You know, there is a lot that is to blame for why Firefox doesn’t get the market share that it needs, but I would blame a part on its community as well. I have never seen a community that is so reluctant to any change or basically any features being added to a product than the Firefox community.
Firefox developers:
Look! To try and make the browser easier to use for new users, we have added a pop-up remind you that hey, Firefox sync is an awesome feature of this browser. Because feature discoverability is hard.
The Firefox community five seconds later:
E N S H I T I F I C A T I O N
Mozilla isn’t perfect. Far from it. I have a lot of things to say about them and features that were never added or removed years ago that I’m still pissed off about and will continue to complain about until it is resolved, like fucking PWAs for example.
But damn, being a Firefox developer sounds really hard. Like, trying to please a bunch of people who are always complaining about the state of this browser, but also will, without fail, always complain every time you change or add features sounds fucking exhausting.
I could come up with a thousand reasons as to why this would never happen. Hell, I could even argue that the whole Steam Deck’s existence comes from a series of decisions that Valve made out of hatred for Microsoft. So, yeah, it’s not happening.
Still though, as a thought experiment, imagining a world where tomorrow, Steam is owned by Microsoft, it’s… interesting, to say the least. In the most horrifying way possible, but interesting nonetheless. Quite frankly, I can’t imagine anything worse happening for video games. Like to me, this is what a video game apocalypse sounds like.