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Comment by blindm | Hacker News Reader

I think Firefox is like some banks in that it is too big to fail [0]. Not that Firefox is a financial institution, but something that has embedded and woven itself so deeply into the web in general that I can't imagine the web without it. If it dies in some fantastical way, something else (hopefully better and evolved) will fill its place. We can't have the Chromes of the world slurping up all our data in the near future. Firefox is a privacy tool as well as a browser.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_big_to_fail

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But it's not that big, comparatively. 2/3 people are using Chrome, 1/6 are using Safari, and ~1/28 are using Firefox. If you look at a trend line over the last 10 years Firefox has fallen from its peak around ~30% in a steady decline toward 3% (and eventually 0%). It's not big, it's barely hanging onto numbers on the chart, alongside Internet Explorer and Edge. Some data: https://caniuse.com/usage-table

Firefox can trace its history back to Netscape Navigator, released in 1994. It has failed and come back before. Even if the Mozilla Foundation fails, Firefox would likely survive in some form.

That was in the age of desktop browsers.

Nowadays most browsing is mobile, and all mobile devices come with a high quality browser component which is effectively part of the operating system already, used pervasively by applications on the device as a component rather than a standalone browser.

Installing a browser, any browser, is already a niche thing to do for the majority of internet users today.

>all mobile devices come with a high quality browser component which is effectively part of the operating system already, used pervasively by applications on the device as a component rather than a standalone browser.

that sounds a lot like M$'s IE before the antitrust case, no ?

No, not remotely.

It may be true that a particular company has a stranglehold on browser choice on your particular phone, but that is completely different from having an anticompetitive strangehold on the market as a whole, which is what matters from an antitrust standpoint. I'm not the biggest fan of capitalism but the market seems to be functioning rather well. Not perfectly but well.

Just a refresher: IE had 96% market share at its peak, and Microsoft were guilty of quite a few other anticompetitive practices as well w.r.t. Windows itself, more or less literally penalizing OEMs from shipping any other desktop OS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars

Competition is thriving in the mobile space. Safari, Chrome, and derivatives of Chrome are competing with each other and they are well-performing, aggressively maintained and updated pieces of software.

Sure, there are plenty of technical reasons to be annoyed with either one of them. Mobile Safari sure is slow to adopt certain standards, etc. And don't get me wrong -- it is extremely regrettable whenever browser choice is restricted. It sucks, I hate it.

Another thing working against Firefox on mobile is that it seems like every software update for Samsung phones resets the default browser/URL handler to Samsung Internet. Anyone not paying close attention will just click through the EULA and suddenly no longer be using Firefox.

I have a Samsung phone, and it's updated quite recently, but I've never noticed this.

I virtually never open Samsung Internet only because I virtually never open any web browser. Browsers launch as a side effect of something else. For example clicking on a link inside LinkedIn, Telegram, bank app help, etc.

When that happens, if a separate app gets opened it's usually Firefox Focus that opens for me, so I guess that means the default URL handler is Firefox Focus (must have set it years ago) and it's not being changed by software updates.

I have a history of being unlucky with technology, which is why I worked in QA before becoming a software engineer. I've noticed lots of jank w.r.t. Firefox and phone updates. YMMV. Firefox desktop updates have reset privacy preferences at least once in the last month or two, and Samsung Internet has made itself my default on top of Firefox at least two or three times in the last few months.

>Installing a browser, any browser, is already a niche thing to do for the majority of internet users today.

And yet there are a range of choices for terminal only browsers. You've overall right, but I doubt that minority of users would let Firefox totally die any time soon.

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