Charles U. Farley
Firefox has slipped from an all time high of 20% market share down to a measly 4%, and half a percent on mobile which has far more users than desktop.
At some point I started jokingly saying that Mozilla exists solely so that Google can pretend it has competition. Now I say this with all seriousness.
I think we need to start thinking about what a post-Mozilla world looks like. Can Firefox keep up without a Google-funded corporation behind it?
Charles U. Farley
@ArneBab I’m also wondering what fraction of that 4% doesn’t also have a copy of Chrome installed for those sites that just don’t work with Firefox.
Arne Babenhauserheide
@freakazoid That’s not the point — the point is that they use Firefox despite that.
That’s a high degree of brand loyalty (and likely one of the reasons, Google keeps paying Mozilla: The number of users they’d lose if Mozilla changed the search engine did not change a lot).
Charles U. Farley
@ArneBab So, they failed to grow in absolute terms while the total market grew by a factor of 5? That doesn’t seem to paint a rosier picture.
Arne Babenhauserheide
@freakazoid You’re missing something in this argumentation: The market share did not change due to losing users. It changed due to not gaining users while the number of internet-users rose through monopolistic mobile platforms.
Tagomago
Just a nuance. I don’t have “brand loyalty”. I just want to use free software and avoid contributing to their enemies to the extent possible. And I think FF does a better job than the alternatives.
Also, iirc Mozilla’s CEO has a salary six times bigger than the mentioned Google payroll, so of course Mozilla could function without Google’s money.
Tagomago
According to wiki (referenced) she was paid $3M in 2020 though?
Anyway...
Arne Babenhauserheide
@tagomago @freakazoid I have kind of brand loyalty: I’m not loyal to Mozilla, but to independence from code fully controlled by Google and Microsoft.
And yes, the salary annoys me, too. There were a lot of bad decisions in the past years (including to dump FirefoxOS just as it started to become a success story).
But it’s not 6x bigger than Googles payroll. It’s about 0.5-1% of that.
Tagomago
@freakazoid @ArneBab Not the point.
Charles U. Farley
@tagomago @ArneBab Yeah, about 80% less than CEOs of other tech companies of similar size and revenue.
Charles U. Farley
@tagomago @ArneBab What is the point, exactly? Most of Mozilla Corporation's revenue comes from their contract with Google.
Tagomago
@freakazoid @ArneBab My bad, I was calculating wrong numbers in my head... You're right.
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