I'm not sure that FF going down in usage can be put on the CEO at this point. There's way too many forces against them, it is not a "fair" fight against the only other option.
Google is way larger and has deals set in place to ensure that basically everyone ends up with it as the default. Let that go on for a generation or two and people forget all about FF. They cannot compete against that.
As for CEO pay, that's typical. Asking or expecting for it to not go up exponentially is pointless, that's just how it works now.
Without trying to pin everything on the CEO, I don't think it's also fair to treat Firefox as helpless and doomed.
For another data point we can look at Thunderbird, another Mozilla project. Thunderbird had started stagnating. It was borderline abandoned for a while, until Mozilla made it official.
The community tried to catch the discarded codebase and keep it alive, Thunderbird got a new home. Remember we're talking about a desktop email client in the age where a couple major companies entirely own email, as a concept. Email _is_ Gmail and Outlook, it's not even close to a fair fight for a small third party email client to compete against that.
> As for CEO pay, that's typical. Asking or expecting for it to not go up exponentially is pointless, that's just how it works now.
The point is that it doesn't have to be typical, nor should it be. There's no universal law of reality which says that CEO pay must forever go up exponentially. It is bad behavior when other companies do it, it was bad behavior when Mozilla did it, and it deserves the criticism it is getting.
Even us die-hard Firefox users are forced to use other browsers just to get full PWA support. If Mozilla makes it difficult for fans of their browser to stick with Firefox, it's not surprising that non-Firefox users won't bother sticking with it or even trying it in the first place.
It is not really Mozilla doing anything to make it difficult to get the same experience, but rather uninformed or ignorant web developers building Chromium/Chrome-only experiences. For examples just check out the uninformed tech stack of Slack, MS Teams, and similar that so many companies use. None of those tools work properly in FF, since their devs do not create a cross browser experience adhering to standards. While I am not particularly a fan of Discord, I want to mention, that already years ago they had a working voice and video chat working in the browser in FF. No idiotic gaslighting attempt of "having to change the browser".
A notification on a website stating that one must use another browser is a sign of utter incompetence or ignorance.
Lack of installable PWA support is squarely on Firefox. At this point, I think they're the only remotely major browser that doesn't have it.
And yes, there is an extension for that. Which is unofficial, requires you to do hacky things (such as installing a whole separate Firefox runtime), and still doesn't fully support things like notifications.
I think that it's not a UI/UX thing, honestly they are almost exactly the same thing (tabs, URL bar, webpage). The difference is that people use what they are given, and when you are Google it's easier to be seen by everybody.
Firefox's multiple profiles' UX is not user-friendly at all. You need to either type "about:profiles" in the address bar or start the desired profile from the command line.
The history/bookmark manager UI is 2000-ish and does not align with current mobile-like design trends.
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Multi-account containers are a cool idea, but they are somewhat power-user-oriented. Ordinary users often don't grasp the concept of cookies, let alone understand the extension's description.
> Under the hood, it separates website storage into tab-specific Containers. Cookies downloaded by one Container are not available to other Containers.
Not a good thing if Mozilla wanted to increase their market share.
Middle-aged users are already using Firefox if they value the open web, but young users will be driven away by the 2000-ish UI. Mozilla cannot attract new users if they can't keep up with the design trend.
The best solution I can think of is making fancy UI the default but also making it possible for power users to switch back to the old UI.
That's why Google is putting the profile button on the address bar: to promote the feature. The UI for adding new users is simple and straightforward too.
Both of them have those features, but the key problem is about UI/UX. Clearly, Mozilla doesn't devote as many resources to improving UI/UX as Google does.
Multiple profiles' UX is not user-friendly at all. You need to either type "about:profiles" in the address bar or start the desired profile from the command line.
The history/bookmark manager UI is 2000-ish and does not align with current mobile-like design trends.
Tangential, but this spurred an interest in reading a few of their annual reports. It seems general purpose LLMs are bad at doing this, at least when I asked what annual revenue was it confidently said $466m for 2020 but the report said 496867 so basically $497m.
Anyone have a blogpost/video/guide on the basics of reading financial statements? I definitely could brush up on whats important within these statements and how to better interpret them....
Edit: the reason I replied here, was because I wanted to see how the company did during her tenure as CEO. That was the leap my brain took.
Google is way larger and has deals set in place to ensure that basically everyone ends up with it as the default. Let that go on for a generation or two and people forget all about FF. They cannot compete against that.
As for CEO pay, that's typical. Asking or expecting for it to not go up exponentially is pointless, that's just how it works now.