[jm4]

Even with $400M in "revenue" gifted to them by Google, Mozilla can't muster even 4% market share. This project is dead. There is no path to increased market share. They have no viable plan to generate revenue beyond what they get from Google. Outside of features like container tabs, which only appeal to a small niche, they don't have much going on. The browser has dramatically higher power consumption in an age where a substantial portion of internet users are on battery-powered devices, it is noticeably sluggish compared to the competition, it has a dated looking UI, there is an apparent void in leadership and development capabilities at Mozilla. Now we get a silly little mascot? Firefox will never regain the ground they lost. The sooner we realize it, the sooner we can get behind something else.

[bananapub]

this is a very dumb take; having an independent browser be at even 4% is great, since it has almost fully stopped the web collapsing down to Webkit/Blink-compatibility fully replacing any actual standards.

Mozilla does seem poorly run overall but this work is very important.

[jm4]

Perhaps an independent browser is important. Mozilla and Firefox are not.

I would argue that a truly open source, easily embedded browser engine that everyone can use is more important than an independent browser. The only problem with Blink is that it's controlled almost entirely by Google. Otherwise, it's an outstanding piece of tech. It would be just about perfect if the project operated more like Linux. We wouldn't need competing engines if development was democratized. The project itself becomes the source of truth as far as standards are concerned. Each browser distro enables what they need and if something becomes popular it's just a matter of other distros enabling a build flag.

[slig]

>having an independent browser be at even 4% is great

Four percent is a rounding error, and I'm seeing a lot of technical people who no longer prioritize testing on Firefox. I doubt many younger devs have even tried it, and its mobile presence is almost zero.

[miroljub]

It's not that great considering there were times when it was closer to 30% than to 20%