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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

We've been here before (hell, 3% looked massive back then, and in a much smaller market). Marketshare is not an issue, the relationship with the community is. A strong community, united around a core of values and secure that the product is built with these values at heart, will evangelize such product out of a niche. Unfortunately, the current Mozilla leadership doesn't seem to understand that significant chunks of its community have lost the faith.

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I want to agree, but can't.

The loss of market share has nothing to do with the browser in itself. Mozilla simply has no reach. Chrome is shipped via Android and on the desktop via services having a billion+ users, like Youtube and Gmail.

Mozilla has no reach or push. It's not an engineering problem.

It's not like FF was ever shipped with Windows. It's just that enough people saw enough value and purpose in it, to go out and get it themselves.

You can install FF on Android in a second on the Play Store, it's easier than it's ever been on the desktop; but you have to want to install it in the first place. Some of this want can be generated by feature excellence, some by peer pressure; but for a long time now, FF has lagged in producing the former and its leadership has actively sabotaged the community that can provide the latter.

Obviously FF was helped by MS dropping the ball in a way Google has not (yet), but in my opinion what happened then could be done again. Antitrust action is coming for both Apple and Google, Mozilla should be ready to pounce right there and then - but it cannot happen if the leadership does not understand that there is a problem.

Firefox came to power because there was a massive vacuum: the stagnant IE. Firefox simply was a fundamentally superior browser.

This vacuum no longer exists. The competition isn't stagnant, they're speeding away.

People say that but for ages FF simply couldn't do what IE did. ActiveX was a thing and FF just didn't support it. Java applets broke all over, and CSS support was a minefield. Most of the mainstream web was outright broken in MozSuite and FF. It wasn't clear at all that FF was "superior" in any way - in fact, the build system was a nightmare, you couldn't embed it anywhere, you had to fix proxy settings all the time (because it had its internal stuff, not using the Windows settings)... Yeah it had extensions, but a lot of people didn't even know what those were (and making them wasn't particularly easy - easier than dealing with MSVC++, but still not easy). Still, people were invested in the success of FF; they tolerated the brokenness and pestered the hell out of website owners to fix their shit and evangelized the browser to friends and family. Because people cared about FF and what it represented: an open browser to use the open web, built for people and geeks - not "consumers" or "enterprise customers".

Now people don't care, because Mozilla is seen as Just Another Silicon Valley Corp, with overpaid execs doing shady deals to push shit down our throat. At that point, "they are all the same" so might as well use the browser that works more often (Chrome). This can change, but it needs a positive shock.

The competition is stagnant. The web is a hostile cesspool and you need tools like ad-blockers to make it bearable, just like you had to buy antivirus software back in the day. The competition doesn't provide that, and this is where Firefox can differentiate itself.

Casual users don't care about technical differences, but they will care about "install this browser and see no ads nor cookie banners ever". The Enterprise will be happy to pay for this because of the security benefits.

Hell, I'm talking about casual users but the truth is that Mozilla has even managed to alienate power users with stupid & useless UI changes and "features".

> It's just that enough people saw enough value and purpose in it, to go out and get it themselves.

This happened at the time when no other browser vendor drove any kind of serious marketing campaign. Even so, Firefox only reached 30% market share at its peak.

Then Chrome shot out, backed by Google's marketing budget, bundled with popular software installers and featured at the "Internet home page": "Still running Firefox? Upgrade to Chrome now!" (quote is approximate, but very close)

> It's not like FF was ever shipped with Windows.

At one time Lenovo was bundling Firefox on their computers.

The difference is that when Firefox initially appeared, Microsoft was treating Internet Explorer as a "finished product" and letting it go completely stagnant.

Google and Apple aren't making that same mistake, at least not to that same level. The developers are happy with the tooling, and the fact that ECMAScript and HTML API's keep evolving faster than much of the ecosystem can keep up with. The casual public is happy about a fresh coat of paint, or putting tabs in a different place every few years.

There just isn't the same opportunity due to incumbent vulnerability today.

As I mentioned below, antitrust authorities are coming for Apple and Google. The opportunity will be there very, very soon; but you can't ride a wave without a surfboard, and at the moment it looks like Mozilla is more interested in selling product-placement stickers than building a great board.

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