I wonder why Firefox even has to beat Chrome. Wouldn't it be enough to have 30% marketshare again? Or even 10% would be enough to consider Firefox a serious competitor.
Somewhere along the line we got this idea that if you're not #1 you've failed. You don't need to crush every single competitor into oblivion to be successful, you just need to succeed at what you set out to do, and in Firefox's case, isn't that just to build a good browser?
The only way to beat Chrome, is the same way Firefox beat IE: Someone else will have to do it.
On some level, Firefox has to 'beat' Chrome in order to get/keep a significant level of marketshare. It needs people to see it as better in some way if they're to choose to use it, especially on mobile where Chrome is the default.
For some of us, it still 'beats' Chrome on some kind of principle - I'm not giving Google yet more control. But are there enough people like me to actually keep a modern browser going?
In that sense, Firefox's competition is not Chrome: it's the other "non-mainstream" browsers like Chromium Edge, Brave, or Opera. What can Mozilla do to attract those users to Firefox? Google doesn't want to crush Firefox to 0% because Google profits from Firefox searches and presumably wants a non-Chromium browser to exist to avoid antitrust scrutiny regulating Chrome.
I'm probably a niche user, but better crypto and web3 support (still cannot make firefox recognize my hardware wallet on Linux). That's the singular most important reason I switched, after many years.
... It'll raise trust if they follow through their promises. Open source Pocket, yet?
Somewhere along the line we got this idea that if you're not #1 you've failed. You don't need to crush every single competitor into oblivion to be successful, you just need to succeed at what you set out to do, and in Firefox's case, isn't that just to build a good browser?
The only way to beat Chrome, is the same way Firefox beat IE: Someone else will have to do it.