Ask HN: Why is Firefox on Mobile's marketshare insignificant? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why is Firefox on Mobile's marketshare insignificant?

8 pointssharmi6 comments

Actually it makes a lot more sense to have Firefox on Mobile than the desktop as it is the only browser (as far as I know) that allows you to block ads via extensions like Ublock Origin.

I am painfully aware, thanks to my immediate family, that the common man is not aware of the implications of losing privacy and it's value.

But surely the impact of ads on browsing experience is much more pronounced and annoying on mobile owing to the smaller screen, slower bandwidth and limited processing power (?). Firefox offers a vastly superior browsing experience in that regard compared to leading browsers like Chrome which even prohibit extensions. I often endup having 200 pr more open tabs on Firefox mobile and it has never been a problem (Open tabs double as ToBeRead list) . May be it has crashed twice in the past 2 years. I have never lost a tab during the crash, a power failure or a restart. Always quite fast.

That is a very clear improvement, and in my opinion 10x better, on status quo.

So why is not Firefox much more popular on mobile?

Declining popularity on desktop as people moved to moblie.

FireFox has taken a "strong stance" on security at the expense of usability. I'm sure you could track the number of sites they refuse to support agiant its decline and find corrolation. Not letting you bypass ssl on localhost or the lan or read from CDs or the local file system or low security legacy systems on the lan make it far less useful as a generic gui than it should be. I use it and keep chromium handy for when it fails me. I dont blame people for switching permanently when it fails them and something else "just works". Plus of course Apple forbid a browser choice and Goolge push their spyware hard on Android. Mozilla of late assume the only use of a browser is browsing the Internet. They are very wrong. Dev tools used to be great on ff so many sites worked better on ff than other browsers. They shot themselves in the foot when they messed up firebug and split the community. That was the point I noticed devs stop using it as a first choice. Then they broke all existing plugins with no replacement when they moved off xul. That cant have helped. If you check bug reports youll find a lot of "wont fix" indicative of the overall change to not supporting users needs. Its open source in name only. even chrome has far more forks. Trying to do anything with firefox code other than firefox on the internet is a non-starter. Dont get me started on use of their js engine vs v8

I would assume for the same reason that Mozilla sued Microsoft in the 90s.

If your browser not installed be default, people will have to a) Know about your app b) Believe that it is better c) Understand how to install your app d) Be willing to install it.

Because Android and iOS have their browsers installed be default, they have a distinct advantage.

Since we are talking about Firefox again:

One point that bothers me with desktop use stats is that so many bots and crawlers are based on Chrome. This must have a negative impact on the measured percentage of Desktop firefox users. (You can remove some bots from your stats when the user agent is very clear like "googlebot/Yandex/Facebook", but you can't get them all)

As someone who moved to Firefox on android just a couple of years ago. I stuck with Chrome for the longest time because i didn't know that Firefox had extensions, or that i could play Youtube in the background. For the longest time I never saw why I should bother.

You didn't know Firefox supported extensions? Chrome still doesn't support extensions on mobile.

I cannot tweak Firefox on iOS therefore I cannot safely use it.

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