Canyonero wrote:Would you rather 10 million people not crash, make 1 million people's machines run faster, or make 1 thousand people who write web sites have screens that look prettier?
The performance and stabilization work is usually cross-platform and rarely performed by the same people who are working on front-end code so I do not think the comparison is correct.
But overall I do not have a definitive answer. My gut feeling tells me that it is dangerous to alienate the developer community while bleeding users at the same time. Right now Firefox' still commendable market share on desktop makes it impossible for developers to ignore it. But what would happen if the market share were to drop dramatically and too few developers were left who keep using Firefox as their primary browser? I think it is easier to make a comeback as long as the web at large remains compatible with Firefox. One possible way to assure this is to keep developers using Firefox as their default browser so that compatibility is in their own best self-interest. The situation on mobile, where most developers are using WebKit-based browsers and mostly code for WebKit only, should be a warning. On the other hand pouring enough resources into the majority platforms and hopefully stabilizing the market share might keep the status quo, at least on desktop.
So if among those hypothetical 1000 people (I think it is far more) were the developers who are responsible for 90% of the top 500 web sites and there would be reasonable chance that they would use Firefox as long as enough "fluff" is present, then I would say yes, it is probably worth allocating resources to cater to their needs. But this is speculation, so the question remains on which side Mozilla would like to err in the worst case.
