The natural consequences of Mozilla spending money on everything except on creating a the best browser in the world and working on marketshare (written in Firefox).

> It would be a "fun" time if FF ever dies, new IE6.0 situation but worse

How would it be worse? Chromium is Open Source, and anyone can fork it if Google go too far.

IE6.0 was entirely proprietary, and nobody could do absolutely anything if Microsoft went too far.

Thanks, I'll point their support staff to that document.

I was told that Firefox is no longer supported by a support technician over the phone. A different support technician wrote this to me in an email:

"Regarding the printing option on Firefox, I'm afraid this is no longer within Stripe's support scope."

(I complained that it is not possible to print certain pages of the Dashboard through Firefox, while Chrome works acceptably well.)

As a frontend dev, every company I've worked for this decade has deliberately chosen to drop Firefox support. We've never gotten a single complaint about it from our users (we get plenty of other reports) and every analytics report showed decreasing usage.

The few developers I've met who still use Firefox eventually stop once we run into the first issue with it on our own projects (usually having to do with graphics rendering of some sort). We don't fix it for our users so we're not going to go out of our way to fix it for our own frontend devs. It's just not worth the time investment.

Firefox is totally dead aside from a few ideologues, who don't really constitute enough of the general population to matter. Webkit support (for ios browsers outside Europe) is much more important, and it has enough differences from Blink to be a time sink on its own, so all the extra dev time that might've otherwise gone to Firefox instead go to Webkit tweaks (with Chrome/Blink being the standard, both for users and devs).

Browser compatibility is a lie, even with polyfills and caniuse and browerslist. If you do enough full time frontend work you'll soon come across the various subtle bugs and incompatibilies. Browsers aren't necessarily more standard now, it's just that Chrome won in a way that even IE didn't.

I grew up in the IE era and did web dev then too. Yeah it's better now, but I think it's mostly because Google has such a monopoly that they are the real standards. The W3C is completely irrelevant now and WHATWG seems like basically a puppet government for the big corporations to dictate what they want. At the end of the day, Google decides what is going into Web, period. Apple controls half of mobile (apps) but Safari is always the odd duck. Firefox... nobody cares about anymore.

Kinda sad, as someone who loved early Phoenix, but honestly Mozilla has so thoroughly mismanaged Firefox over the years that I'm surprised it has any users left at all.

iOS probably hurts Firefox. Any Firefox installs on iOS don’t really matter, since WebKit is being used on the backend.

That said, I think it hurts Chrome more than Firefox, so I’m not all that upset about it. I think iOS is the only thing stopping Chrome/Blink from being the only browser anyone writes for, much like IE before Firefox came along. I think it’s important that Blink doesn’t end up with that market share. Once it’s past a certain point, everyone feels forced to use it so their pages work, and they end up on autopilot to 98% a market share. That that point, Google essentially owns the web, even more than they already do.

I’d have less of an issue with this if they weren’t ad company with data collection as their competitive advantage. There are a lot of conflicts of interest when it comes to Google and the future of the web.

Because the hackers left ages ago and now there are only executives and smart juniors that don't take long to leave Mozilla

You can help by reporting the sites on webcompat.com or via Firefox's new-ish add-on "webcompat.com reporter"

Which are those sites? Did you report them? (Hamburger->Report Broken Site)

Safari is a worse locked down experience, and if you run any variety of Chrome you're actively making the world a worse place by allowing a bad actor to dictate more and more web standards as user count increases.

Your crusade against Firefox because of Pocket or some other small managerial is a silly and meaningless when looking at what it means if Firefox actually goes away.