Comment by WorldMaker
3 years ago
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.)
> Anecdotally, everyone I know that used Firefox has stuck with it or deepened there reliance on it
I find this interesting, because I literally don't know a single person who uses FF regularly anymore, even amongst my hacker friends. 10 years ago, 100% of them did.
Sample size = 1
In my life I've always come back to Firefox at some point, for various reasons. But I'm currently NOT using it anymore:
- on my personal laptop I'm using Safari because battery life is my #1 priority, and Safari is the best in this particular category. I'm also using Safari on my iPhone because it works well enough, and I find favorites and tabs sync useful
- on my pro laptop I used to use Firefox Developer Edition because I've always preferred Firefox devtools to Chrome-like devtools. But I've recently switched to Arc and I love it. I've tried vertical tabs in the past on Firefox but the experience sucks, it's half baked and ugly. Arc is not perfect but it solves quite a few pain points I had in the past. I still prefer FF devtools, but Arc's experience is better aligned with my intuitive workflow.
So yeah, for me to switch back to Firefox, they need to improve battery life drastically (they're not even bad at it, but Safari is just so much better), and try major innovations regarding user experience.
> I'm also using Safari on my iPhone because it works well enough, and I find favorites and tabs sync useful
I've been very happy with Firefox Sync using the iOS Firefox. (Even if that Firefox is "just" a wrapper around Safari on iOS, it still has all the sync tools I need, which yes are very useful.)
> But I've recently switched to Arc and I love it. I've tried vertical tabs in the past on Firefox but the experience sucks, it's half baked and ugly.
Arc does seem interesting. Its current macOS-only focus makes it a non-starter for me, but I'm glad it works well for your workflows. I have been switching back and forth lately between TST and Sideberry in Firefox trying to find which one I like the most for vertical tabs. It is something that I feel the wish that out-of-the-box Firefox had just a tiny bit more polish about, but I do appreciate that extensions can help a lot there and there are multiple options. (However, especially now that Chromium Edge has vertical tabs out of the box that seems like a sign that there is more mainstream interest today and I'd love to see Firefox do some sort of polished design pass.) That's not yet a showstopper for me, but I feel it.
Battery life has been a lot less of an issue for me than memory usage (Firefox could be better there sometimes in my estimation, they are not bad it, just I've seen others do better), but I can certainly understand that complaint.
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> I literally don't know a single person who uses FF regularly anymore
Perhaps the FF users don't feel the need to tell you ?
I see the browsers they use.
> 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.
Am I mistaken in thinking all that's needed is the User-Agent request header? I don't think FF generally fakes this.
You are underestimating the laziness of the Adtech industry.
"But we've already got Google Analytics, why would we implement server-side code (<- so complicated!) just to log some stupid header?"
Yeah, Google Analytics pioneered "JS and tracking cookies is all anyone needs for analytics" in ancient times and most other analytics companies followed that leader. It's the rare HN post indeed to see someone actually using classic web server logs in 2023 for analytics instead of JS+cookie trackers.
> Anecdotally, everyone I know that used Firefox has stuck with it
You guys know people that use Firefox?