https://ferdychristant.com/the-state-of-web-browsers-f5a83a41c1cb Late 2018 edition
Mozilla has two weapons to combat the decline, both of which will horribly fail, I’m pained to say. Not because I want them to fail, or to be overly negative or pessimistic. They will fail because both weapons do not address the root cause of the decline.
Weapon 1 is technology. Mozilla is doing fantastic things in rewriting their browser, from an engineering perspective that is. There’s Servo, Rust, WebRenderer which all look highly innovative, and will ultimately produce a better browser. They may soon have a little peak in delivering the world’s best desktop browser, from a technical point of view.
Firefox loyalists (like me) will love it, and 3 new people will agree it’s awesome. And that’s the end of it. The enormous market shifts in browser market share are not caused by browser features or performance. They are caused by the mobile-first revolution and dominant parties being able to ship default browsers to billions of users. Non-technical users do not consciously pick a browser based on features or speed, and even if they did, modern browsers are all fast. I honestly can’t tell the difference between any of them, not even on mediocre hardware. Firefox’s decline and the sharp rise of competitors is not due to engineering, therefore the solution also does not lie in engineering. And even if you did believe engineering is the solution, let’s establish that you can’t out engineer Google. You can win a battle, but not the war.
