Comment by netdevphoenix
5 hours ago
> Simple: allow those users to be lost to preserve the product.
Lose the users lose the funding. Firefox can't live out of HN as its sole userbase. Have you checked how much it costs to build and maintain a modern browser?
Plenty of users who have no money for TV or consoles, watch it on their laptop on low quality. I am one of those who watches Netflix on Linux Firefox :)
This isn't just any risk. It's an existential one for Firefox. You are asking them to make something that would be unpopular to the majority of its userbase at a point when they are borderline extinct. You are asking Mozilla to jeopardise Firefox for the same of a feature that YOU dislike enough to want to burn Firefox to the ground to get rid of it.
Yes I am asking them to have principles. I'm sorry this is such an insane concept to understand or appreciate. Maybe the next Mozilla will understand that having principles is not optional.
>Maybe the next Mozilla will understand that having principles is not optional.
But what does "having principles" translate to? Focusing on the EME issue, how many people are going to be like "humpf, firefox added EME so I'm going to use chrome instead!"? Is that small slice of the user base even worth keeping? If they're going to be incensed by random issues like this, they're probably not worth the trouble to cater to, or maybe they'll just flip flop between chrome and firefox (depending on what the latest outrage headline is) that there's not much point in catering to.
If you can't articulate specific benefits to "having principles", then you're not really interested in firefox winning, you just want it to die a martyr.
> But what does "having principles" translate to? Focusing on the EME issue, how many people are going to be like "humpf, firefox added EME so I'm going to use chrome instead!"? Is that small slice of the user base even worth keeping? If they're going to be incensed by random issues like this, they're probably not worth the trouble to cater to, or maybe they'll just flip flop between chrome and firefox (depending on what the latest outrage headline is) that there's not much point in catering to.
> If you can't articulate specific benefits to "having principles", then you're not really interested in firefox winning, you just want it to die a martyr.
You've got it backwards. It's not that people use Chrome in retaliation for Firefox having zero principles, it's that people stop caring to install Firefox because there's no clear reason to keep using it.
Having no principles itself eventually loses you a small minority of users... and those were your core supporters and evangelists. It is not a huge number of people, but it's not good when your base of supporters is rotting from the inside-out.
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