Firefox took marketshare from IE when that was impossible. It could do it again with Chrome, if things change a bit.
Some problems with Mozilla are that they don't do community management well any more. In the old days, there were amazing grassroots-driven projects like spreadfirefox.com. It is not like that any more. Grassroots supporters have trouble participating, even if they try.
For example, I tried to create a Firefox programmers' meetup group in Berkeley, and even though some community people from Mozilla joined the group, no one from Mozilla would reply to my inquiries. (I still would like to restart that idea, but I don't have time to chase them down. We have 4,000 members in our various meetup groups at the moment.)
Another problem is that they are doing things that make their most-dedicated core users lose interest. They should have realized the incredible enthusiasm for Firefox that plugins like Pentadactyl were creating. They're killing off the API that it depends on. Instead, they should have funded the development of Pentadactyl and made it a reason why tech-savvy users choose Firefox. Tech-savvy users drive adoption, but they have abandoned many of their tech-savvy supporters.
There is still hope for Firefox if they are able to get the messages about privacy across. Chrome is slower to use out of the box, partially because of the auto-completion algorithm that tends to send people to Google Search to click on ads before reaching their destination. The older Firefox search box didn't waste users' time like that. (Recently it changed so that it shows titles rather than URLs, which is also slow, because there is an extra security risk of going to phishing sites, if you don't stop to look at the URLs.)
Also, Firefox is the only mobile browser that allows add-ons, so that's another benefit that they should be promoting.
Firefox took marketshare from IE because Microsoft abandoned it for several years (IE6) then did an half-assed update with IE7. It was a big pile of poop and Firefox succeeded not because it was a great product because because it was the right product at the right time.
For Chrome on the other hand, its near-monopoly situation is worrisome but it's actually a pretty good product. So there is no pragmatic reasons to leave it for Firefox, only ideological reasons and it's a driver nearly not as powerful as suffering every day.
It's pragmatic to leave Chrome for the exact same reasons people left IE, the parent company has stopped improving the product.
Chrome sold people on the promise of a much faster, lighter-weight browser than the heavy but competent Firefox of the time, a promise that Chrome no longer delivers on. The "added users" Mozilla has claimed in 2016 were developers realizing Chrome wasn't light or speedy anymore and if they were going to use a browser hogging all the RAM on their system they may as well use one with a functional extensions ecosystem.
Chrome may not be comparatively "as bad" as IE was at the peak of Firefox's success, but it's still suffering from the same disease.
Exactly right. I moved to Chrome when it came out, and moved back to Firefox a couple of years ago because of Chrome's growing memory-hogging problems and its inability to handle hundreds of tabs.
It hogs battery life like nobody's business. I use Safari on my Mac because I want to use my MBP for more than 4 hours unplugged, even though Safari is objectively worse in every other category.
If Firefox can deliver near-Chrome features with better battery life, I'll switch and never look back.
Firefox took marketshare from IE, because IE was terrible. It had no tabs. ActiveX was a security risk. Mozilla had amazing community management back then, and the community was completely in love with the product.
Many of those core supporters have been lost, because Mozilla stopped listening to them.
Chrome was able to gain users rapidly, because Google put a Google Chrome ad in the corner of the search results pages, claiming that it was faster, even when that claim became dubious.
The thing is chrome is an open source browser with a lot of really smart people working to make it better everyday . IE, was none of theses things when Firefox came into the market. You also have to remember many of the core developers who built Firefox went on to build Chrome. And then even many of developers that built IE went on to work on chrome. In 2007, they had pulled together an amazing team to kick off the browser that is now chrome. IMO - Mozilla should use blink and be the privacy focused browser.
There are no new engines that aren't forks of existing engines aside from Servo which is still experimental.
Aside from EdgeHTML all the major browser engines are open source. It takes several years and lots of money to create a from scratch engine compatible with the majority of websites people visit.
There is no money made directly from the browser itself. All of the money is made from products or services around the browser. Which is not a viable model for anyone but the biggest companies.
Not enough people care about how unwise monocultures are. Network effects push people to the thing everyone else uses.
Tech-savvy users don't drive adoption. They provide insight on product direction to help a nascent company with an immature tech product cross the chasm to mainstream usage, saving it from the usual fate of foundering aimlessly until it runs out of funds.
These two suggestions -- Mozilla getting involved in meetups and not deprecating an API allowing vim navigation in the browser -- would take Mozilla even farther from relevance, assuming any nonzero opportunity cost to those actions.
I think that they do to some extent. People ask their tech-savvy friends what to buy/use, or they use what work computers provide, which are configured by tech-savvy users.
> Mozilla getting involved in meetups
Not only meetups -- I'm talking about the feeling of the community in general. I've been using the browser since Mozilla Application Suite and was a very active early evangelist. The community was much different back then.
> not deprecating an API allowing vim navigation in the browser
I think that you are underestimating the enthusiasm people have for some of those Firefox tools. :)
> would take Mozilla even farther from relevance
Re-creating the grassroots-driven community would not make Mozilla less relevant. It's exactly what they need to do to survive.
Because they have to. Firefox could remain an unusable single-threaded XML behemoth, but what point is there in your wonderful extensible browser if it's an unmaintainable slow mess?
It may be true that they have to abandon it, but they should be very careful to listen to developers on what features the new API should have. Extensions like Pentadactyl keep some of their biggest supporters from leaving Firefox. Having those kinds of true fans is like having free employees that will tirelessly evangelize your product. It's cheaper to cater to them and have them do your marketing than hiring marketing employees.
IMO Mozilla had started allienating core users the moment Firefox reached 1.0 and became Mozilla's flagship product. The browser component of Mozilla Suite had useful features that were simply dropped from Firefox. (Also around this time Mozilla started the Mozilla(R) Firefox(TM) nonsense which led to Debian's Iceweasel and such. I remember that there was some kind of legal issue with having Firefox logo on cake and banner for FF 1.0 release party in Prague, which fortunately got ignored)
For me, firefox became completely unusable few months ago when somebody decided that pulseaudio is the way to go and nothing else should be supported.
I cannot imagine someone bemoaning FF 1.0 and trying to run a pure ALSA system with no Pulse is representing enough of a demo that gaining them back would increase Mozilla's marketshare.
Some problems with Mozilla are that they don't do community management well any more. In the old days, there were amazing grassroots-driven projects like spreadfirefox.com. It is not like that any more. Grassroots supporters have trouble participating, even if they try.
For example, I tried to create a Firefox programmers' meetup group in Berkeley, and even though some community people from Mozilla joined the group, no one from Mozilla would reply to my inquiries. (I still would like to restart that idea, but I don't have time to chase them down. We have 4,000 members in our various meetup groups at the moment.)
Another problem is that they are doing things that make their most-dedicated core users lose interest. They should have realized the incredible enthusiasm for Firefox that plugins like Pentadactyl were creating. They're killing off the API that it depends on. Instead, they should have funded the development of Pentadactyl and made it a reason why tech-savvy users choose Firefox. Tech-savvy users drive adoption, but they have abandoned many of their tech-savvy supporters.
There is still hope for Firefox if they are able to get the messages about privacy across. Chrome is slower to use out of the box, partially because of the auto-completion algorithm that tends to send people to Google Search to click on ads before reaching their destination. The older Firefox search box didn't waste users' time like that. (Recently it changed so that it shows titles rather than URLs, which is also slow, because there is an extra security risk of going to phishing sites, if you don't stop to look at the URLs.)
Also, Firefox is the only mobile browser that allows add-ons, so that's another benefit that they should be promoting.