Ask Slashdot: What Should Mozilla Do To Boost Firefox's Market Share?
'Mozilla's Firefox once commanded a large chunk of the browser market share, but now it stands under a pitiful 5 percent. Google money removes need to compete from a management POV as they'll get paid either way but they're still leaving money on the table.
What should Mozilla do to help Firefox regain its lost market share? Not so long ago Internet Explorer was only used to download Firefox when geeks reloaded Windows machines for others. Today, Edge, however pathetic, still outranks Firefox. Were FF not arguably the best available browser for Linux, share would be even less.
Were you the king for a day what would you do to make Firefox great again? If you dropped or deprecated Firefox what shooed you off? This is not about Firefox being good or bad but about regaining casually discarded market share. '
-- source: https://ask.slashdot.org/story/22/12/14/1626235
Cheers, Peter
On Thu, 15 Dec 2022 09:50:21 +1300, Peter Reutemann quoted:
'Mozilla's Firefox once commanded a large chunk of the browser market share, but now it stands under a pitiful 5 percent.'
What is a “market”? It’s where participants trade things of value. Like where one party provides a good or service to another, and the other party pays them money for it.
Where is the “market” when you are downloading and using a piece of software for free? There isn’t one.
On 15/12/2022 12.58, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
On Thu, 15 Dec 2022 09:50:21 +1300, Peter Reutemann quoted:
'Mozilla's Firefox once commanded a large chunk of the browser market share, but now it stands under a pitiful 5 percent.'
What is a “market”? It’s where participants trade things of value. Like where one party provides a good or service to another, and the other party pays them money for it.
Where is the “market” when you are downloading and using a piece of software for free? There isn’t one.
What about "barter"? No "money"!
What fair-exchange? Peter mentions AKL-events at a HAM-meeting, and I mention HAM-events vice-versa.
Worse: what is "money"? Fast disappearing coins and notes which only claim to represent 'value'.
Mozilla 'give' me a $free browser (in fact they incur significant costs). I respond with feedback. 'Telemetry' informs usage. Usage-stats can be used to design training courses.
...and so the list/chain goes on.
Meantime, the economists amongst us will invert 'value' to consider "opportunity cost". If Firefox did not exist, what would be the socio-economic effect? To imagine that, one only has to cast-back a few years, to when MS-Internet Explorer was the dominant web-browser, and market-saturation led them to allow the facility (and web.dev generally) to stagnate. "The Market" reacted to that, with a "Correction", and now we have Chromium (and MS-Edge), considerably improved 'products', and a rapid pace of change.
A market is a meeting place. A part of society. The word can be used in both narrow definition and wide application. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/market.asp
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participants (3)
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DL Neil -
Lawrence D'Oliveiro -
Peter Reutemann