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Comment by matteoraso | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. Even if Firefox makes up a small part of the market share, any website that serves millions of people will want to support it. Imagine if you have a website with 1,000,000 monthly visitors, and 2% of them use Firefox. Dropping support will mean 20,000 less monthly visitors. This gives us an idea of how much you should spend on support. If you make an average of $0.10 a month per user, you should be okay with spending at least $2000 a month on Firefox. That's a pretty big budget, and it's reasonable to go much higher than that if your website is rapidly growing. The big players like Google and Facebook will also be comfortable supporting Firefox at a loss, since you don't want to bleed users and create market space for a competitor. At most, you lose a few small websites that you probably weren't going to visit anyways.

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> Imagine if you have a website with 1,000,000 monthly visitors, and 2% of them use Firefox. Dropping support will mean 20,000 less monthly visitors.

It will always be 2% which will always be, at maximum, 2% more revenue. That's probably negligible if you have to support them and there's an opportunity cost to that money. You'd probably be better off spending that money on advertising than Firefox support, especially since Firefox users typically know when a page isn't working, it's probably them and they have a backup solution available.

I used Firefox for a long time but switched because I just got tired of switching all the time and I started regularly using a site that didn't work in Firefox (I don't remember now but I think it was my credit card).

> they have a backup solution available.

Im a decade+ daily driver of Firefox. If a website doesnt support it, I make a mental note that I hate this company now, close the tab, and move on. I don't open it in a V8 browser, i look for an alternative.

I was exactly the same way, even to the point of doing the same thing if adblock or privacy extensions broke the site, but there are sites where you can't just move on where you really just have to use another browser.

I've gone back and forth between chrome and firefox for the what has to be close to 20 years. I want to use Firefox but ever since Chrome came out and blew it out of the water with javascript performance, it's always felt a bit clunky even as they've made their own performance improvements. I suspect my future lies with a chromium based browser eventually.

> At most, you lose a few small websites that you probably weren't going to visit anyways.

I think this is wrong. It starts with a website to look up train departures that no longer works on Ff. Then the site to buy movie or concert tickets fails on FF. Booking a restaurant, again, requires you to take out chrome.

Which has two concequences. People stop using FF all together because switching all the time is work. And people ensure they always have a copy of chrome around, while fewer and fewer need to keep a copy of FF around.

And so FF spirals exponentially into insignificance.

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