Gregory's ServerSeeing lots of discussion around Firefox marketshare, would be interested to hear what features / functionality people thought Firefox could implement that would make a big impact?
 20 comments
@fabrice Yeh thats definitely the thing that would have biggest impact, but outside my wheelhouse @dale decide who precisely your ICP is and optimise the product for them. That might mean cutting features, and making some users unhappy. Also: invest in mobile features and distribution channels. And focus on improving time to market.  @dale @psvensson Dial down on the tracking protection so that they would actually show up in the stats that fuel the market share discussion?  @voxpelli @dale @psvensson This is a big one. I'm not sure you even need to "dial down tracking protection", but it should be possible to have a conversation w/ folks like GA to report out of band in an anonymized way. @slightlyoff @dale @psvensson Would love for there to be a standardized way to collect privacy respecting telemetry from web pages (in a non-js way)  @voxpelli ha, I wonder if you can CSP ban a non-existent url (https://nope.nope or something) with Content-Security-Policy-Report-Only and then in CSS do *:hover { background-image: url(https://nope.nope); } to get a URL ping any time anybody mouses over anything :) @slightlyoff @dale @psvensson I tried getting eg a big multinational store to correlate their server stats with their GA stats to figure out eg how many Firefox browsers were missing They themselves had only then discovered that iPad no longer reports as iPad… Yes, I've always felt that the user is never part of the conversation. So it might not always be pure evil on the company's part, the reason that no one wants to sit in their tub anymore is the lack of actual water in it. But there are no channels for the user to easily give feedback on this, so the bad practice goes on with infinite positive feedback. @dale not sure if it would have a huge impact, but if it had vertical tabs I would recommend it to anyone more often. Something else Idk if it's worth something, but I tend to recommend it less as there's few things that feel clunky, for example changing profiles and having to write 'about:profiles'. I know I would not recommend it to less tech savvy ppl bc of these.  @dale i remember way back when liking opera because it had irc, torrent, etc baked in. lots of internet users want to play alternative toys, but will only do it if they know it is safe. when i first got into web dev and i needed "more than a browser" i got some shared VPS with a Cpanel dashboard with mysql, phpmyadmin, etc, etc. that host determined the services, protocols, host system. we can have all that locally now for our personal networks. firefox baked with that; probably wasm-backed.   @dale They could use the majority of the pay they give their CEO to improve the application, just as an example  @dale Keep in mind that those "market share" stats are always going to be skewed. Firefox users leave less breadcrumbs around, are less likely to show up in telemetry/tracking, and the plethora of Chromium-based browsers and electron desktop apps all help inflate Chrome's presence over everything else. @dale @tchambers dunno about features it could add, but I've stuck with FF for years because it's (pretty much) always told me what's really going on when there are issues, and I troubleshoot stuff a lot. Helps that I detest BS error messages, and IE started that fad long ago. |
@dale None would matter (same as Quantum perf improvements didn't help). Fix the distribution channel issue first.