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Comment by joelthelion | Hacker News Reader

> This raises some questions: why is Firefox usage going down, and what does Mozilla need to do to bring it back up?

> How does an average user get started with Firefox?

This misses the elephant in the room : the main reason Chrome is eating other browsers is that Google is putting its advertising might behind it. You know that little "want a better browser" pop-up displayed on Google's search engine? That's an absolute killer for other browsers.

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not entirely true. firefox has solved a lot of startup and other performance issues, but the core rendering engine still lags when confronted with heavy loads, just a scrollable div of a couple dozen large images is enough to make it stutter seconds at time while they load and render, sure it's partly a developer issue for not using thumbnail in the listing, but chrome shows them all with zero lag.

stating that the only reason chrome is ahead is because advertising is disingenuous: firefox only started catching up with them only in the last three-four years performance wise and the gap it's still there.

just a scrollable div of a couple dozen large images is enough to make it stutter seconds at time while they load and render

I might be wrong, but with WebRender, isn't scrolling now done asynchronously so it doesn't stutter while things are loading? I certainly haven't experienced any scroll stutter since I turned it on.

WebRender is not really used by Firefox yet. They're currently rolling it out to some very narrow sets of end users.

Scrolling has been async for many years, both with WebRender and without it.

Chrome lags on some webpages that Firefox don’t and vice versa. Overall I get a smoother experience on Firefox but ymmv.

>> that little "want a better browser" pop-up displayed on Google's search engine?

I actually do not know what you're talking about. Been using Firefox for the last few years and haven't seen this pop-up once.

As another Firefox user, I know the pop up very well. Not even the results page where people at distracted, it's on the actual Google homepage (as well as other places). Abusing monopoly in one market to monopolize another.

Is it possible that this is somehow forbidden by EU law, that's why me, being EU citizen, never encountered it?

running an adblocker?

Now that you mention it, I think I remember an ad blocker indeed blocks those ads.

It would be an incomplete adblocker if it didn't :D

I'm an EU citizen as well.

For reference, booting up Windows Sandbox and loading google:

https://i.judge.sh/any/Diamond/WindowsSandbox_hE75Eaor7Z.png

It was also an enormous improvement over other browsers on performance, usability and security perspective. People are not mindless drones, they use it because they see a benefit not because of an ad.

I use Firefox on Linux and (current) Edge on Windows, in both cases because they feel faster than Chrome (which I used to use when it felt faster). I still use Chrome on my phone because I can't uninstall it. :)

You should be able to disable system packaged apps unless you are running an absolutely ancient version of Android. It's the same effect as uninstalling except it keeps the original package in storage in case you re-enable.

Firefox on Linux doesn't have GPU acceleration out of the box nor GPU video decoding (at all still?). Firefox on Android has it's own litany of issues (though to be fixed in their new version soon™).

Edge was actually pretty great on Windows but everywhere else it wasn't Edge and it's going away to come back as a Chromium clone shortly anyways.

Exactly, disabled apps still take up space. So on a limited space device I just use what's there.

I haven't tried the new version of Edge based on Chromium, but my guess is that it'll be as slow as Chrome. :(

> That's an absolute killer for other browsers.

I'm not so sure about that. First of all, most "normal" people I know don't actually know what a browser is ("open your browser" - "my what?" - "... open the internet" - "ohh, okay!") nor which one they are using. I've never had anyone ask for help in switching browsers - unless something is seriously wrong with the one they have, they don't see the alternatives, and most users aren't adventurous, they don't want to mess with their computers "just to take a look".

Google Chrome is bundled with a lot of freeware apps and the user needs to uncheck a checkbox to avoid it being installed as a default browser. That's literally how it got current market share, along with being heavily advertised on google.com.

Makes sense, and works well with my experience that users don't really care or know what they are using. If the extent of customization is your bookmarks, being converted to a happy chrome user isn't hard. If it's more than that, a coerced install is probably not going to make you switch.

But for most people, they won't really notice a difference between Chrome and Firefox in their daily usage.

Let me tell you about a fascinating anecdote that happened to me a few years ago. My grandfather bought a new laptop. I set it up with firefox and saved his common sites (gmail, facebook, etc) to the new tab page so that he dosen't have to do anything else to open them.

A month later I get a call from him asking about why he is unable to find gmail and facebook. What happened is that my grandpa ended up with google chrome on his machine, which obviously did not have the pinned sites on the front page.

Here's the real kicker - He does not know the difference between about "firefox" and "chrome" and browsers, nor he did not install any other app that bundled google chrome with it. He did not go around adventuring with his browsers.

He was literally baited by google into installing chrome in a completely sneaky and underhanded way. How? Through the front page ads.

Would he generally install software if he sees an ad for it, or was that special because it wasn't obvious that it was an ad and therefore had more trust (like some security product company saying "your door is unsafe, buy our product" vs your friend telling you that your door is unsafe)?

It's strange that Chrome doesn't take the bookmark, bookmark-bar status and new-tab-page from firefox - if they did, he likely wouldn't have noticed and called you.

I'd wager it was the "Browse Faster" ad - which coming from Google is a tempting click.

Just a small aside on the grandparents topic: my grandfather lost every dime to email scams in the late 90s. The man was a Westpoint grad who served in the Pacific theater as an officer, and in his last years he clicked away his retirement. Installing Chrome is a pretty benign mistake but boy, we need guard rails for our older folks.

I most definitely agree regarding older folks. Unless you have a very good feel for the digital environment, consider everything harmful, and all emails you don't expect, know the sender for (or where the sender behaves atypically) to be malicious. It's a touch lesson to teach, much like stranger danger for kids, and it's going to become more and more important the more stuff moves online. When you're required to file your taxes via a website, you're much easier to attack than when you took a bunch of forms, completed them and then mailed them to the government (or, if you're late, go and put them in their mailbox). Plus the general inconvenience of good security ("why can't I use the same password?"), fun times lie ahead.

>Would he generally install software if he sees an ad for it, or was that special because it wasn't obvious that it was an ad and therefore had more trust

That's the trick in here. He doesn't install anything else off the internet. It only happened with chrome. And I am positively sure it was due to the very sneaky and underhanded chrome ad on the front page of google itself (a place where it is impossible for anyone else to get a single ad).

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