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.
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...