Technology

I dispute this as well:

“Don’t try to be like the other browsers, chasing daily active users. Get back in touch with your userbase and understand why they choose Firefox every day instead of just mindlessly picking one of the larger browsers like the majority of users. Then build a browser for these users, instead of pushing them away by doing what the other browsers (which they actively try to avoid) do.”

This is a nice sentiment.

But these aren’t the Internet Explorer days.

A browser engine with less than 1% market share isn’t going to be supported by web developers, and then everything about its development becomes an uphill battle. Major sites won’t work, and they can’t afford to fixe them all on an ad hoc basis. And again, it’s not like the IE days where the “default” browser is so unbelievably dysfunctional, the OS was more open, and the user base was a bit more technical.

I’d argue one of Firefox’s most important functions (alongside Safari) is to stop Chrome from becoming the de facto web standard, instead of the HTML spec.

And it’s been repeatedly demonstrated that “these users” the quote describes is an exceedingly small base. It’s reasonable for Firefox to want to expand that, instead of catering to an ever shrinking pie.

I do partially agree: Mozilla needs to touch some grass. They need to get sane. But there is no “option to pick” presented to most of the world. And if Mozilla caters to the same oldschool Internet users like they always have, Firefox will die.

I don’t have a good solution. I’m just arguing that sentiment is applicable to an era we are no longer in.

but it won’t make the money people happy

Aka pay the Firefox devs.

I understand Mozilla wastes a lot of income, but still. This isn’t a hobbyist piece of software, it’s an expensive, labor intense project that needs constant professional attention.

The income part isn’t trivial, unless they find some alternative source of funding (like the Ladybird project apparently has).