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Comment by smsm42 | Hacker News Reader

You realize that people that don't care won't even know what Firefox is? Being a niche player and scaring away niche people is the most stupid strategy possible.

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Being a small player and throwing away any hope of expanding your user base by building for people who will complain no matter what you do is, well, something!

neglecting existing customers in an attempt to gain larger market share is certainly a play

Ah yes, the customers of Mozilla, who are certainly paying users and not just people whining and saying BACK IN MY DAYS IN THE LAST MILLENIUM IT WAS DIFFERENT.

Get over it gramps, things are changing. Mozilla spent ten years trying to mostly appeal to these people by staying very conservative, and it got them nothing but abuse and harassment from people not realising that staying stuck in the past is a death sentence for Mozilla.

You want to save Mozilla, burn down Google first. The ecosystem in which they are evolving isn't driven by them.

I solemnly proclaim I would pay reasonable money for a browser (Mozilla or otherwise) if their maker would truly try to make the best browser possible and succeed at least partially at it, instead of serving a thousand of agendas none of which is making the best browser possible. The sole reason why I am not Mozilla's customer is exactly that - because they do not see me as their potential customer and don't care about my needs. Of course, they are free to do that but the result is people like me aren't giving them their money. So they have to go to Google.

like I said, neglecting existing customers in an attempt to gain larger market share is certainly a play

the rest of your post seems to hinge on some judgement you think I made about that

> You want to save Mozilla, burn down Google first.

Uhhh... 85% of mozilla's revenue comes from Google via the search deal. In a theoretical scenario where a genie waved a magic wand tomorrow and google went "poof", disappearing, mozilla would be in a dire emergency for lack of revenue.

It would. But Mozilla has zero long term survival chance in the current ecosystem. The economics are just not there, there cannot be more than one big browser in the way this system works.

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