When I read articles like this I'm always reminded of this little story about the law of averages : a few years after WW2 the US air force had a problem : their

When I read articles like this I'm always reminded of this little story about the law of averages : a few years after WW2 the US air force had a problem : their planes kept crashing. After some investigation they realized the issue was that the cockpit, based on old measurements, was too uncomfortable to control the plane properly for the bigger and taller pilots of the time. So they decided to take measurements from 4000 pilots, averaged them, and got ready to update the dimensions of the new universal pilot seat. Surely it would be adequate for most pilots that were just measured to create the new design. However one young recruit decided to check exactly how many of the 4000 pilots would be within 30% of average for the 10 most critical dimensions. The answer : none. Every pilot was different, and had a combination of different noone else had. The new pilot seat would have to be a fully customizable one, full of knobs that would allow it to be fit to each specific pilot. You can apply this analogy here (and in fact to most software) : all users use a differt combination of features. Maybe just a few use compact mode. And just a few use RSS inside the browser. And just a few use some other little used feature that was removed without making the headlines. But those are not the same users. When you make the intersection of all those sets of people, turns out it's almost all of them. I don't know if that explains the decline of Firefox's market share, but it certainly is part of the reason.