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Comment by inter_netuser | Hacker News Reader

Why is Firefox marketshare so low?

my experience with HN usage is that "its not as fast as chrome" or "the dev tools arent as good as chrome".

My experience with "normal" people; we the nerds told them to install chrome 10 years ago and now they are used to it.

Personally I use Firefox and have done since it came out as it's fast enough for me and I'm not a front-end dev so the dev tools suit my limited use.

Maybe it is not as low as it appears. Since most of the privacy settings are the default, installs and usage isn't counted?

I'm pretty sure browser share is done by useragent, which will report Firefox if you're using Firefox. Unless of course you change your useragent but the number of people doing that will be vanishingly small.

To be fair, one of the very few add-ons available for Firefox on Android is an add-on that does exactly this on Google properties so Google won't degrade your experience for using FireFox.

So maybe it is more popular than we think. Very hard to know for sure.

Android happened and combined with a popular desktop Chrome, well the rest is history.

Not sure you can really blame android, when Android allows Firefox as a first class replacement for Chrome and with ease for the user, whereas iOS doesn't even allow the real Firefox.

iOS is a very important platform for Firefox, so apples anti-competitive behavior in this regard really undermines firefox's future.

I'm very sad that this issue has not come up in all of the debate about the app store.

~98% of Androids use the default browser, which is an incredible amount of people, like in the billions. We tend to forget iOS is a minority worldwide.

But Mozilla is big in the same markets where iOS is big.

>Not sure you can really blame android, when Android allows Firefox as a first class replacement for Chrome

It's still the default, and defaults matter.

Not sure it's reasonable to ask a for-profit company to do more than make it easily and fully changeable. Neither Microsoft nor Apple come close to that.

It was a thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu

Mostly because of a multi-billion dollar ad campaign by a megacorp whose name rhymes with Moogle.

Dark patterns from Microsoft and Google. They nag users to set their own applications as the default. You can't expect users who don't know any better to to always say no, they get tired and then say yes.

Because the reasons why its market share ever got as high as it did to begin with no longer apply. Firefox isn't basically competing with a piece of abandonware that happens to ship with Windows any more.

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