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Market share was/is a means to an end.

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.

You're exactly right, and this threshold effect killed Opera's Presto engine. It may yet kill Gecko.

> If Firefox is destined for a market share of 2%, may as well get there quickly. A few years of decline vs a few months makes little difference in the long term.

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?

As a developer the lower the market share the less incentive there is to supporting it. I have stopped testing to see if my sites work on firefox and just focus on chromium and safari.

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.

> As a developer the lower the market share the less incentive there is to supporting it. I have stopped testing to see if my sites work on firefox and just focus on chromium and safari.

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 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.

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 read this kind of comment all the time, and it's something I almost never experience.

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".

In the early days of bloated SPAs, they used to run like absolute shit on Firefox (if they even worked at all).

Now everything runs like shit on every browser so things appear to be more equal.

Do you not see the causal connection between 2% and pages that runs only on Chrome? Those same incompetent devs would make it run on Firefox with a higher % without annoying you

There are also plenty of other direct-to-user benefits

Firefox is a pretty good browser, I wonder what caused people to switch.

Google ad campaigns, some years where Chrome genuinely felt snappier, Google pushing Chrome everywhere, Google sabotaging Firefox on their own websites.

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.

Firefox isn't the default browser on any of the popular consumer operating systems, so people don't need a reason to switch from it, they need a reason to switch to it.

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...

I remember when Firefox did themselves a bud light when they ousted Eich. People hold grudges.

Great, informative comment. Thank you.

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