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

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.

An opinion of mine is that Firefox's market share has to be greatly under-reported at this point. Built-in, on-by-default tracking protection disables some of the impact of exactly the sorts of trackers that report this sort of market share data. I think that's why the numbers vary so much depending on where you look. No other browser seems to have reporting problems like that.

Plus, one of the major sources of such market share data is and has long been Google themselves and they have such a massive conflict of interest there, but so many people interested in market share data rely on Google numbers because they rely on Google as their advertising landlord defining the markets in which they buy ads.

Ignoring mobile, I don't think Firefox's market share has "dropped" on desktops. Anecdotally, everyone I know that used Firefox has stuck with it or deepened there reliance on it and I know enough people that left Spartan Edge for Firefox when Edge went Chromium to wonder if the market share even went up somewhat though depending on your market share data nothing like that is visible either. (And others point out the problem with mobile marketshare and that being the majority browsers for people's time. Firefox on iOS looks like Mobile Safari because it is Mobile Safari and gets counted as such.)

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".

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.

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.

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.

Because firefox let itself be defined by its competition (chrome).

Everything in firefox in the last 10 years feels like they are just copying chrome with a bit of a delay. You don't win the market by doing the same thing as the market leader (Especially when the market leader is as well funded as google). You need to find a niche and execute on that.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

Simple: Chrome captured the market with a good product, at the right time.

I remember when Chrome was new, and it was fast, and Google had other game-changing products (like email with enormous storage). I was just an average consumer back then, and I went for Chrome.

Then, once you capture enough market share (due to poor competition), people start targeting Chrome as the de facto standard. Throw in Android and you have a browser that the world now depends on. Even Microsoft gave in (with a built in ad-blocker, cause they're bitter about it, too).

Should we all be running a C++ based Javascript interpreter? Absolutely not. But try explaining why to the masses...

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

I think in part it's because the web also just got shittier.

One of the common reasons given in this thread is that Chrome is faster, but I've found that aggressive use of NoScript and uBlock will make Firefox much faster than your stock Chrome browser. Excessive JS, excessive CSS, and of course the browser made by a company that pushes both excesses is better at handling them.

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.

If I had to pick one thing, I'd say distracting projects at Mozilla. I say this as an outside observer without much to base it on other than the products and announcements I read about.

Don't get me wrong I love the niche work that gets done on the side. What I don't think is a good idea is trying to do more than one big thing at a time, e.g. Firefox OS phone. As I say this it seems to have made its way as TV firmware, so maybe not a waste.

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.

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.

I was a diehard Firefox user in the aughts, running a bunch of extensions and recommending it to people.

I switched to Chrome the first day it became available, because it was just so much faster.

You don't need a monopoly or advertising to grow a product that sells itself that well. (Those absolutely did come later.)

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.

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.

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

I don't understand how people can use a browser without Container Tabs. This is a killer feature of Firefox and so many people don't even know about it.

Firefox was even over 30% at one point. It's a fine browser, but that 30% was in the desktop era where the only competition was a stagnant IE.

Then mobile happened and Firefox failed to secure a seat at the mobile OS table. Nor does it have any big web property to push the browser. So neither on mobile nor on desktop does Mozilla have any leverage.

It's not an engineering problem, it's a leverage problem. But even in engineering Mozilla can't out-compete Google. There's no way out of this sink hole.

Such is the technical analysis, but I want to compliment it with the normie analysis: nobody gives a shit about browsers. They're free and all do the same thing. Hence people go with the default and stick to it for life.

Google using its huge market share to push a browser to help it know what you are up to. Same as Google analytics, same as Google hosted libraries, Google fonts etc etc. All there to make sure they see you on every site. Why anyone would use chrome is beyond me.

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.

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.

IMO it's in some parts a marketing problem others have already discussed quite well, and in other parts, almost every update (and I slowed them down by moving to the ESR channel, because the breakneck speed of the main releases was getting old) surprises me in some new, almost always user-hostile, way. I don't know who's at the helm of Firefox but good lord do they despise their users (and especially the power users that almost certainly make up the vast majority of their remaining marketshare - I don't know too many "normies" (if you will) who know or care what Firefox has been up to lately - actually, a lot of folks don't even know (or remember) what Firefox is). Rather than doubling down on being the resistance to Google's creepware and internet monoculture, Firefox seems to like to spend its development bandwidth finding new ways to advertise Mozilla's latest acquisition, creating new time-limited themes, redesigning parts of the UI that weren't broken to begin with, or really anything but fronting a real opposition to Google.

If qutebrowser didn't devour all my RAM I'd have stayed moved over to it on one of my past 5 attempts to move from FF to QB. Instead, my options are FF (or maybe I'll move to LibreWolf, hm), or... Ungoogled Chromium I guess.

I think the reason for Firefox lagging behind in market share can be explained with an overarching theme of "bad management", which may have contributed to some of these problems which chipped away at their chance for success.

> At a crucial stage years ago when IE was clearly dying and many people were considering different web browsers, Firefox's UI and overall performance felt extraordinarily slow in comparison to alternatives. Additionally, as a developer, the experience of building Chrome extensions was much more pleasant there than in Firefox which really soured me on them. It's not like Mozilla has bad developers, but they might have been trying to work on too many projects at once with the financial resources they had available. Even if Firefox has subsequently caught up, peoples' perceptions might take a while to change.

> Whether or not you agree with this, there was a growing perception that Mozilla was moving in a "woke" political direction that seemed to be at conflict with the overall drive towards an open web that many people initially supported them for. Even if the intent of articles like "WE NEED MORE THAN DEPLATFORMING" was genuinely good, their messaging was "pants-on-head regarded" given that many influential tech people supported Mozilla specifically to keep the open web alive. If Mozilla did anything to put that perception of their support at risk, they poisoned their brand for a lot of tech people who tell their friends and family what browser they can be using. Many of these people moved on to browsers such as Brave that seem to be much firmer in at least trying to give a very clear and consistent messaging about what they're all about.

It was not as good as chrome for most of that decade in performance or security. Google was able to use it search market share to advertise its browser but because it was better many people moved off firefox. 2nd reason is chrome used to auto update in the background so I used to install it on all the pcs of all the non tech people I used to be tech support for as that helped me a lot of daily headaches in term of computer troubleshooting

For me, it just lacked features, and the organization itself seems to be more and more focused on political advocacy rather than making a solid tool. I don't remember when Firefox last did a UI change that made me go "FUCK YES, that's awesome". Instead they publish paeans about how they hired a sneaker designer to do temporary color the-- sorry, colorways for their browser.

A lot of the other work is shit like how we need more than deplatforming (one of the examples linked by Mozilla was algorithmically preferencing sources Mozilla liked - conveniently Mozilla wouldn't have to dirty their hands by manipulating what we see on the Internet)

If a browser's mobile version is way, way behind, their UX team's ideas of good UX not aligned with mine, and they want to decide what I see on the 'net, why bother? There are other fish in the pond, teams focused on actually making good tools for users. They understand they're blacksmiths and make hammers rather than confetti paper.

I've switched to Arc. Firefox is okay, but it has become the new Opera, lots of features but appeals to a niche. And like Opera, websites tend to break on it. Chrome is the new IE, sluggish, but everyone uses it because of the brand name. Edge is like Netscape, a former champion failing to regain market share with a superior product.

IMO Firefox's flaws is that

1. It doesn't have the same compatibility as the chromium stuff. Especially add ons. It's similar to the Huawei app store.

2. It's too focused on performance but not really UX. Arc is doing great with UX without hurting too much on performance. There's no visible improvements and unlike Arc, it doesn't do a good job of educating users on how to do things better.

It's not default on anything and gmail users naturally default to it. It doesn't market as much as MS and Google either. People using firefox specifically seek it out. I'd wager, at least 80% of users haven't heard of firefox.

I was on a call with people from big G several years ago, explaining issues I had with a product in firefox and out of 3-4 of their people (not engineers or very technical people), not one knew what firefox was, even as I shared my screen. I don't blame them, just pointing out how outside of tech people circles firefox does not really exist even as a term. Back in the day, it made a name for itself as an IE alternative but now it is forgotten thanks to Chrome.

I've worked at several big companies, one of the few policies they all had was "chrome is the only approved browser".

Chrome is, for the majority of use cases, better. I say that as a Firefox user annoyed by fairly frequent glitches and slowdowns.

Normal people care about that. Google is also heavily pushing Chrome on their properties. That's enough to make a lot of people switch.

I gave Firefox a try this year. I was actually excited to try something new after Google Chrome. Then I noticed the tools I use on the daily acting weird, as I work most of the time via browser. Wanted to export an image from Figma, it was a blank png file. Wanted to share an image on Instagram, the image was flipped upside down. And when I wanted to watch Youtube videos autoplay had to be turned off from browser settings. So after a week I went back to Chrome.

Very recently Chrome has really messed up on my Linux Mint machines, something to do with hardware acceleration. They don't seem to be in any hurry to fix so, I'm now using the Brave browser. Very decent experience so far.

At some point; Firefox was marketed as and felt as "the best browser". Now the whole marketing seems to revolve around being the best "ethical/open/private/nice" browser. Real or not; it feels like their number one priority is privacy/ethicality rather than technical excellence.

Being "an ethical alternative to" is appealing to some users; but there is a ceiling to this approach. And there is more and more competition in that space (chromium, brave, or even safari). So the share of people putting "ethicality" as their primary deciding factor is split amongst more option.

I agree, the browser has gotten better over the years. But I was lured away to Chrome because of its integration with Google services. I stopped using most of them and about a year and a half ago switched back over to Firefox. Sadly, there are some sites that seem to render perfectly in Chrome, but not at all in Firefox.

Also, FF was late to add meaningful JS debugging tools.

And I had kind of a bad experience working for Mozilla. Still... I have respect for the Firefox team and don't have a problem using the browser.

I'm a bit of an outlier, but it's a data point.

Alot of it felt like a timing thing --- Firefox was huge, swore by it etc, but then Chrome just kept getting faster. Eventually switching over was a no brainer and at the same time any new users/new installs started to lean towards Chrome also and the momentum happened. Why would any new user/install switch in droves after that? Marketing is a tough sell when users (a huge chunk who barely know what the browser is let alone care about its open source/privacy/whatever) are happy just surfing along inside Facebook and it "works fine".

I think it's because Firefox was behind on supporting the browser features that Chrome did, so some pages just didn't work on Firefox. I see that problem happening much less often now, but if I had to recommend a browser to any user, I'd tell them to get Chrome just to avoid any incompatibility issues.

I like Firefox mainly because I fear that at some point Chrome will not support ublock origin and its ad blocking features. Also, ublock origin can be installed on the mobile version of Firefox, whereas it can't be installed on the mobile version of Chrome.

I switched to firefox since it has ublock origin as a plugin on phones. AFAIK chrome does not hence browsing on my phone is useless with all the ads I get using chrome

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?

I use Firefox on my desktop PC, FF on my linux laptop and FF on my android phone. Works like a charm but pople like to give their data to Google so...

It might be helpful to ask the question in reverse: why was Firefox ever popular?

I would submit that the answer is that FF was an alternative to IE. And IE was trash. It was so bad that people would go out of their way to download FF.

Now, even if FF is marginally better, iOS Safari and Chrome (and I assume Edge although I haven’t tried it) aren’t that bad. So people don’t go out of their way to find another browser.

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.

Because a some years back and for many years it was slower. Chrome came as a default for many devices and many sites css where also optimized for it, and soon other browsers adopted its engine. Firefox had a niche of better browser addons but Mozilla leadership killed it. For mobile it is even more handicapped.

Disclaimer: Longtime FF user who feels like a good friend is gone

For me logging into google properties that automagically logged me in the browser was the red line. The last straw. The unthinkable audacity of taking control of my user agent, done in businessy way with a slight innocent smile.

Compared to this, even a hundred pockets and PR lapses and 2007 ignored bugs mean very little.

I wish safari and firefox all the best in fight for free web.

The innovation difference between the browsers is not significant enough to merit a switch.

Commercially supported browsers have a big advantage. I remember google chrome in 1.0 days. And it was terrible. They became great after a while. In the same time, Firefox extensions started needing rewrite.

Now the innovations are happening on both sides. The difference is little to none.

Back then there were fewer browser in the common scope of awareness.

My 60 year old dad installed brave long before we ever discussed the browser, and he's darn near tech illiterate.

Same with several other browsers and other family members.

I would hazard a guess that it's simply due to greater variety in total, with chrome/chromium never represented due to dev choices.

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.

On desktop, I use Firefox, Chrome, Edge (and sometimes Safari) interchangeably and sometimes at the same time. On mobile, I use Firefox and Chrome interchangeably.

Honestly, I notice no different in performance, look or feel. Sometimes I have to check which one I am actually in.

Personally, I ditched Firefox due to poor performance. Especially on infinite-scroll pages, Firefox would just stutter and become unusable.

Maybe it's improved, but my impression was that of a browser gradually getting worse.

Furthermore, not all websites seems to care much if it breaks in Firefox.

Firefox was a great browser, haven’t tried it in years. Last I tried it was slow memory hog. They also fired a whole bunch of great engineers during Covid.

Many websites I tried looked off it didn’t work in Firefox. Had to switch to chrome.

Simple:

1) Simpletons want an iPhone/MacBook and end up with Safari or Chrome.

2) Those who can't afford one got an Android/Windows and either use the native browser or Chrome.

3) Everybody else uses Firefox, at least on their computer.

There's your 10%.

Purely because it doesn't come pre-installed on most devices.

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

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

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

I really hoped Edge v2 would go with the Gecko engine

chrome is a better UI.

[dead]

Because it used to be a highly extensible browser for power users without spyware and adware.

Then it stopped being extensible at first, then the management went "woke" with all LGBTC++ inclusiveness and other CoC bullshit, fired/made go lots of good core developers and then it all went to shit in accelerated mode.

Firefox security is very very bad. I don't know about it's speed, but AFAIK chrome is one of the fastest and lightweight on laptops.

But mainly it's Firefox security. Though I'm not really sure how many people are actually informed about Firefox security.

They are also totally reliant on Google. Google can decide to tell Mozilla to use only Manifest V3 and other because of their funding. People are worried about that.

It's also known for the privacy concious people that Chrome browser doesn't send telemetry or anything similar when you disable it through settings.

P.S. Not an advertisement for Chrome.