Greetings fellow Mozillians,
We are watching for long time Firefox losing the ground under the feet. May is in my opinion where red light should be turned on, -0.40%from April! This is huge. What worries me is that no one from UX team didn’t predicted that, or at least product managers didn’t listened to them. Awful and noobish mistakes are made. Even more worrying is that our solution for losing market share is FoxYeah and Firefox Friends initiatives.
So what mistakes are made? Without any metrics for sure I can say that for this huge decline are guilty new tab page, sync, hello, and pocket. Where new tab page and sync are only indirectly to blame, hello and pocket are both indirectly and directly to blame. Indirectly they are guilt because when they came users were bombed with guided tours. Where in the world user wants to read some guide, even better to be forced to read it… to click arrows or “X” to shut it. I can see average users cursing “what the f* is this s*”. Guided tours are most to blame, like 90%. Now about bundling hello and pocket. Don’t get me wrong they are great extensions but they are not essential stuff for browser. Firefox is already seen as your gran-ma browser because one trivial thing, search box. Users perceives modern browser browser with 2-3 buttons and big url bar - a la Chrome. Now lets add two more buttons and smoke IE6 toolbars.
Users want non intrusive browser experience, url bar and/or search field on the page, no guides no bloatware bundles. They know how to type, that’s what they ask from browser - to enter the queries. In the time where I would suggest to divide developer tools into add-on and unbound them from browser installation Firefox is playing Opera 12.
Cheers.