Intolerant is the word (back story here) – believe as we say or retribution will come pretty much sums up the story of Brendan Eich who lost the CEO position at Mozilla / Firefox simply because he gave a donation years earlier to a pro-traditional marriage group during California’s Prop 8. Thus, upon seeing this news seemed like proper Karma:
An incredibly shrinking Firefox faces endangered species status
Mozilla’s Firefox is in danger of making the endangered species list for browsers.
…In the last 12 months, Firefox’s user share — an estimate of the portion of all those who reach the Internet via a desktop browser — has plummeted by 34%. Since Firefox crested at 25.1% in April 2010, Firefox has lost 13.5 percentage points, or 54% of its peak share.
At Firefox’s 12-month average rate of decline, Mozilla’s desktop browser will slip under the 10% bar in June, joining other third-tier applications like Apple’s Safari (with just a 4.8% user share in February) and Opera Software’s Opera (1.1%). If the trend continues, Firefox on the desktop could drop below 8% as soon as October.
Firefox’s total user share — an amalgamation of desktop and mobile — was 9.5% for February, its lowest level since Computerworld began tracking the metric nearly six years ago, and 3.4 percentage points lower than in July 2014, the last time Computerworld analyzed the data.
Mozilla faces a double whammy: Its flagship desktop browser continues to bleed share, while the company has been unable to attract a significant mobile audience.
Could it be partly due to simple technical “stuff”? Could be as I haven’t watched the tech of browsers for quite some time. Certainly, I believe, that as EVERYthing has become politicized (as shown by Eich being shown the door for “wrong thinking”), companies that decide to play in the Culture Wars can often get bitten. Certainly there are some, like Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, have always been identified as being Left. But when Mozilla crossed that line and upset a good percentage of their consumers, well, don’t be surprised when you get bit.
This is one time when the Right did do a boycott (I was one of them of both FireFox and Thunderbird, their email product) – and it didn’t come all that later than the Chick-fil-A fiasco. And unlike Chick-fil-A when the Left went after it (and then prospered), it seems that the fox in the logo has gotten clipped.
(H/T: Computerworld)