Amazing how they continue not to cater to their core audience. They literally have lost 90% of their market share from their peak, I guess I can see the temptation to try to regain it by reaching out to others, but doing that at the expense of your core is a terrible business strategy. It's not like those users are all that sticky, they're leaving as Mozilla pisses them off, and likely Mozilla are going to be left with what they stand for - which these days is nothing.

It's sad, I'm sure there was a better path Mozilla could have taken, but they've had a decade or more of terrible management. I wonder if the non-profit / corp structure hasn't helped, or if it's just a later-stage company with a management layer who are disconnected from the original company's mission and strategy.

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PurpleRamen 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Amazing how they continue not to cater to their core audience.

Who is Mozilla's core audience? From what I remember, it's not addon-users, as most users never have used even just a single addon.

> They literally have lost 90% of their market share from their peak,

To be fair, it's not entirely their own fault. Competition is strong, especially from Google and Apple. Even with perfect decisions, they likely would still have lost big since their peak. The market for alternative Browsers isn't as big any more as it used to be.

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chmod775 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

> From what I remember, it's not addon-users, as most users never have used even just a single addon.

If most users who install Firefox do so for superior adblocking and those same users are also very likely to turn off telemetry (which I think some privacy/adblock extensions probably do by default?), then at Mozilla's end one might get the impression that "most users don't use extensions" - even though the vast majority of users do.

So to answer the questions of:

> Who is Mozilla's core audience?

It's probably the kind of user that has telemetry off. You don't know much if anything about them.

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PurpleRamen 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Update-checks are not included in telemetry. And I would think most people using addons still do update their addons from time to time, or even have the auto-check active. There is also the download-stats from their server-side, so I would think they do have a good enough picture of their numbers. Might be they could be 10% off, but surely are there not tens or even hundreds of millions of stealth-users around.

> It's probably the kind of user that has telemetry off. You don't know much if anything about them.

Don't think so, most people don't give a f** about this. Tech-people on that level are even in the industry a minority. And on the other side, those stealth-users are worthless for Mozilla, because they can't make money from google with them. So for a project needing to make money with usersnumbers, everyone who is out of this, isn't core audience anyway.

	▲	chmod775 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Don't think so, most people don't give a f* about this. Most people are not Firefox users.

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Foriney 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> It's probably the kind of user that has telemetry off.

If less than 4% of users use uBO, which the kind of users you're referencing claim is the primary reason they use Firefox, I doubt many users disable telemetry either.

	▲	nerdponx 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		I believe some Linux distributions patch Firefox to change default settings including disabling telemetry. Probably not a big factor, but still something to think about.

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esperent 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

40% of Firefox users use addons.

https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/usage-behavior

	▲	PurpleRamen 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks, I think this was what I was searching. Strange that it's not appearing in my search-results. Relevant part from the site: [..]Add-on usage measured here reflects multiple facets of browser customization, including web extensions, language packs, and themes.[..] 40% is a big minority, but not really what I would call core audience, especially when language packs and themes are also counted here. And 5 of the top 10-addons in that statistic are language packs. Though, UBlock Origin is #1 with 9.6% user-share, and it's shown to have 10.5 million users on the store-page, which means there are at best only around 100 Million users left with Firefox on desktop? Seems worse than I thought.

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CamouflagedKiwi 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Who is Mozilla's core audience?

I am thinking of it as: people who care about privacy and/or an independent web browser. That seems mostly in line with what the Mozilla Foundation's principles are stated to be.

Maybe it's not that. But if not, what is it? How do they otherwise have any positive differentiation versus their competition? It surely can't be claimed to be any sense of "users who want an AI browser" because surely those people are going to use ChatGPT's browser, not Mozilla's.

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nerdponx 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Remember when the whole reason people liked Firefox is that it was super customizable? There was a time when it was THE power user browser. Things only went sideways after Chrome came out.

Firefox literally was a mainstream browser at one point. Internet Explorer sucked. Safari didn't suck but it was nobody's favorite either except some really hard-core Apple fans.

Yes, Chrome was revolutionary when it came out. And yes, Firefox seemed to struggle with legacy architectural decisions that limited their ability to catch up. But Firefox was still differentiated and had a loyal fan base. Loyal fan base is exactly what can keep a project or product alive through a downturn. All they had to do was focus on the browser. They did some great things along the way like popularizing DoH. But it's 2025 and there's still no UI for switching profiles that any normal person might be able or want to use. Can you really blame people for giving up?

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nateglims 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> To be fair, it's not entirely their own fault. Competition is strong, especially from Google and Apple. Even with perfect decisions, they likely would still have lost big since their peak. The market for alternative Browsers isn't as big any more as it used to be.

Their peak in share was also pre-chrome. They've basically been losing the battle slowly for over a decade.

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5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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g947o 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> From what I remember, it's not addon-users, as most users never have used even just a single addon.

Source?

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clippyplz 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

I looked up "firefox addon usage" and this was the second result https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/usage-behavior

> over 40% of Firefox users have at least 1 installed add-on

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Yossarrian22 5 days ago | parent [-]

Before they changed their ToS to allow selling my data I had spent the last 2 decades with telemetry disabled and adblocker installed

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lurk2 5 days ago | parent [-]

What’s the story on the TOS change? This is the first I’m hearing about it.

	▲	LauraMedia 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		A while ago they changed their TOS from something along the lines of "We will never sell your data" to "Your data is safe"

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lurk2 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> About one-third of Firefox users have installed an add-on before

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/extensions-addons/heres-...

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PurpleRamen 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Ublock Origin has 10,488,339 Users listed on it's Mozilla store-page at the moment, AdBlock Plus has 3,188,401 Users. And Firefox has surely still far more than those ~14 million users.

There was an article from Mozilla, some years ago, going more into the details about this, but I'm not sure where. Though, I found another one[1] from 2021, which starts with only one third of the users having installed an addon.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/blog/firefoxs-most-popular-innova...

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5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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pepperball 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Amazing how they continue not to cater to their core audience.

I’ve seen this across several industries now.

The “core audience” is too small and too particular. There is another audience, much easier to please, much much larger, much more money can be made off them. Why stick to your niche “core audience”?

	▲	Etherlord87 5 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		No, it's not much easier to please. You will compete with Chrome and you will lose. It is the core audience that is much easier to please, because those are loyal users that trust you and all you have to do is respect this trust by providing a stable service without nasty surprises.
	▲	sb057 5 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Well Mozilla has completely failed at it, for starters.

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KurSix 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

When you've already lost most of your mass-market appeal, the only defensible strategy left is to double down on the people who still care

	▲	Ezhik 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Every tech CEO loves to cosplay as "announcing the iPhone" 2007 Steve Jobs but nobody ever tries to cosplay as the "pulling Apple back from the brink by focusing on core competencies" 1997 Steve Jobs.

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nerdponx 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Conspiracy theory: Mozilla leadership is bad on purpose as a form of sabotage. Erode the fan base until it just wears away and dies on its own. Then there will be no one to challenge the Microsoft Google Apple hegemony.