Chrome went heavy on marketing. And their marketing was compelling. At a time when the web was really slow, Chrome advertised speed - remember those Chrome ads where they'd load web pages while something flew by the screen?
At a time when the web was dangerous, Chrome advertised security. Remember when Flash wasn't sandboxed? When Java executed automatically? When nothing had auto-updates?
Firefox caught up, but at best it's "as good". What's it really doing for me?
The answer is presumably privacy. And that's cool. But most people have a hard time understanding what "privacy" means. Further, you can say Chrome is weak on privacy, but it's hardly as bad as people make it out to be.
So basically Mozilla is, at best, equivalent to Chrome, but Chrome was way better for a long time. So it's got to convince people to come back, but its only selling point is really vague.
And then you have some other stuff like companies can manage Chrome via GSuite. So now your work computer is X% more likely to run Chrome. So now you have to choose to have a different experience at home and at work.
What would I do?
1. I'd refocus on the mission. Privacy is critical, security is critical. That would mean a number of things - how is it that Brave is the first browser to integrate TOR? Isn't that insane? TOR has been using Firefox by default forever, and no one thought "maybe we should just support this thing, and start heavily contributing to it" ?
2. I'd invest heavily in next-gen performance and security. Chrome has In-The-Wild zero days being exploited - that's an opportunity. The web is heavier than ever - that's an opportunity.
I'd focus heavily on that. I'd push benchmarks and I'd market those features heavily.
3. I would fire every executive who took a multi-million dollar bonus while firing tons of employees.
That's just day 1 stuff.
Going further I'd consider what it would look like to see Mozilla in the Enterprise. Integrations and management features built into the LTS releases are an obvious start.
At a time when the web was dangerous, Chrome advertised security. Remember when Flash wasn't sandboxed? When Java executed automatically? When nothing had auto-updates?
Firefox caught up, but at best it's "as good". What's it really doing for me?
The answer is presumably privacy. And that's cool. But most people have a hard time understanding what "privacy" means. Further, you can say Chrome is weak on privacy, but it's hardly as bad as people make it out to be.
So basically Mozilla is, at best, equivalent to Chrome, but Chrome was way better for a long time. So it's got to convince people to come back, but its only selling point is really vague.
And then you have some other stuff like companies can manage Chrome via GSuite. So now your work computer is X% more likely to run Chrome. So now you have to choose to have a different experience at home and at work.
What would I do?
1. I'd refocus on the mission. Privacy is critical, security is critical. That would mean a number of things - how is it that Brave is the first browser to integrate TOR? Isn't that insane? TOR has been using Firefox by default forever, and no one thought "maybe we should just support this thing, and start heavily contributing to it" ?
2. I'd invest heavily in next-gen performance and security. Chrome has In-The-Wild zero days being exploited - that's an opportunity. The web is heavier than ever - that's an opportunity.
I'd focus heavily on that. I'd push benchmarks and I'd market those features heavily.
3. I would fire every executive who took a multi-million dollar bonus while firing tons of employees.
That's just day 1 stuff.
Going further I'd consider what it would look like to see Mozilla in the Enterprise. Integrations and management features built into the LTS releases are an obvious start.