As long as Firefox keeps up with the standards treadmill, I could be the only person using it, and it really wouldn't affect me any. As of right now, there are vanishingly few sites that earnestly work differently on Firefox than on Chrome. Significantly more sites arbitrarily block non-Chrome User Agents, but that's trivially avoided by just serving a Chrome UA on Firefox.

Which makes it trivial to switch. There's really no justification for sticking with Chrome. Switching to Firefox takes about a minute, you can import all your saved logins and bookmarks, and then maybe spend a whole whopping 30 seconds adding Ublock Origin. Complaints about Chrome amount to "I am too inconceivably lazy to spend 90s switching to a browser that doesn't hate me".

> Firefox already lost the browser wars. It's about 2%.

Firefox, originally "Phoenix" when it was first released, originally had 0% and made it up to 30%. There's no technical reason why it can go higher from 2%.

If the folks that started Phoenix/Firefox thought the same way you did, when IE was the top dog, we wouldn't have it in the first place because they would have things were "lost". They decided things were not lost and to make an effort.

We can again choose to consider things "lost", or we can try to turn things around.

Apple market share (whether by hardware or operating system) was that low for awhile there and by some estimates OSX even dipped down to 2.29%:

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/

And that doesn't even count the dark years of OS9 in the '90s. Have they lost the operating system wars?

The great thing about FOSS is that nobody can stop me using it, and nobody can force you to use it. We can all be happy.

The great thing about Firefox "losing" the "war" is that Chrome users' ad viewing essentially pays for my internet, and with only 2% market share, nobody will pay any attention to those of us still blocking ads. Sometimes you lose the war, but still end up winning the battle :)

I think there was a huge missed opportunity with the recent Google monopoly case, which could have been used to give users a dialog box to select a browser from a list instead of starting with Chrome as the pre-installed default.

It's less drastic than forcing Chrome to be spun off, which I don't think was realistic, and it's almost an exact copy of an anti monopoly remedy used against both Microsoft and Apple. It likely would have a meaningful impact on browser market share and it would be very similar in spirit in terms of its impact to the proposed remedy of spinning off Chromium to a new company.

It would also be a convenient natural experiment testing the anti-Mozilla narrative that contends the browser market share decline had absolutely nothing to do with distribution defaults, but was instead exclusively driven by minutia of Mozilla's strategic decisions.

What does it matter for users if it's at 2% if it works better than the alternatives?

Lots of products and services have small market share and are better than the market leaders.

I don’t care about its market share. Most people are tech illiterate. This comes as no surprise.