Cause and Effect? [OregonMuse]

First there was this, from April 2014, about a year ago:

Media coverage of Mozilla and its Firefox Web browser over the past week has largely focused on new CEO Brendan Eich and his 2008 opposition to gay marriage (in the form of a $1,000 donation to California's Prop 8 campaign). Yesterday, Eich resigned from Mozilla...Some are even calling for boycotts of the Firefox browser...

...and then there's this:

In the last 12 months, Firefox's user share -- an estimate of the portion of all those who reach the Internet via a desktop browser -- has plummeted by 34%. Since Firefox crested at 25.1% in April 2010, Firefox has lost 13.5 percentage points, or 54% of its peak share.

Wow.

Did the first one produce the second? They're talking about maybe Firefox going extinct, like Netscape. That sounds a bit premature to me, but I'm amazed it's being discussed as a possibility.

I'd like to think that conservative blowback is responsible for Mozilla's sudden reversal of fortune, but of course there's no way to know for sure. The SJW howling mob very loudly called for the lynching of Brendan Eich, an extortionate demand with which Mozilla complied, so the cause-and-effect is plain as day. But, in contrast to this, the conservative blowback is not the act of doing something, rather, it is the act of NOT doing something, which makes the measurement of the effect very difficult. It's kind of like proving a negative. Presumably, the head honchos at Mozilla are asking themselves why their flagship product has suddenly taken a 34% market hit, and if so, what answers have they come up with?

Full disclosure: I was one of the ones who dumped Firebox when Eich was thrown under the bus (and switched to Pale Moon). I don't think there's anything they can do to make me start using Firebox again. Actually, come to think of it, there is: they need grow stones big enough to tell the SJW howling mob to go pee up a rope. Until then, Mozilla is already extinct to me.

Personally, I think the SJW mob is in reality a very tiny contingent that has become adept at exaggerating their numbers and producing a vastly disproportionate amount of noise. Not a roaring, barking Rottweiler, just a yapping little chihuahua with a loudspeaker. If word ever got out how small they are, they'd be finished.

posted by Open Blogger at 07:33 PM

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