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Comment by muizelaar | Hacker News Reader

1) I'm running a MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015)

2) My display options are set to "more space"

3) I loaded this hackernews thread.

4) Firefox and it's child processes are using <1% cpu.

If I aggressively scroll this page I can push the cpu usage up. We have a variety of fixes in the pipeline that will help with this (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1265824). That being said, only 4.7% of our users are on MacOS so it's more difficult to justify prioritizing work specific to that platform.

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4.7% of your users, but what percentage of web developers?

If that second number is substantially higher (and I personally suspect it is, but I don't have data backing that up) I think it would be very reasonable for Mozilla to prioritize MacOS. Getting web developers to use firefox makes firefox work better for everyone because it makes more sites work well with firefox.

Yeah, we do prioritize Mac disproportionately to its market share for that reason. It does sometimes happen that we have to make hard calls though, and that's what Jeff is referring to.

On that note, one of the key motivators behind WebRender (our new graphics backend) is that it provides hardware acceleration across all platforms, including mac (whereas our current Direct2D acceleration works only on Windows). So Mac graphics performance should generally improve once we get that shipped.

I build internal tools in my organization. Most of our developers are on MacOS and use Chrome day to day. Most of our users are on Windows. Whenever a browser specific issue comes up, we do our best to address it, but our first response is typically "go install Chrome". Chrome adoption is 97% internally, 2.5% Safari, and the remaining 0.5% is Edge. We have a 0% internal Firefox usage rate.

Draw from that what you may, but I bet that dynamic is happening in other places.

4.7% of your users... and how much of that is because you are finding it difficult to prioritise work specific to that platform? It sounds like a chicken-and-egg problem to me.

First off, thank you for all of your hardwork. I'm grateful for the existence of Mozilla.

However, I would like to ask... 4.7% translates to how many millions of people?

Now don't get me wrong: I'm a big fan of Firefox, and have used the dev edition as my main work browser since Quantum came out. However, that's a terrible attitude to take. You have half a billion dollars per year of revenue. The second-largest desktop platform should be a major priority. Certainly above all of the other non-core-Firefox projects you're working on, however cool they may be.

I also have this problem, and it's a reason not to use Firefox for me. Maybe you only have 4.7% of users on MacOS precisely because of problems like these?

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