Comment by rvba

It's funny, because Firefox gained dominant market share in a time when Internet was much younger and Internet Explorer was bundled with Windows.

However Firefox offered something that IE did not have - extensions and customization, so those "in the know" popularized it. Especially abilty to block ads spread as word of mouth.

Then the "in the know" people would install Firefox and recommend it (for free!) to their family and friends.

Now we are in time when Google creates various "manifests" that are a fancy way of saying that they want to cut on ad-blocks in Chrome... so it would be Firefox time to shine again. What do they do? Their CEO (previous one) says that they dont want adblocks and could in fact get rid of them! So opposite of what made Firefox popular in the first place!

Then on top of that they developers of firefox have a big internal problem: they dont want to do what users want (ability to make addons, extensions and customize thing). They dont want to do that because it is "hard". They want to do greenfield projects that nobody is interested in. Note that those developers dont write Firefox for free, they earn good salaries. But management lets them do what they want.

The differentiator for Firefox were extensions - but those were killed, because the team did not want to support them

Business book will ask you "what is the unique proposition of Firefox" - it was adblock now and they want to kill even this.