Comment by devsda
2 days ago
End users are easily influenced but they could have targeted developers.
I think they should have pushed for a gecko based electron alternative. End user dont really care if their favourite markdown editor or notes software is based on electron or gecko but it would have made sure that developers do not target, develop and test for only chromium based browsers.
That would probably also be considered a "distraction" by HN. Electron isn't built by the Chrome team.
It also wouldn't be directly revenue diversification. You can't beat Electron by selling an alternative.
Firefox has somewhat tried to target developers. There's Developer Edition with a "direct to the dev tools" focus. Firefox's Dev Tools still generally are somewhat ahead of Safari's and Chrome's (though not always Edge's, even in the Edgmium era one of the few teams that still exists that doesn't upstream everything immediately is Edge's Dev Tools work). Firefox was directly ahead on Flexbox and CSS Grid debugging tools, though now everyone else has copied them. (Not to mention that the history of Dev Tools in the first place all points back to Firebug and other Firefox extensions that went mainstream and then made sense to prioritize as out-of-the-box tools.)
Firefox probably can't do much more to target developers on its own, from a browser perspective. Targeting developers doesn't seem to move the needle enough in marketshare, either.
It's not just Electron that developers are stuck in "develop and test for only chromium based browsers" modes. There's also all the top-down pressure in corporate environments to standardize on only one browser to "cut down" on "testing costs". There are the board room-driven development cycles of "I only care if it looks good on the CEO's iPhone" or "the CEO is into Android this year, that's the focus, everything else is garbage". There's also the hard to avoid spiral of "Firefox marketshare is low, don't worry about it" to more sites not working as well in Firefox to Firefox marketshare getting lower to more "don't worry about it" websites and so on.
> I think they should have pushed for a gecko based electron alternative.
They did! At least three different versions of it!
Is anyone else seeing this pattern? "Mozilla should have an endowment". They do! "Well they should have invested the endowment!" They do. "They should have done a gecko based electron alternative". They did. "They should have tab grouping". They've never not had it, between native support and extensions. "They should be spending on the browser." They literally spend more now than ever in their history.
It's vibes and drive by cheap shots, all the way down. I get that dabbling in adtech is not great, I get that they've cycled through side bets recently without committing to them (unlike Google?!), but it's an ounce of truth with every pound of nonsense. Mozilla Derangement Syndrome.
Developers are no longer a significant fraction of the pie, and a significant fraction of those are web developers or do web development, and those users will in all likelihood primarily use what their users are using, which isn't Firefox.