Comment by logicalmonster

I think the reason for Firefox lagging behind in market share can be explained with an overarching theme of "bad management", which may have contributed to some of these problems which chipped away at their chance for success.

> At a crucial stage years ago when IE was clearly dying and many people were considering different web browsers, Firefox's UI and overall performance felt extraordinarily slow in comparison to alternatives. Additionally, as a developer, the experience of building Chrome extensions was much more pleasant there than in Firefox which really soured me on them. It's not like Mozilla has bad developers, but they might have been trying to work on too many projects at once with the financial resources they had available. Even if Firefox has subsequently caught up, peoples' perceptions might take a while to change.

> Whether or not you agree with this, there was a growing perception that Mozilla was moving in a "woke" political direction that seemed to be at conflict with the overall drive towards an open web that many people initially supported them for. Even if the intent of articles like "WE NEED MORE THAN DEPLATFORMING" was genuinely good, their messaging was "pants-on-head regarded" given that many influential tech people supported Mozilla specifically to keep the open web alive. If Mozilla did anything to put that perception of their support at risk, they poisoned their brand for a lot of tech people who tell their friends and family what browser they can be using. Many of these people moved on to browsers such as Brave that seem to be much firmer in at least trying to give a very clear and consistent messaging about what they're all about.