Mozilla making choices specifically to try to "keep up" with Chrome has objectively failed: Firefox's marketshare has plunged so far that it's getting harder to keep using it on the web, as developers simply stop testing or caring much if it works with their site.

I think this is because simply chasing Chrome didn't have the desired effect anyway. By doing so, Mozilla hurt Firefox by gradually reducing what differentiated it from Chrome in the first place, relegating it to be kind of just a worse Chrome that looks even weirder.

A similar statement would be something like, "Firefox may as well pledge to support Web Environment Integrity; otherwise, people will just use Chrome."

In a totally different vertical, Valve has made interesting choices. To my knowledge, they do not provide a way to do attestation on Steam hardware devices, so games that want to support Steam hardware simply have to get rid of their intrusive DRM and anti-cheat, or at least significantly loosen it. Depending on how you look at it, this has either been a massive success or a massive failure. After all, a lot of big games don't run; Fortnite, Valorant, etc. But on the other hand, it remains a very powerful incentive for publishers and developers to reconsider their choices, as these devices still do have a non-trivial marketshare. (And for smaller games this obviously is hard to ignore, probably often moreso than intrusive DRM.)

Mozilla may have been ultimately correct that the choices they made helped them stay relevant; it's hard to know for sure how much their marketshare would be different today if they made bolder choices, but in the long run I think it has doomed them, as it is now unclear what even really differentiates Firefox. The last remaining thing seems to just be that you can run the full version of uBlock Origin, which is pretty valuable and all, but I'm not sure it makes up for the deficiencies. (I also like Container Tabs, but I think that feature is pretty niche, possibly somewhat by virtue of the fact that Firefox is now pretty niche.)

I'm currently using Librewolf. My long term hope was that Ladybird would become the browser that does what Firefox should have, but when I asked Andreas Kling whether or not Ladybird would try to support EME/Widevine in an HN thread, there was no reply, which is pretty close to "probably".

We already have "no compromises" forks / side-versions of Firefox. FF cannot pull a Steam because they don't have a big enough userbase, and the userbase won't grow if they are too purists, sadly. Firefox lost the battle to Chrome over 10 years ago, partly due to its faults (it was heavy and slower to load that back in the day Chrome) and also because Google shoved Chrome down its users' throat (I perfectly remember the Chrome banner in Google's home page, not even SERP).

>Firefox's marketshare has plunged so far that it's getting harder to keep using it on the web

any examples? i only use firefox, including for work, as well as encourage all of my students to use it, and i cant think of any sites that dont work.

if anything, i would say its sort of the opposite (getting easier to use). some microsoft websites were wonky ~5 years ago, but now all seem to work perfectly in firefox.

>I think this is because simply chasing Chrome didn't have the desired effect anyway. By doing so, Mozilla hurt Firefox by gradually reducing what differentiated it from Chrome in the first place, relegating it to be kind of just a worse Chrome that looks even weirder.

That logic might work for firefox's product direction as a whole, but narrowly looking at the EME issue, what should have they done? If they didn't implement EME, then people will have to install chrome to watch netfilx. The users who are there as a matter of principle (eg. HN readers) might still use firefox as their daily driver, but they'd almost certainly lose some normies who were using firefox on inertia. Meanwhile because they refused to negotiate, they won't be able to influence the direction of the standard, which means no sandboxing of DRM modules and other privacy features. Both firefox and their users lose out in this scenario.

Firefox should've gone the same route as Internet Explorer and forked Chromium. Firefox could focus its energies on creating features that are different instead of recreating the same ones.

> it's getting harder to keep using [Firefox] on the web

I've heard this said for the past ten years or so and so far haven't found it to be true.

> But on the other hand, it remains a very powerful incentive for publishers and developers to reconsider their choices, as these devices still do have a non-trivial marketshare.

There's really nothing to suggest this has been the case.

I very much expect Valve to implement a hardware backed attestation and signed driver model for future hardware.