Where's the 92% coming from? As far as I can tell the peak monthly active users was about 500 million [1] and they're currently at 208 million [2]. If they had shed 92% of their userbase I would expect their active users to be around 40 million. And if we're talking the past few years, they have lost users, but six years ago they were sitting at 231 million compared to today's 208 million, which if my calculator is correct, is a 11% loss not 92%.

1. https://venturebeat.com/dev/firefox-on-fire-with-500m-users-...

2. https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

The inconvenient fact for these anti-Mozilla narratives is that most of those losses were in the 2010s before any of the side bets that people point to. The side bets era is approximately the 2020s, and the big market share losses were approximately in the 2010s, and so the side bets couldn't retroactively have caused the market share losses, and the actual market share losses of the 2020s are real but not consistent with the hysterical narratives that come out in the hn comment sections.

And the other inconvenient fact for these polemics is that actual driver of market share change is Google's dominant position as the world's most visited website and as a distributor that gets to pick the default browser on more than one billion Android devices and counting.

When Microsoft Edge grew it's market share, it wasn't because users A|B tested it against Firefox and found it more preferable, it's because it was a preinstalled default that gained ground over device churn. When Opera had practically the perfect browser in 2011-2012, they didn't conquer the world. When Mozilla did their massive quantum overhaul that delivered huge advances in performance and stability, their market share continued to decline. There are natural experiments left right and center testing the claim that market share is a perfect 1 for 1 response to changes in browser design, and so far they've failed to confirm that hypothesis.

Meanwhile the accusation seems to change on a nightly basis. Yesterday someone was outraged that anyone would dispute that average users don't care about any of this, they just want whatever browser is in front of them as long as it's fast and stable enough (so they claimed). Today, you've tagged in to claim users are hyperfocused on the minutia of Mozilla's design decisions on a day to day basis. Tomorrow somebody's going to claim it's really about something else. The only thing these competing explanations have in common besides hysterical exaggeration, is that they rely on unverified Trust Me Bro stories that never address the inconvenient fact that Google's distribution advantage is the primary driver of market share change. It feels like recreational outrage.