Matisyahu's Blog

I’m reading through articles talking about how Mozilla is planning for the future in terms of generating revenue and growing Firefox market share. The thing is, if you want to grow market share then you need to win over the tech enthusiasts, the family member who is ‘good with computers’, the van guard of early adopters who then have a halo effect. What is the halo effect? when the iPod was launched and made available on on Windows the half effect was how the iPod introduced customers to an Apple product which enticed them to investigate what other products they sell.

In the case of Firefox, if they wish to increase market share then they need to win over the group of people I mentioned earlier – part of that is the work that they’ve been doing around extensions but refusing to cripple it to the extent that Google is doing with Chrome but that will only go so far. The other area where they need to work on is closing the functionality gap (link) (link) promptly so that firstly there compliance with web standards trail by a matter of weeks rather than months and secondly that they address issues of compatibility such as with when suing the Skype web based interface – the below error appears when using Firefox 123:

I have reported it however they’ve closed it off as a duplicate which is true but it is frustrating that something that was reported 5 years ago (link) with no work being done to address it. When someone reports a website incompatibility and the best you can do is “well, sucks to be you” then do nothing then don’t be surprised that your browser is promptly uninstalled and the user goes back to using Chrome. This is the same issue that Microsoft found when they had the EdgeHTML based Edge browser where their telemetry showed customer’s gave it a chance but when they had their first negative experience of the website not working properly they gave up and went for Chrome. If the person who would provide the halo effect has a negative experience then is that person going to suggest it to friends and family – to encourage them to move over?

At the moment I’m running Firefox 123 with uBlock Origin 1.56.0 and things are going well – there is a slight performance boost over Firefox 122 but overall everything is fairly reliable. I’m happy that Mozilla developers are fighting the good fight because a monoculture isn’t healthy for the technology sector so I hope that the Mozilla developers take on board my two points I made regarding web standards compliance and and website compatibility.