| Its not about Eich - or, gasp, open source. Neither of those words capture the attention of your 'mainstream' users staring at their mobile phone as they walk down the street. Don't believe me, ask the next 20-something you see. "Back in the day" (read: when the world relied on internet explorer) tabbed browsing was not a mainstream feature. Nor was pop-up blocking, containerized scripting(active-x anyone?) and browsing not being tied to window managers. Times have changed and now while we have diversity, we also strangely have more of the same. Aside from interface, Safari, Chrome and Firefox all offer very similar experiences. Those game changing features that made Firefox popular are now mainstream. The stats mentioned above are interesting but should not be surprising to anyone here. Google has heavily promoted Chrome and built it in to the android platform. Apple has done something similar with Safari and iOS. No surprises here. Also, keep in mind that Mozilla walked away from an entire market of mobile users. (Source: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=firefox+ios ) Wrt moving forward, what about listening to current trends in the market? Security, privacy and speed all seem to be popular buzzwords these days (now, if more than ever). Why not focus here first? Users have proven time and time again that unless there is a major compelling reason to change they will stick with what they know and what has worked in the past. With the built-in browsers being 'good enough', what reason(s) do they have to change? Man, it almost seems like we've been here before.. |