[forbiddenvoid]

Why is that surprising? Firefox doesn't have a narrative that's compelling for the typical user and I'm not sure it's ever had one that was really viable. 'Not-google' really isn't good enough for the average user, and no amount of 'we care about your privacy' is going to convince the common user that Mozilla _does_, in fact, care about their privacy.

The reality is that most typical users care about their privacy a lot less than we might expect or want. That's probably not a great sign for society in general, but I think it's the truth.

[brimble]

They needed to differentiate themselves years ago. The value prop in the early days was "very light & fast, blocks popups, has tabs, is totally free with no ads". It was a no-brainer to install it on every barely-technical relative's computer a nerd could get their hands on. The only thing that approached it and wasn't incredibly obscure was Opera, and that either cost money or displayed ads.

FF is no longer "very light & fast" (it may no longer be possible to attain that and actually support modern web browsing—Safari is the only mainstream browser that's even close, AFAIK) and does have ads. Their various interface redesigns have made it confusing as hell to my parents. Old-school popups are handled well enough by ~every browser and they just about all use tabs and have for over a decade. Meanwhile they've added... what? To differentiate them? Plugins. But now those are the same as Chrome's. Very good dev tools—but now those are available elsewhere, too.

They needed to go all-in on something radical years ago to have a long-term shot at relevance. Decentralized social networking or chat built-in to the browser. Aggressive built-in ad blocking & unique user-empowering controls. More, not fewer, non-HTTP Internet protocols built in. Something. And clearly not Pocket.

Now I don't think their market share's big enough for even something like that that to save them. In fact now it'd likely just kill them even faster.

[heavyset_go]

> FF is no longer "very light & fast"

I beg to differ. It's certainly faster and uses less resources than even Ungoogled Chromium on the same machine.

[irrational]

> Firefox doesn't have a narrative that's compelling for the typical user

Firefox doesn't sell you off to the highest bidder?

[d12bb]

Oh, they absolutely do, like 90% of the funding for Mozilla comes from Google.

[irrational]

Google just does that so they don't get broken up. But that doesn't mean Firefox is sending your data to Google.

[account42]

It does exatcly mean that Firefox is (by default) sending your searches to Google.

Mozilla also uses Google Analytics on their websites and keep testing the waters with putting ads right into the browser. Users are absolutely justified in not trusting Mozilla's claims about caring for privacy.

[forbiddenvoid]

My point is that far fewer people care about this than one might expect. And a non-trivial number probably don't believe it anyway.