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by wolverine876 867 days ago
> the facts remains: / 1. Firefox was neglected and lost a massive market share.

What is the factual basis for saying that Firefox was neglected? Lots of stuff is repeated around here, but it's not impression from any facts.
2 comments
_xivi 867 days ago
> What is the factual basis for saying that Firefox was neglected? Lots of stuff is repeated around here, but it's not impression from any facts.

Interesting, what do you attribute Firefox's bleeding out marketshare steadily over the past decade to if not neglect from leadership? Strategy is at the core of the CEO role and other executives.

Mitchell Baker actually stated herself, I think in 2020 at the time of layoffs, that Mozilla needed to focus on stuff like decentralized web, artificial intelligence, security and privacy network, etc. So yes it seems evident that the browser was neglected to pursue other endeavors, that mind you, didn't see much success either.

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wolverine876 867 days ago
It doesn't matter what I attribute it to; I'm not an expert.

An obvious alternative explanation - really the null hypothesis, IMHO - is competition from Google. Google has much greater brand power, engineering resources, and marketing power than anyone. They could advertise Chrome across their incredibly popular ecosystem, including on the (possibly) most popular page on the Internet, https://www.google.com.

Chrome is a pretty good product, too, and didn't have legacy code like Gecko to deal with. I'm not sure what any Mozilla CEO could do.

Maybe facing those odds, it was better to invest in other things too. Mozilla's mission isn't a web browser, but to make the web free and (private).

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archerx 866 days ago
> I'm not sure what any Mozilla CEO could do.

I donno, maybe not firing the engineers while giving herself a pay raise? Crazy I know right...

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bobthecowboy 867 days ago
As someone who's nearly exclusively used Firefox since before it was called Firefox, I would not say that the product itself has been neglected. It continues to get better, from my point of view. Like seriously if you're reading this and at all interested, just try to switch to it for a week, it's great.

However it is factual that its marketshare (and thus, relevance (and thus, influence on the web)) has dramatically declined over the past decade or so. People complain about Mozilla's tech side quests (and occasionally people complain about their social-cause chases), but this is the real honest complaint. Firefox is trending toward irrelevancy, while Google has gradually taken control of this market. Meanwhile, CEO compensation has gone up (amid layoffs in the ZIRP era, for that matter).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

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wolverine876 867 days ago
I know that, but I think it would be extraordinary to defeat a (free) Google product that they advertise throughout their ecosystem.
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