General Discussion • Re: Pale Moon's PR Problem

Then you should look at Firefox's plummeting market share numbers from 2009 to 2026, they are abysmal. And 99% of that loss of users was before Mozilla's recent AI pivot. So the problem with being associated with another project whose popularity has been plummeting like a rock for 17 straight year is that the force of gravity will pull your own project down with it. Did you read the earlier Balrog analogy? People will associate your browser (nice, lovely Pale Moon) with a browser they strongly dislike (Firefox), and they won't give Pale Moon a second thought.

This is a big problem we have as well, I admit. And it's one I've been kinda worried about as far as Firefox marketshare. That our userbase will be a subset of those who would otherwise use Firefox. In fact, given that we spoof the UA to be Firefox so websites will not turn us away at the door in a lot of cases... who knows how much of the reported Firefox marketshare is really Firefox and not Pale Moon or other forks, anyway? I noticed their usage fell from 5% to 3% around the same time we had a dip in users...

I just wonder how we can... you know, not be chained to Firefox? It's like, we started off rebasing the browser on Firefox every few years. Then it got harder and harder until we stopped at UXP, but kept backporting stuff from Mozilla for a long time. Now more and more complex stuff has to be done by us from scratch. But it seems like it's hard to break out of that and establish an independent identity...