[Pacabel]

It may just be a thought experiment at this point, but I think it's pretty clear now that all of the major browsers are unfortunately headed in this direction.

This rush to target "more simple Internet users" hasn't gone well for Mozilla and Firefox so far. All they've managed to do is create a dumbed-down UI that's harder and less efficient to use, and this has alienated a lot of Firefox's existing users. This is a big part of why we keep seeing Firefox's share of the market sliding lower and lower.

Users can forgive Chrome for its bad UI experience because it offers quite good performance and resource usage. Firefox, unfortunately, does not offer that (I know, I know, Mozilla has benchmark results that will show the opposite, but these aren't indicative of actual user experiences). When faced with two browsers offering basically the same flawed UI, then users will use the one that offers the best runtime performance and the lowest resource usage.

Going forward with this sort of a design, or even continuing down the existing path that Mozilla has been taking, ultimately won't be successful. Users have very obviously been rejecting Firefox because it now no longer offers a usable UI, nor does it offer acceptable performance and resource usage.

[pessimizer]

>When faced with two browsers offering basically the same flawed UI, then users will use the one that offers the best runtime performance and the lowest resource usage.

I don't think that Chrome wins decisively on resource usage. It cheats a lot, and if you use your browser in uncommon ways, it degenerates.

I think that Chrome will win over Firefox's 'be like Chrome' strategy because people like leaders rather than followers, and would rather have Chrome-like features now on Chrome rather than waiting a year for Firefox to copy them, slightly differently.