On Saturday, March 12, 2016 at 8:59:20 AM UTC-8, Bobby Holley wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 11, 2016 at 4:28 PM, Terrence Cole <tc...@mozilla.com> wrote:
>
> > We've had this conversation several times in the last few years and I think
> > I've finally figured out why it has always felt subtly wrong.
> >
> > Our share of users on older platforms is disproportionally high compared to
> > the market in general because of our decline in market share. People who
> > don't want to upgrade their OS generally don't want to "upgrade" their
> > browser to the shiny new "chrome" thing the kids are talking about either.
> > It is a symptom of a larger problem and it seems like we are continually
> > hiding from that problem instead of tackling it head-on.
> >
> > We should be aggressively cutting support for niche markets and spending
> > that effort to increase our market share where it counts: where it's
> > growing rather than rapidly shrinking. Telling 1.2% of our (admittedly
> > small) market share to, effectively, GTFO, is pretty scary; however, I
> > think the alternative is to simply fail as a project as we chase our
> > users-by-default into more and more niche markets. If we can't use our
> > resources to re-capture 1.2% of the market among people who have modern
> > computers and no obligation to love us, then maybe we've already failed.
> >
>
> I don't think it's quite that simple.
>
> I agree that it's important to recognize that users on older OSes have
> lower long-term value to us, because we'll _eventually_ need to stop
> supporting them, and there's no guarantee they'll reinstall Firefox if they
> move to a new machine.
>
> However, they _do_ have short-term value, in that their continued use of
> Firefox makes the Web better for every other Firefox user. The number of
> f***s web developers give about the experience of Firefox users is directly
> proportional to the number of Firefox users visiting their sites. The lower
> that number goes, the bigger our disadvantage, and the more engineering
> heroics we'll need to do to compensate. By the time Opera/Presto went
> under, rumor has it that almost all of their resources were going to
> web-compat.
>
> Its a regressive game that favors monopolists, but there you go. Ditching
> 1.2% of our users makes it materially more difficult to attract new ones.
> So we should only do it if the benefits really outweigh the costs.
Though in this case, the main competitor (Chrome) would also be dropping
support. In fact they are even worse in that they are dropping all pre-Win7
platforms while I proposed dropping support for only XP SP2.
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