> The most important thing is compatibility with major sites at this point. if people's banking or health insurance page reject Firefox, people are just going to use Chrome.

That's really not the primary issue, although it will drive people back to their preferred browser if that is an issue. Firefox is fighting an uphill battle against default browsers, which are Edge on Windows, Safari on MacOS/iOS, and Chrome on Android phones. You can't just say "We're compatible with all the sites that already work with the browser you use" and expect people to switch. You need genuinely useful and unique selling points that can be appreciated by the average person in order to overcome the default's inertia.

That's not an argument. Firefox made all of its share back in the day by being better than IE even though IE was everywhere on Windows computers.

Firefox gained marketshare against Internet Explorer by being significantly better than Internet Explorer. I remember enthusiastically switching to Firefox, especially because it had a mouse gestures addon and was just so much faster than Internet Explorer. I also switched to Chrome because it felt like a big jump from a Firefox that had become bloated and slow. I also got my family members to switch. It was just plainly obvious how much better they were at the time.

Since then I've used Safari, Firefox, Brave, Chromium, Chrome, and a variety of other browsers for long stretches of time. All of them have large sets of upsides and drawbacks associated with them, but Firefox doesn't really have much of anything that I can enthusiastically point to as reasons to switch for my non-tech obsessed family members. That's a problem that Firefox desperately needs to overcome if it wants to continue existing.

So the market grows in size, almost none of that growth being distributed to Firefox, hence the slow and endless bleed.

The people who wouldn't use the aforementioned browsers are Firefox's only hope - otherwise, why not just use Chrome or Edge? Firefox isn't going to win by being a more faithful Chrome copy (this current strategy has failed them for years).

> performance, ad blocking

Blocking privacy-invasive garbage and ads (aka spam) will often improve performance.

So you'd still indirectly benefit from a user-focused, privacy friendly browser even if you don't explicitly care about privacy.

Two reasons: 1. inertia - I’ve been using it for 17 years and it’s still good enough to not switch, and 2. Google already knows too much about me, I don’t want to give them even more data through their browser. So I guess I do care about privacy…

Firefox needs to find a space for itself in the browser market, not try (and fail) to take Chrome's space. Focus on offering features that Chrome doesn't offer and the people looking for those features will come. Stop removing customization and hackability.

Unfortunately, I think none of the people in control actually understand this, probably because they're the kind of people who are happy using Chrome themselves.

Mozilla can't push their browser. They don't have Android, Youtube, various other services with billions of users. Not even Microsoft is successful in pushing Edge (except for the corporate world) as they too have no giant consumer-facing services.

Moreover, Firefox is virtually absent on mobile (0.5% market share). On massive websites (some I see at work), Firefox doesn't even show up on dashboards, it's not even in the top 10. Some weird obscure regional browsers outrank it.

Technically speaking, Firefox is an irrelevant browser and has been for several years now. You may love it for sentimental or philosophical reasons, but the real world cares little about that.

Anyway, the bleeding will continue without a leverage to push the browser. It's not an engineering problem.

It kind of is.

Back in the day Firefox managed to steal a significant chunk of Internet Explorer's marketshare just by being better.

It can pull off the same nowadays - there's a major disease currently plaguing the web that a browser is perfectly positioned to eradicate: advertising. The code is already written and licensed permissively (uBlock Origin) and all they need is to bundle it (just like they are currently bundling Pocket).

That's the ticket to Firefox's resurgence - be better than the competition in a way that the competition can't beat (because it would be counter-productive to their advertising-based business model). A simple side-by-side comparison of a major newspaper's homepage in FF vs Chrome will sell it to the masses.

Why did IE so quickly destroy paid browser market then languish for so many years? Because they had a lock on desktop market share. Google and Apple just have to be mediocre because they own the hardware, services, and/or distribution.

Mozilla cannot take from other business arms to bankroll its browser. It has to sell defaults, ads, or find other markets.

The problem isn't just defaults, it's that Mozilla isn't giving people enough reasons to actually switch. A stock Firefox install isn't going to give you any major benefits over Chrome, and the only benefit (ad-blocking - but with an extension you need to install manually) isn't something Mozilla is looking to capitalise on.

Mozilla can win over the masses in one day by just embedding uBlock Origin and using that fact in their PR and marketing - no bullshit useless features such as "Colorways" or Pocket, no dubious social justice/political activism, instead, just say "the web sucks and Firefox makes it tolerable" with a side-by-side comparison of FF vs a stock browser on a popular newspaper's website.

My point is what FF did then was unusual, requiring the incumbent to be negligent for a long time. Chrome and its derivatives are moving quickly. (Perhaps even wrecklessly so given security implications of some of their 'standards'.) Chrome also sets the standards Mozilla must now follow to keep up, and exceed to overtake it.

Isn't it strange that even huge well funded competitors have all given up and just fork Chrome? They do it because they cannot compete starting from their own foundation. Chrome is too entrenched and moving too fast.

> Mozilla can win over the masses in one day by just embedding uBlock Origin and using that fact in their PR and marketing.

Brave has ad blocking preinstalled, so does Chrome to some extent. I don't think Mozilla would stand out with UO alone. And even if it did and became dominant what would that mean for creators who are ad supported?

But the incumbents are negligent. Their browsers, based on their business models, no longer serve the needs of their users. This is an opportunity for Firefox.

> Brave has ad blocking preinstalled, so does Chrome to some extent

Haven't used Brave so can't comment on it, but Chrome doesn't and can't have powerful adblocking due to its parent company's business model - not to mention that one reason to block ads would be privacy which is also a problem with Google, so it would be a non-starter even if it was blocking ads.

> even if it did and became dominant what would that mean for creators who are ad supported?

I wonder how we dealt with this argument back in the day where OSes were full of security holes and the antivirus industry was starting out?

The only remaining share of Firefox is because of these users. Good luck dropping the ball on that one and not ending with a 0% share.

How many people consciously make an informed choice about which browser they use, to begin with? When I entered college, we had a system that required you to install a spyware client that certified to the network that you were not running any file sharing software - unless you were on an unsupported OS (as identified by the user-agent string), in which case it just let you pass the registration process without certification. After figuring this out, I did this for my entire dorm floor, installing Firefox in the process (as that was the browser for which I knew a quick way of setting up a user-agent spoofing addon off the top of my head). The result was an additional about 30 Firefox users because of one power user's preference of it, which was entirely based on customisability and privacy considerations. Half of the people I set it up for probably wouldn't even have known how to replace or uninstall it if they turned out to hate everything about it, and conversely no amount of pandering to non-technical users would have gotten them to install it for themselves.

Agreed, very little. It doesn't mean privacy isn't important for Firefox right now because the only users they have left are those using it for privacy or ideological reasons.

That is the entire truth. Privacy, Telemetry and Linux are red herrings to increasing market share and do not make any money or help Firefox since the majority of users do not care about any of this. If a website isn't compatible with Firefox or is broken and has missing extensions, then the users will just move to Chrome and never look back.

Thanks to the re-usability of the Chromium engine it has created many derivatives, just like the ecosystem of Linux distros which people are free to choose. This is what Firefox could have been to cement the browser market and Firefox was once ahead at one point, but did nothing to keep it up and watched Google over take them.

What a disaster Mozilla has been for the past 14 years and yet they are still unable to make money outside of accepting Google's money.

So Mozzilla doesn't need to be a power user browser but it does have to appeal to the things tech people want. That's how it has a future that's how it keeps going. Because FF is open source, it doesn't need a revenue stream, shareholders or a board. At the end of the day it just needs enough people who love it to keep using and supporting it.

It would be a delusionally ambitious premature optimization for Firefox to target the majority of users. Firefox needs to target a niche well, then grow that niche. If that niche were stamp collectors or people who read historical romance novels, Firefox would barely lose any market share if it focused on them exclusively and converted them all.

Side by side scroll a recipe website with chrome vs adblocked FF on the same device. Chrome one is slower, half the content is ads, some of them autoplaying videos with sound!

FF experience is the pure content.

Dunno about all the other nonsense, a lot of the mobile web is utterly unusable without adblocking.