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:

  1. 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.
  1. 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.

  • 0xtero@beehaw.org
    1·
    2 days ago

    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.

    • quickenparalysespunk@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
      1·
      1 day ago

      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.