by glenstein | 2025-11-23 01:44:19+00:00
The main driver of market share loss was the rise of mobile and Chrome being the bundled default on over a billion devices. I don't think Mozilla's run has been perfect, but I am flabbergasted at so many confidently wrong retellings of the history of market share change that treat it exclusively as a story of Mozilla's strategic missteps and make no space for the fact that a trillion dollar company with the #1 or #2 most visited site in the world for the past 20 years muscled a new browser into the picture, leveraging their monopoly in search and mobile, plus laptops produced and sold practically at cost. Firefox could have made every perfect decision you could have dreamed of and still suffered a market share collapse.

In fact, I think there's a pretty clear-cut example of a natural experiment demonstrating what it looks like to execute in the browser space to nearly perfection and still lose. In my personal opinion, Opera at its peak with the Presto engine, represented the most impressive combination for it's time of elite level performance and stability, genuinely good innovation that benefited the user, and commitment to the core browser above all else. My favorite was whenever they rolled out Opera Unite (to this day a truly mind blowing idea), I think Opera 11 or 12.

And, at a time when it truly mattered, was light on resources and bandwidth and even shipped a portable executable that could be run from any Windows PC from a USB stick. Not only that, but it was consistently ahead of the competition with embedded and device adapted versions. Is business partnerships were creative and cutting edge too. They were early to mobile, struck deals with oems, and even got on the Nintendo Wii. They offered paid and subscription options. IIRC they sold "speed dial" placement for ads and got into the search licensing game. So in everything from performance to speed to stability to innovation that actually benefited users, to intelligent business partnerships and experimenting to find revenue, Opera executed at perhaps the best level anyone could, the perfect moneyball browser. And I was never originally an Opera fanboy, I preferred Firefox 1 and 2 at the start, but pivoted to Opera because, as a college kid with no money, it delivered an impressively modern experience on lightweight hardware.

Despite executing at the highest level both in software and business decision making, it didn't matter, because distribution power trumps product quality. Sustaining a fully independent rendering engine became financially unsustainable, and with the maturity of Android, carriers favored bundled stock browsers.

With no options left Opera then made what I consider a difficult and very unfortunate decision, but perhaps having no other choice, sold to a new ownership team, pivoted to Chromium, and lost much of its team to Vivaldi which is also based on Chromium. But at no point in the story was their loss of financial visibility or market share due the loss of vision that people think explains Firefox's loss of market share. If the world actually worked that way we'd all be using Opera 25 right now.

Edit: If someone more knowledgeable could chime in, I would be fascinated to know if choosing a browser on Android could be a potential monopoly remedy. There's already precedent for that on Windows, iOS and on Android in EU for search.