They spend more on developing the browser now than they ever have in their history, and they remain the most successful independently financed browser in the history of ever. Other major browsers have to be financed by trillion dollar companies based on independent revenue streams.
The predicament right now is that AI might displace search, which is a problem if you make money from search licensing. It's not yet clear what the new normal is going to be in an AI first paradigm. But what is clear is that doing nothing means the world will pass you by when everything changes.
> someone more serious picks up the mantle.
So don't sour the victory, it'll cost you the war
Note that just not bogging down Firefox with AI features is not enough here. Firefox market share has been going downhill for most of my life, long before they appointed this new AI-crazed CEO. I don't know what the solution is, but it's clear that it's not Mozilla.
The problem with this revisionist history is that it's completely helpless to address the actual dynamics that led to the rise of Chrome, and attempts to tell the entire story in terms of add-ons tweaks to the Firefox user interface, even though that has nothing to do with the change in market share. The major drivers were the world's most visited website pushing a new browser and preloading it as a default on billions of mobile devices. Mozilla could have executed perfectly and still been sidelined.
But a few bad new cycles in the early 2020s crystallized a negative attitude that perfectly fed the hedonic skepticism of Internet comment sections, and so an echo chamber emerged of people reinterpreting that history as if purchasing Pocket or running a VPN somehow retroactively caused all the market share change.
Nobody's ever bothered to like look at the factual timeline, but once they hear it repeated enough they get confident enough to repeat it themselves and on and on the snowball goes.
Firefox market shares are the best of any non OEM browser[1] and is beating competition from a number of OEM browser (like Samsung's one on mobile) and is fairly competitive compared to the desktop version of Safari (only 1% below on desktop market share).
Yes market share have been going downhill but mostly because they were abnormaly high for something that doesn't ship with the computer in late 90's early 2000's due to:
- the inertia of being born from the ashes of Netscape, which was the default browser at the beginning of eternal september.
- it had its highest market share at a time when its strongest competition was Internet Explorer: a magnet for malwares.
So its market shares are quite good actually. Note that Opera (and now Vivaldi) never got close despite being appreciated by many.
[1] yes it comes with many linux distro but it is sold with virtually zero device.