> it's axiomatic that Firefox wouldn't be in such a horrifying shape if they were focused on it
In my experience many things come to be in horrifying shape because of focus as well, so I don't agree with your logic.
> which is why they should jettison everything that isn't Firefox or doesn't serve Firefox.
I mean, 4 / 6 of the products on their product pages have Firefox in the name[1]? Really begs the question on what you mean by "doesn't serve firefox." I guess you mean you don't like the VPN or Pocket?
> if they made Firefox into a power user browser again, somehow, then power users would flock to it again and bring in some of their peers and family
I think maybe the reason we have different views on this is that we might view the user base differently. I'm not sure how you mean "power users" - it's a fuzzy term - but I suggest we start at the number of people in the worldwide IT industry[2]. Probably not all super users, but likely more technically savvy. It seems there are about 55,000,000 of us, but that's in an internet user population of 4.66 billion[3]. That puts the power user population at about 1.4% of the people represented in the market share statistics. So if global relevance is your goal, I'm not sure that the power users are gonna do it. Even if Firefox dominated the market they would need to bring a lot of friends and family along to get the people needed to push Firefox up ~6%.
The web is just way, way bigger than it used to be and is serving way more people. I totally agree that Firefox is failing to find a convincing foothold in the modern web, but I'm unconvinced that appealing to power users would benefit the browser or the web more than any other group. I also think that, if Firefox caters to a particular demographic with unusually deep expertise, that they risk moving the browser in a direction that's less appealing to users who lack that deep expertise.
In my experience many things come to be in horrifying shape because of focus as well, so I don't agree with your logic.
> which is why they should jettison everything that isn't Firefox or doesn't serve Firefox.
I mean, 4 / 6 of the products on their product pages have Firefox in the name[1]? Really begs the question on what you mean by "doesn't serve firefox." I guess you mean you don't like the VPN or Pocket?
> if they made Firefox into a power user browser again, somehow, then power users would flock to it again and bring in some of their peers and family
I think maybe the reason we have different views on this is that we might view the user base differently. I'm not sure how you mean "power users" - it's a fuzzy term - but I suggest we start at the number of people in the worldwide IT industry[2]. Probably not all super users, but likely more technically savvy. It seems there are about 55,000,000 of us, but that's in an internet user population of 4.66 billion[3]. That puts the power user population at about 1.4% of the people represented in the market share statistics. So if global relevance is your goal, I'm not sure that the power users are gonna do it. Even if Firefox dominated the market they would need to bring a lot of friends and family along to get the people needed to push Firefox up ~6%.
The web is just way, way bigger than it used to be and is serving way more people. I totally agree that Firefox is failing to find a convincing foothold in the modern web, but I'm unconvinced that appealing to power users would benefit the browser or the web more than any other group. I also think that, if Firefox caters to a particular demographic with unusually deep expertise, that they risk moving the browser in a direction that's less appealing to users who lack that deep expertise.
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/products/
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1126677/it-employment-wo...
[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/617136/digital-populatio...