and pushed it on people by leveraging their monopoly in a separate area. You know, the kind of thing we used to think was bad in the 1990s.

Good points have already been raised, but don't neglect the rise of smartphones. When you get a Google phone that already has Google's browser installed, and it works relatively well, why would you change? Add Chromebooks into the mix, and those meet a lot of people's needs, why change?

Then, if you get a laptop, you'll want to have all of your passwords and bookmarks synced, so instead of using Edge, you grab Chrome. never even thinking of Firefox.

Finally, in the early 00's, Firefox users had a reputation for letting you know about it. Forums of the day were full of signatures with a Get Firefox link in them. You don't really see that level of fervor anymore, because the difference between Firefox and Chrome today is nowhere near the difference between Firefox and IE back then.

Firefox should act like a startup in the growth phase. Pretend it has X users and is ready to grow, instead of acting like it has X users that it's trying to hold on to.

If Firefox were a growth startup, we'd see all sorts of strategies coming into play: recommendations, ways to invite friends to try it, gamification, doubling down on what differentiates it, focusing on a niche then expanding that niche, trying to stand out and be more memorable, etc.

For example, Brave is doing some of those things

The nice part is that, because it's owned by Mozilla, users don't have to worry about a bait and switch at the end of the growth phase

   > The nice part is that, because it's owned by Mozilla, users don't have to worry about a bait and switch at the end of the growth phase

I was an avid Firefox user, until it started adding services that I never asked for, namely Pocket. Things that should have been an add-on were now a core feature of the product.

Use Firefox for a day if you are a Chrome user, you’ll quickly realize the experience is far subpar.

JS stuff is slower, random websites break, the UI feels a bit sluggish.

I understand there are ideological reasons to support Firefox, and that some of these issues are easily attributed to other parties. But for users, there aren’t too many reasons to switch over from Chrome or even Safari, like it was the situation during the IE6 days.

Chrome is better. That's why. It's faster. JS loads quicker. Websites break, for instance Tidal streaming. There are three million tech support threads on the internet of people who can't use Tidal on Firefox. Firefox on desktop can't even translate pages yet, I have to use a janky third party plugin.

As a fairly normie internet user, unless you have a hate-boner for Google or some arcane developer niche use case, I don't see a reason to use Firefox anymore.

The rise of Chrome in the early 2010s really cut into Firefox's marketshare. This is anecdotal, but I remember Chrome running very fast on my Macs in the early 2010s. It was much faster than Firefox of that era and was quite competitive with Safari. Firefox's performance did improve drastically later in the decade, but from a marketshare standpoint Chrome had already gained significant ground.

In the past five years or so I switched back to Safari on Macs and to Firefox on Windows and Linux. My reasons had to do with three factors: (1) Chrome's memory usage, (2) privacy concerns with using Chrome, and (3) my concerns that Chrome would become the monopoly web browser, similar to the "bad old days" when Internet Explorer 5 and 6 were dominant, which held back the Web until Firefox emerged sometime around 2004. Firefox is a good browser and I hope that it will continue putting up a fight against Chrome to keep the Web from being completely dominated by Google.

Some users don't understand the difference between the web / an ISP / a website / a search engine / a web browser / an OS /... because of massive advertising from Google, that went on all the segments, and also did so much anti competition that it was charged in the EU

For some, Google is the brand for the tech, and everything else like Firefox is a knock off, or a pedantic complication.

It's a scary world we're living in.

And it's the world we IT guys have built, when we taught the elderly and everyone how to be online with hands-on first and no proper explanation. Google has done better with even easier hands-on and absolutely nothing to know before you use your phone or Chromebook.

Android, chromeOS and google in general push chrome. Windows pushes edge (i.e. chromium). Apple pushes safari (i.e. webkit). So what do you expect new users to pick?

It was a combination of factors. First, Google Chrome was originally faster and lighter weight than Firefox. Second, Google used their market advantage to push Chrome via Google search and other properties. Third, Google used multiple third parties to trick end users into installing and setting Chrome as their default via dark patterns when updating or installing Avast, Adobe Flash, Java, etc. (I had to uninstall it from my mom's computer multiple times during this time period.) Fourth, Chrome focused on their developer tools and they got much better than Firefox's. Fifth, Chrome continued to improve and get faster including much better multi-process support and crash resistance while Firefox was held back by their legacy extension framework and XUL-based UI elements.

Examples of paid Chrome dark pattern installs: https://imgur.com/gallery/WWZxj

Chrome used to be a lot faster years back so I switched. Firefox sadly has never given me a reason to switch back. Chrome is still fast and generally easy to use. (Maybe others here can give me good reasons to switch?)

Chrome also has some obscure features I rely on that Firefox does not have (or just doesn't do well):

  * Firefox does not support Touch ID on macOS. I can't actually log into a lot of my sites

  * I can't create a desktop app version of a site (Chrome > Tools > Create Shortcut as window). I use this to put google meet, jira, and some other internal tools as dedicated dock apps.

  * Chrome lets you run a work and personal profile in different windows. It's just a cmd+` away. It also remembers which profile you had viewed last and opens links in the right one. I didn't like multi-account containers in Firefox because I always had to select the right profile when I click a link.

For years, we believed that The Google is the end-all-be-all in terms of "the best" tech to be using. Today, a lot of people still believe this, although to a lesser extent because, for obvious reasons, fewer exhibit blind trust in The Google or get that warm and fuzzy "not evil" feeling. Also, one organization has an astonishingly bigger cash flow than the other, so go figure.

With the shift to smartphones, a diminishing number of people care about their web browser, let alone those who even remember what a web browser is. Chrome just works for most people, and the need to use another browser is completely unclear to the average person. In fact, there may be no good reason to switch browsers for the average person; why would you choose a different browser with better ad-blocking capabilities when you like using The Google and enjoy those quirky State Farm commercials?

To top it all off, Mozilla has made lousy decisions as to how to delegate its cash flow.

The main reason is distribution. The vast majority of internet usage is mobile where Safari, Chrome or Samsung browsers are preinstalled. Users rarely change from the default unless they really need to.

Speaking of which, Edge is competitive enough that most Windows users don’t need to change - unlike internet explorer.

Edge comes preinstalled and is managed by one provider that manages the rest of your software.

If you add Firefox to a corporate standard computer, that's one thing more to manage.

When you really look at it, Firefox has nothing more than edge that really justifies it's existence in a corporate network.

The worst about it, now that edge is chromium based, more and more websites or saas are targeting chrome only and don't care about the "nerds" using Firefox.

IMHO, unless Linux gains more presence in the desktop world, Firefox usage won't increase much.

I previously used Firefox on Android for adblocking and other extensions, but the hoops I had to jump through to get working extensions became increasingly more ridiculous. I switched to Kiwi browser (Chromium based) and and have been very have a much easier time with extensions and it is much faster as well. The only disappointment is no syncing of tabs to a desktop browser.

I use Firefox focus on the iphone and I love it.

I like being able to just close it and the history is wiped.

Firefox will always have a special place in my heart, because of Firebug, which I credit to helping me whilst I was learning webdev in the late aughts.

A colleague of mine at the time quipped that "Firefox is my workhorse; Chrome is my show pony"

Times have certainly changed.

Big picture, I don't know. But I stopped using FF entirely a year or so ago because it reached a point where I could no longer put up with it without irritating me. I find its performance to be awful, it's much less usable, and it's harder to correct the various UI choices that I'm allergic to. These are problems that I didn't have, or that weren't as severe, before the revamp.

It's clear to me that FF is set on their development direction, and it's one I dislike, so it was time to give up.

This was actually a hard decision on my part. I've been using FF since the very beginning, and was a heavy advocate for it. Leaving it feels like leaving an old friend who has changed into someone I'm not compatible with.