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Blaming Mozilla's decreasing influence on a vague and alleged "Google-Apple-Microsoft industry alliance" isn't really accurate. While the corporate players inv

by Pacabel 12y ago

Blaming Mozilla's decreasing influence on a vague and alleged "Google-Apple-Microsoft industry alliance" isn't really accurate. While the corporate players involved may just happen to have interests that might align somewhat in this case, Mozilla has made its fair share of mistakes that have driven people away from Firefox. A browser with fewer users results in less influence for its creator and users, obviously. Phoenix, Firebird and Firefox before version 4 were generally excellent releases. This was back when Mozilla innovated and put out offerings that benefited users. These versions truly made people better off, and much of Firefox's rapid adoption was due to direct word-of-mouth recommendation. Then around Firefox 4, they decided to imitate Chrome, rather than leading the way. The release schedule changes caused broken add-ons for a very long time. This drove people away. They've also repeatedly made harmful UI changes, to the point where Firefox today is almost visually identical to Chrome. This has driven more people away. Meanwhile, there has only been minimal progress when it comes to improving the performance of Firefox, and reducing its memory usage. This, too, has driven more people away to browsers that manage to perform better, with fewer resources. (Spare us the are-we-fast-yet-style benchmarks that just don't seem to match the actual browsing experience.) Nobody but Mozilla themselves made Mozilla act in such a manner. Nobody but Mozilla themselves are responsible for driving away so many Firefox users. And so here we are today, with Firefox at perhaps 15% to 20% of the browser market, if even that. This is a far cry from their peak, when they were above 30%. They no longer offer an appealing product, which causes a decrease in the number of people using it, which directly results in the unfortunate lack of influence that we're seeing in this case.

jrochkind1 12y ago
At the point they decided to (as you say) imitate Chrome, they had _already_ lost quite a bit of market share to chrome, and the market share loss seemed to be continuing. Whether their choices to 'be more like Chrome' were appropriate responses or not you can debate, but dating their loss of influence or market share to after they decided to 'imitate Chrome' is a mistaken timeline. Personally, I'd say their loss of market to share from Chrome came from a few things: * Google's ability to promote Chrome was huge, since so many people look at google every day. This is huge, and perhaps we could just stop there, but... * Firefox had become bloated and slow and a bit crashy. It's just true. Google had the resources to write a high-quality new browser (which is pretty huge), and their browser was really really fast and really really stable compared to FF. (It is no longer so stark a difference, cause FF has much improved on speed and stability, and Chrome, as it continued to be developed got the inevitable bloat and bugs that software does. Although Google writes pretty good software, and Chrome is no exception). * FF just wasn't innovating much anymore in features, for users or developers. There wasn't a lot of (non-ideological) reason to use it, if something else came along. Developers matter because they influence other users (in part by designing their sites with certain browsers as their main testing environment), and developers aren't influenced as much by the fact that google.com tells them to download Chrome. But I think FF lost significant dev market/mindshare to Chrome too, in part because Chrome's dev tools were way better than FF's at that time. Now, if Mozilla made the right or wrong choices to try and recover, we can argue (I think overall they've made a lot of the right choices for the hand they were dealt), but at the point they changed to be 'more like Chrome', it was a reaction to already having lost a huge amount of market share. If they had kept on the course they were on, I think they'd have lost even more by now.
- Pacabel 12y ago
  Yes, I agree that some Firefox users had moved to Chrome early on, and that Google does have the potential to market Chrome more forcefully than Mozilla can for Firefox. I don't think that the timing is all that relevant, though. This has been a gradual process over several years now. The main point is that it wasn't so much what the other browsers and their vendors did that reduced Mozilla's influence, but rather that it was what Mozilla did (or didn't) do that has resulted in Firefox's decline. Mozilla stopped leading, and instead decided to follow Chrome. While doing this, they've bungled major Firefox features, ranging from automatic upgrades to the UI design, time and time again. They've neglected to sufficiently resolve long-standing resource usage problems. They've ignored feedback from disappointed Firefox users for years now. They've ignored that this direction obviously isn't helping to prevent users from leaving Firefox, while at the same time it's driving a lot of users away, and furthermore it isn't really bringing in any new users. In my opinion, Mozilla has been its own worst enemy these past several years. They've inflicted more harm on their own cause than any external opponent or competitor could have ever hoped to do.
nnethercote 12y ago
Don't you get tired writing variations of the same comment over and over again?

by Pacabel 12y ago

jrochkind1 12y ago

At the point they decided to (as you say) imitate Chrome, they had _already_ lost quite a bit of market share to chrome, and the market share loss seemed to be continuing. Whether their choices to 'be more like Chrome' were appropriate responses or not you can debate, but dating their loss of influence or market share to after they decided to 'imitate Chrome' is a mistaken timeline. Personally, I'd say their loss of market to share from Chrome came from a few things: * Google's ability to promote Chrome was huge, since so many people look at google every day. This is huge, and perhaps we could just stop there, but... * Firefox had become bloated and slow and a bit crashy. It's just true. Google had the resources to write a high-quality new browser (which is pretty huge), and their browser was really really fast and really really stable compared to FF. (It is no longer so stark a difference, cause FF has much improved on speed and stability, and Chrome, as it continued to be developed got the inevitable bloat and bugs that software does. Although Google writes pretty good software, and Chrome is no exception). * FF just wasn't innovating much anymore in features, for users or developers. There wasn't a lot of (non-ideological) reason to use it, if something else came along. Developers matter because they influence other users (in part by designing their sites with certain browsers as their main testing environment), and developers aren't influenced as much by the fact that google.com tells them to download Chrome. But I think FF lost significant dev market/mindshare to Chrome too, in part because Chrome's dev tools were way better than FF's at that time. Now, if Mozilla made the right or wrong choices to try and recover, we can argue (I think overall they've made a lot of the right choices for the hand they were dealt), but at the point they changed to be 'more like Chrome', it was a reaction to already having lost a huge amount of market share. If they had kept on the course they were on, I think they'd have lost even more by now.

Pacabel 12y ago
Yes, I agree that some Firefox users had moved to Chrome early on, and that Google does have the potential to market Chrome more forcefully than Mozilla can for Firefox. I don't think that the timing is all that relevant, though. This has been a gradual process over several years now. The main point is that it wasn't so much what the other browsers and their vendors did that reduced Mozilla's influence, but rather that it was what Mozilla did (or didn't) do that has resulted in Firefox's decline. Mozilla stopped leading, and instead decided to follow Chrome. While doing this, they've bungled major Firefox features, ranging from automatic upgrades to the UI design, time and time again. They've neglected to sufficiently resolve long-standing resource usage problems. They've ignored feedback from disappointed Firefox users for years now. They've ignored that this direction obviously isn't helping to prevent users from leaving Firefox, while at the same time it's driving a lot of users away, and furthermore it isn't really bringing in any new users. In my opinion, Mozilla has been its own worst enemy these past several years. They've inflicted more harm on their own cause than any external opponent or competitor could have ever hoped to do.

nnethercote 12y ago

Don't you get tired writing variations of the same comment over and over again?