A shrinking Firefox faces endangered species status

Chrome integrates all of my stuff in to my gmail account - don't need to have yet another "Mozilla cloud" account.

GMail works better on Chrome (faster loading/rendering from my experience).

Writing this from FF on Fedora 21, I still use FF from time to time to see what they are up to and test stuff.

At this point I don't see the purpose FF serves - Chrome ate their lunch as the portable "better than the default browser" replacement and native browsers are becoming decent. With Win 10 IE should get even better (evergreen AFAIK), there is plenty of competition between Microsoft/Apple/Android and they all seem to be behind the standardization effort and Chrome is there to provide a cross platform solution those not satisfied with native browsers.

The only inspiring tech from Mozilla that I know about is Rust - which is (ironically) a native/statically compiled language. Even Microsoft has done bigger stuff for web dev than Mozilla (TypeScript, OSS/cross platform ASP.NET, VS web dev tools + free VS) and Google shouldn't even need mentioning. The ASM.js stuff is iffy/niche - I'm much more hopeful things like Sane/Sound script. I don't see how Mozilla is going to stay relevant in the future - maybe if the Servo yields real gains with the experimental stuff they are doing and it gets integrated in to FF - but that's years out in the meantime it's just going to keep sinking.

So let's actually read the article:

>the iconic browser dropped another three-tenths of a percentage point in analytics firm Net Applications' tracking, ending February with 11.6%.

That seems a lot less serious than is actually made out. Lets find out some more about Net Applications:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Applications

That says to read this: http://web.archive.org/web/20081205105936/http://www.thestan...

>The company tracks browser usage -- how many hits are coming from browser A vs. browser B. In November, several factors skewed the results toward Safari. Thanks to the presidential election (which kept people visiting news sites) and the Thanksgiving holiday, an unusually high percentage of overall browsing in November happened outside of the office. So it's no surprise that browsers with higher home usage, such as Safari, would do better. (Firefox also did better, gaining more than 20%, while Internet Explorer -- popular in corporate environments -- dropped below 70% for the first time.)

>Net Applications tracks usage across its more than 40,000 client websites. Although these sites are located all over the world, they're skewed towards Europe and North America. That happens to be where Apple has a strong presence. Vince Vizzaccaro, the Net Application's Executive Vice President for Marketing and Strategic Alliances, acknowledged the problem and informed The Industry Standard that they will start weighting their statistics by country in January. "We need to better represent Asia and Africa," Vizzaccaro said.

Oh right, so they get access to the logs of "client websites", of which microsoft and apple seem to be some of the largest. So scientifically lets open the logs of my sites and see what browsers are represented there. Oh dear, it looks like safari has a 30% market share on mine over the last week. But what's this? Virtually all those hits are from the same IP address group. Oh it turns out that a whole bunch of mac scrappers hit my sites. And look! The same user shows up both as a internet explorer hit, a safari hit, and a chrome hit, turns out the same person uses different devices and the default browser that comes with each. This would be three different people according to Net Applications.

Every single one of those had a very vocal minority protest the change. Nearly every single one was very easy to leave as an option; at least as an about:config toggle. And every time they didn't, they lost a lot of those vocal users to another browser. And this happens so often that, well, this is why Firefox's market share is currently at 11.6%.

You can either have a browser that your users think is pretty great with a 50% market share; or a browser that your users think is absolutely fantastic with a 10% market share. Firefox has chosen the latter. It's no surprise that the few remaining users love it: it's a browser highly customized to exactly what they like, to the exclusion of everyone else.

I've done and seen this exact same thing with my own software. It's not nearly at the scale of Firefox, but the effect has been the same. I went from catering to what my users wanted and having tons of options, with about 100,000 downloads per release; to now doing things the way I want, with few options, and about 10,000 downloads a release. Many people now insist on using a release I put out three years ago; kind of like how I insist on sticking with Firefox 28.

It's fine if you want to go the route of making the software you want, rather than the software your users want, just don't act surprised about the inevitable result.