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Comment by charcircuit | Hacker News Reader

>Certainly not the Linux / open-source crowd

Appealing to that crowd is not big enough to grow it's market share from 2%.

Appealing to that crowd is how they grew their market share the first time around. The techies came first, trust was established, and then they recommended it to everyone else.

Do you really think AI features are going to move the needle here? Is your grandma going to think "Wow, Firefox can summarize my emails!" and switch web browsers?

Most of Firefox user base has always been on Windows, not Linux. What OS do you think the "techies" that promoted Firefox to replace IE in the first place were running?

Sure maybe 20 years ago. But back then Linux's userbase was also on Windows, because desktop Linux hadn't really become usable yet. I think nowadays Firefox's marketshare is a lot higher on e.g. Ubuntu (where it's the default) than it is on Windows (where Edge is the default).

According to Mozilla's own data at https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware Windows (7, 10 & 11) make up 84% of their user base.

That's not the claim being made and you know it

Only thing that wasn't usable on Linux 20 years ago was games.

Optimal marketing strategies change over time. What may have worked 20 years, may not be the right approach today. Many businesses struggle with this. They remember what they did to initial gain success, but that marketing route is no longer effective so they fail to figure out how to reach new people and eventually die.

>Do you really think AI features are going to move the needle here?

It's better than doing nothing at least.

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