[dtx1]

That would almost be a good argument but the reality is that they cannibalized their core product to increase their revenue but have done so to the point where it no longer remains viable in the market. Alas, the locusts have had their feast and we are all worse of for it.

[alberth]

So in hindsight, if you were CEO of Mozilla - what would you have done differently that you believe would have maintained Firefox market share?

——

I think diehard Firefox fans don’t understand that, no matter how great you make Firefox - it will always lose share to better distribution.

Google had the best distribution because it was the vast majority of consumers homepage. And on the homepage, it was nagging users to install chrome.

Distribution > Better Product

[JimDabell]

> So in hindsight, if you were CEO of Mozilla - what would you have done differently that you believe would have maintained Firefox market share?

Integrated ad blocker, enabled by default. It’s the one thing Firefox can do that Chrome never will.

Most people aren’t tech-savvy enough to install an ad blocker. Most people really do see all the ads on the Internet. Blocking ads by default would make the browsing experience far more pleasant, and so browsing with Firefox would be far more pleasant than browsing with Chrome for most people.

And obviously, continue to invest in improving the core web experience instead of getting distracted by side quests and firing everybody working on Servo, etc.

[alberth]

> Integrated ad blocker, enabled by default. It’s the one thing Firefox can do that Chrome never will.

How would that work exactly ... given that Google pays Mozilla $800M to be the default search engine just so that they can serve ads to Firefox users.

If Firefox enable a default ad-blocker, Google doesn't then generate ad revenue and they would stop paying Mozilla. Mozilla entire org revenue stream would disappear.

[sltkr]

If I were CEO of Mozilla I would have also killed the core product by implementing Facebook's user tracking shit and making Google the default search engine just so I can rake in something like $10 million personally.

Then I'd retire and start an open-source project to develop a good open-source browser that puts user's interests first.

The problem is the CEO of Mozilla doesn't do the second part.

[M95D]

OH MY GOD! Are you serious with this question?!? Or are you just mocking us?

Bring back editing the UI, custom toolbars, custom side panels, plugins for custom side panels, features Opera 12 had, such as Opera's Notepad, UI checkboxes for commonly used settings to be placed in custom toolbars (I would love a checkbox for JS enable/disable and a checkbox for Images enable/disable), directly editable UI colors without the need to search for a theme, smaller UI without margins/padding (90's style), HTML source code live patching with REGEX the way AdMuncher did it, save page link as .url files, a self-hosted sync server that can run on a OpenWrt router with 64MB RAM (no, I'm not talking about a nodejs crap that needs 8GB ram just for itself!), self hosted download manager as linux console app on a different computer (like Aria2, but with better integration), etc. etc.

This list is just what I could think of in 10 min. I'm sure that $$$ budget could build so much more. How about a new browser from scratch?

Edit:

Here's more: embedable engine allowing others to build browsers based on it, framebuffer support like "links -g" allowing it to run in linux console without X/wayland, ability to act as a remote rendering service to allow a very low power device to use it as a remote web rendering server to offload web page JS/CSS workloads (like Opera Mini worked, but with the intermediary server hosted by the user), integration with OS and/or DHCP server to request a new IPv6 IP for each page visited

[alberth]

Everything you described is extremely technical.

Are you suggesting what you described above, 95% of global users care about? ... and that's why Firefox market share has gone down, because the general person wants a REGEX with live code patching?

Because right now, Firefox has 5% market share (based on the GP linked to graphic).

I'd wager that, 5% market share is roughly proportional to the global market of developers. And the 95% of the world who do not use Firefox today, are the same 95% who don't care about anything you described above.

[M95D]

FF doesn't need 95% users. 30% is enough. No browser should have 95%. That would be a monopoly.

30% was the market share it could have if the management direction was to attract Opera 12 users (and devs too) or at least not cripple FF like they did since v50.

[dehrmann]

I'm a Firefox use, and while I agree Mozilla neglected it, I think leadership saw the writing on the wall that they're at best the #4 player after Chrome, Safari, and Edge, and they decided to branch out in search of new lines of business. It turns out there isn't a story there (and probably never was--this was a desperation move), and now they're left with Firefox in an even worse state.