To be honest, market share shouldn't ever have been Baker's goal and losing it isn't necessarily a black mark against her. Firefox should have a vision of what it wants a browser and the internet to look like and be working to make software that supports that. Firefox seems to just be following along as Chrome with some minor tweaks [0] and that is the real problem. Google's vision of the internet is not what Firefox should be working to implement. There are deep strategic issues here that go far beyond market share. I'm personally happy to use niche software, I don't care what other people are using (Linux reached my desktop a long time ago). But it is hard to see what even Mozilla thinks the point of Firefox is.
One of the things that makes Brave interesting to me is that it sees a web where middle men get cut out through the use of cryptocurrency. Is that going to work? Probably not. But it is a different take on what the internet could be. We need competitors like that. Even for privacy; it is hard to tell who Mozilla thinks the internet should look like. I'd hazard little change from now except without 3rd party cookies. That isn't a very impressive vision.
[0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browsers/compare/chrom...
Mozilla positioned Firefox in part as a reference for how web standards should behave (*), particularly for ones where Chrome/IE/Safari diverged with competing non-standard implementations.
But for that to work in the real world, not just at W3C debates, you need major websites to care if they function correctly on your browser. And for them to care, enough people have to be using your browser that these companies see a business case for spending money to add your browser to project plans and QA test matrixes as a compatibility target.
That decision is heavily informed by market share, whether global or as a percentage of the site’s own access records. In particular, double digits is a rough threshold for that, and that was pretty much Mozilla’s target. 50% would be wonderful but 10%+ let them assert standards in the ecosystem via the implicit threat of users leaving a site if Firefox didn’t work.
As a test professional at the time, one of the most discouraging things I saw after leaving Mozilla was Firefox dropping off all the test plans I knew about when they hit single digits. I’d poke at that decision where I had influence, and would basically get back a response that “Firefox is dead, just look at the numbers.”
(*) I’m pointedly ignoring some of the more aggressive introductions of things like device-interface APIs crucial to making a browser engine act like a phone OS, etc. Ultimately, someone has to build a working implementation before it’ll become a standard, anyway. There’s a race aspect for new ground and Mozilla was part of that.
But generally speaking, where there was an actual recognized standard, Firefox used it and not some homegrown alternative. So websites also had to develop to that standard to function correctly for a significant percentage of users.
I think this whole discussion of market share smacks a little too much of evaluating a president by the country’s GDP. Useful for a pithy remark, but doing any sort of detailed analysis seems doomed. I think the factors you listed are far more relevant
How does that play into your decision to use Firefox or any other browser? I'm a Firefox user and I care nothing about market share. I get annoyed if I stumble upon a page managed by incompetent devteams and thus only runs on Chrome, but that's a quick in-and-out.
Why do you care about share? Why do you feel it's relevant, specially if people are pushed to use Chrome or Edge through unethical means?
A few years ago Firefox was my main browser and I got sick of the constant changes and just use chrome, brave and safari now. I never missed FF for one moment.
I remember when Firefox was the faster leaner version of the mozilla browser and now they have bloated it up and forgotten its foundational principles.
It's one thing to claim to not include Firefox in your list of supported browsers.
It's an entirely different thing to claim you only support Chrome and Safari.
If you are a developer and only target browsers from Apple and Google, this is a personal decision you're making to purposely ignore around 25% of your whole market share. This is not Firefox's or Microsoft's Opera's problem. This is your problem.
I read this kind of comment all the time, and it's something I almost never experience.
The only feature that I want in Firefox that I need to use Chromium for is Web Bluetooth, and that's because I use a Bangle.js smartwatch, which is even more niche than using Firefox is.
It's very hard for me to understand why so many people think they routinely encounter websites that don't work in Firefox.
I agree, fortunately that's somewhat rare. It still stings if you come across a broken site that you need to use frequently. I'm concerned that Google's "extend" phase is just ramping up, with incompetent devteams confusing "Chrome has a large market share" with "it's ok to publish a broken site if it works with Chrome".
Now everything runs like shit on every browser so things appear to be more equal.
There are also plenty of other direct-to-user benefits
Which Mozilla could provide if they'd spend more resources on Firefox and less on random tangents.
But now Google is doing their work for them by making Chrome worse:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/google-chrome-will-l...
Generally speaking, we have seen that people are okay with handing over the web and all their data to Google, if a button press registers 20ms faster.
In 10 years she'd be making 100M per year and have 100 customers :P
Now if that person caused the downward slide to begin with, that's a different conversation. Again, I don't know the internals of Mozilla well enough to make an educated argument one way or the other.
Instead it doubled and then increased again (wasn’t it more like $7m by the end?)
The product's global importance is now a tiny fraction of what it was 15 years ago, and the person during whose tenure this happened was recently making 10x as much as back then. TEN TIMES.
And whoever approved that obscene compensation thought this was a good idea.
I used to be a big Firefox fan, but the last 10 years made me abandon it, I don’t even check if my sites work on it anymore because the market share it has is so tiny. My time is better spent making sure it works with Safari...
Over the past few years Mozilla has increased revenue while reducing the percent derived from Google with expenses slightly down.
And it's absurd to put the fault for the declining market share purely at the feet of Mozillas leadership. Not to say they were blameless, but when Google threw its weight behind Chrome, including massive ad campaigns on billboards, pushing it on its web properties, and regularly breaking Firefox on their own websites for no technical reasons, you can't reasonably expect Firefox to just magically maintain their market share. That said, at the upper end you could look at Germany, where Firefox is still between 10-20% (depending on the estimate you look at), as what could have been achievable more broadly.
This committee has 3 members. One of which was… Laura Chambers, the new CEO. Source: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/
So she basically decided how much she would be paid. For me it's a clear conflict of interest.
They explain here how the compensation for the CEO is decided: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2021/a...
It's basically based on what other similarly-sized tech start-ups pay. Which is ridiculous to me as Mozilla is basically a Google-funded open source project.
Also, who was on the nominating committee when Laura Chambers was nominated to the Mozilla Corporation in the first place? Baker. With one other member of the compensation committee, and another person.
This seems also to be a conflict of interest to me.
You'd really need to decide if you thought their marketshare would go down faster or not with someone else.