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Comment by vivzkestrel | Hacker News Reader

majority of the people will still use Chrome even if Google literally delists all blockers from the planet. One major reason being "browser migration". The guys on HN crying foul on most of these articles are a vocal minority. This s Google's version of "corner the market and raise the prices". They ll lost 2-5% market share at max

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There's an evangelist effect - Apple benefited from it a lot way back when (less so now). Where techies lead, others tend to follow. That 2-5% might be the first few pebbles in the avalanche.

You still need a tangible reason for switching. Maybe we can push, but Firefox would need to sustain the momentum and I don't see them doing it.

My pet peeves: sync and app mode. I don't want to switch at the moment, tried many times, but it doesn't stick for me. If i ask my my aunt to do that, and she dislikes it, she won't do it again and won't trust me anymore on top of that.

The “techie” “evangelist” network effect is a thing of the past.

Today it’s all about mobile.

Nearly everybody uses their phone for everything and they aren’t making choices about which software to install on their personal laptop.

I think that's fair, actually. Appliances, not computers.

But why the scare quotes?

If browser migration stopped the majority from changing, Internet Explorer would still dominate. But Firefox got the majority, and then Chrome.

It's a bit more fluid than the OS market. A company can't get away with just anything forever in the browser space. At least not so far. 2-5% loss is significant for one change, and denotes a chink in the armor of dominance that other players can begin to exploit; whatever dissatisfaction caused people to migrate, other players can be very good at it, which can get more people trying the other product, which if it does well in other ways, can spread. So 2-5% loss has a small chance of turning into a long, slow landslide of market share loss.=

Definitely dangerous to start throwing customer experience under the bus for short to mid-term gains without paying attention to the long term picture.

I've been using Firefox some lately because my work has a heavyhanded managed system-wide Chrome profile and one other problem is that Firefox is just buggy and slow in some noticeable ways that Chrome is not.

I often read these kinds of comments on HN and I don’t understand them. I’m using FF on MacOS and it feels like exactly the same experience I used to have on Chrome. Except that I like multi account containers better than Chrome profiles.

I would love for HN commenters to share a recording in which they show this “buggyness”

I’m on Linux. Attempting to drag a tab to a new window doesn’t work and permanently breaks the “x” button to close tabs (until a restart).

Too bad your lies have been upvoted. I am also on Linux - had to boot it up just to make sure I am not spreading bs - and what do you know, dragging tabs between windows works just fine, like it always has.

I am happy you have a better experience, but it doesn’t do me any good.

> They ll lost 2-5% market share at max

IE lost a lot more than 2-5% during the golden years of FF. At its peak in 2010, FF had about 30% market share.

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-2009...

Not even Safari has reached the same level or market share (including mobile).

Don't forget that google also has mozilla by the balls and can turn firefox into a community project at any time.

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