TL;DR
- if Chrome’s buyer f***s up too badly and Normies (i.e. majority segment of browser users) flee, can Firefox keep up with the flood of users? Can they keep enough users to attract enough donations/investments to become more stable or grow (grow staff #s or activities) long term?
underlying assumptions:
- many privacy-minded users use Firefox forks on desktop and possibly mobile. Without Mozilla the organization, said forks may or may not be able to continue individually on their own. However, it seems hard to argue that they would fare better if a “main” Firefox continued, possibly under the umbrella of some pre-existing group like Canonical or Linux Foundation. Better yet if Mozilla were to reverse course from its user data cash-in moves and increase its long-term stability.
scenario conditions:
- Google sells Chrome
- a:
ignore/prune this timeline
to FANGA companies (“faang” acronym can eat sh**) or cloud-infra. giants like MS/Oracle/Cisco who would have no problem technologically maintaining FF, but would definitely increase the enshittification level. ignore/prune this timeline, outcome is predictable.
- b: to a smaller company who can’t maintain it well and/or adds too much ads/a.i./upsell/enshittification even for Normies, my educated guess is there will be some kind of exodus. This timeline is what I’m curious about.
- At time of said exodus, Firefox has not yet descended to equal depths of enshittification, and thus becomes one of the refugee camps for fleeing Normies.
Question:
- hypothetically if, let’s say, FF total user count goes up 2x in a week, 10x in a month, maybe even 100x in a day, can Firefox services (sync, user forums, extension store, bug tracking/fixing, or even just installer downloads) realistically scale up fast enough to avoid disappointing the majority of refugee users and losing the chance to gain long term users? Or would they stumble too hard and end up remaining a small share of the browser market while other new/existing browsers take the spoils?
i guess the most relevant professional to give the real-world answer might be a macro network infrastructure specialist, but i’m looking for everyone’s opinion.
No. We’ll just use Firefox forks. Seriously, why do people always think there’s either Chrome or Firefox in this world? Are you too scared of difference and alternatives?
underlying assumptions:
- many privacy-minded users use Firefox forks on desktop and possibly mobile. Without Mozilla the organization, said forks may or may not be able to continue individually on their own. However, it seems hard to argue that they would fare better if a “main” Firefox continued, possibly under the umbrella of some pre-existing group like Canonical or Linux Foundation. Better yet if Mozilla were to reverse course from its user data cash-in moves and increase its long-term stability.
because that’s the way it is. if google stops funding firefox development, all the forks disappear.
exactly. thank you. this is the whole impetus for the conversation of what happens to Firefox and consequently its forks.
Uh, no? You don’t know how Open-Source works. Floorp can technically be self-funded because it gets grants and donations to sustain its development. You act like everything relies on Google’s funding when that’s not entirely true.
Why wouldn’t ggl just turn Firefox into a proxy puppet Chrome they control and enshittify to match their previous Chrome?
Doesn’t development still need funding somehow?
modern cloud based apps can spin up additional servers as demand spikes and spin them down when demand goes back down, with load balancing etc. limited by the financial budget for such hosting. does firefox have millions of dollars to capture some major adoption? i think they should.
seems like you’re the one who understood best what I was getting at. thanks for your opinion.
i do hope they have enough budget
Hoping Firefox will ever be the most popular browser again is an exercise and disappointment.
i went out of my way to avoid stating any hope of FF becoming the most popular. i used “stable” (as in user numbers) multiple times.
Chrome’s buyer f***s up too badly and Normies
Not sure what sort of borked mess it would need to be to change peoples habits. Goggle’s fucked Chrome themselves and " normies" aren’t fleeing.
I don’t know but Internet Explorer somehow managed to mess it up badly enough to be widely considered inferior by the vast majority of the population, despite being pre installed on Windows. So I suspect Chrome could fall in the same boat if it’s bad enough. Though I guess there are still open source forks.
I wonder if Chrome started charging a monthly fee if that would be enough for them to start hemorrhaging users?
true that
Unless Firefox comes pre-installed on android, unlikely
I’m pretty sure the market share for Firefox would grow. Maybe even 5-10% which would potentially put it at total of …. 15%
They would be huge, but to think Firefox would ever be the popular browser is probably a bit too optimistic. That ship sailed long time ago.
Chrome/Google is pretty messed up junk these days and no one cares.
i went out of my way to avoid stating any hope of FF becoming the most popular.
like you said, i actually was thinking of them capturing about 5-10% more of the market. i think that would be a significant and worthy goal. it’s enough to increase interest from potential large donors, at least slightly.
I’ve been feeling that they were getting ready to turn FF into something more commercial, and if that didn’t stabilize/increase funding enough, to shut it down entirely. so a slight and sustainable increase of users and funding is the best near term outcome, in my mind.
