[momokoko]

Or Mozilla’s leadership was distracted by a bunch of meaningless distractions instead of focusing on unsexy things like this and lost out to a competitor.

It wasn’t the users that lost interest in Firefox. It was Mozilla that lost interest in Firefox.

[kybernetikos]

> distracted by a bunch of meaningless distractions

I often find that the specific things that are thought of as 'meaningless distractions' by different people don't entirely overlap.

For example, I think having a mobile OS not controlled by google or apple would be phenomenally important, so I was entirely in favour of FirefoxOS.

Rust has led to improvements in Firefox that were previously said to be nearly intractable. I'd definitely include that as something valuable, not just for firefox but for the world.

Mozilla Persona seemed like a really good way to solve something that we're still struggling with - to have a universal web identity that belongs to me rather than some surveillance monetiser.

I could see value in emscripten, Firefox sync, Rhino, Shumway, thunderbird.

Now that is already a selection of projects that includes a bunch that were widely considered to be failures and were killed. It's also already probably too much for a company of Mozilla's size.

The projects that we see mozilla doing at the moment, I sort of get - they're trying to pitch the brand as a 'privacy' play, but if they really want to do that plausibly, they're going to need to change their income model.

[_-___________-_]

Do you think that focusing on more unsexy things would have helped? It seems to me that it's fundamentally a marketing problem. Many people are not even aware that Firefox exists, despite it being basically as good as Chrome, and in some ways considerably better.

[manquer]

ultimately if there value , word of mouth works pretty well .

Firefox does not have a brand visibility problem , no amount of marketing will convince users if the browser is not significantly better. If the value is marginal convenience trumps.

Firefox did not gain market share orginally because they did better marketing than IE. They became big because they built a better product.

Chrome became because of the same reason too. They did a lot of early innovations with per tab process isolation headless or v8 decoupling and myriad to new features giving performance boost and making it possible for projects like electron to exist.

Firefox got a major usage boost post quantum.

If they could rebuild the full stack on rust there will be a massive usage boost.

Mozilla is in a unique position they don't have revenue targets or shareholders to please. They have users, and a single customer who is also their only competitor.

It is no brainier to say largest chunk of investment should have gone there.

P.S. yes google has a unfair advantage, they implement web standards well before it is accepted then force their version by sheer force the market dominance. This is not new IE did it to netscape . However google also owns a lot of the pages people visit. They will optimize their sites for their browser. This is why youtube will always be faster in chrome than firefox.

[floatboth]

Firefox did gain over IE because major websites pointed IE users to it.

And of course Chrome became dominant the same way.

Word of google.com main page > word of mouth :(

[abacadaba]

All I'm really looking for out of any possible anti-trust is a big "try firefox for better privacy" popup on google.com.

[manquer]

Website admins pointed IE users to Firefox because it worked better, supported APIs and features which made their site better.

Chrome was the same too. Yes Google does have unfair advantage because they own lot of properties people interact with every day, they are a significant player for user mind space, but they are not so large that people spend 50-60% time on google products only .

[birksherty]

I don't agree. Google is many times bigger than Mozilla. I am not talking about tech people here. Everyone uses search, youtube and android is huge outside usa. Chrome comes preinstalled in major plateforms. Even if it's not going to a google site tells them to install it. These people don't even know they can install firefox.

[makapuf]

Well then focusing on firefox marketing and unsexy optimizations more than cool projects was the thing to do. In any case, focusing on the browser.