Mozilla Dev on How to Convert Chrome User to Firefox

A Firefox developer discusses the hurdles Firefox faces.

To survive the battle with IE and Chrome, Mozilla will have to find more compelling reasons for people to use Firefox - or reasons to draw people back to Firefox. Nicholas Nethercote, who works on memory improvements in Firefox, described why getting users back from Chrome may nearly be impossible, and the reason why casual users may steer clear of Firefox.

Nethercote stressed that Firefox does not offer the importing of bookmarks from Chrome. As long as there are just a handful of bookmarks, users may be willing to accept a manual install of bookmarks in Firefox, but if the transfer of bookmarks includes potentially hundreds of bookmarks, the lack of bookmark import may actually kill the deal for Mozilla. Nethercote stated that Mozilla needs such a feature badly.

He also stumbled over "awful" third-party add-ons in the Windows version of Firefox, which resembles the experience of crapware. On the positive side, he noticed that Mozilla's position as a non-profit organization resonates well and AdBlock Plus is a tool Mozilla needs to promote much more [Ed. note: Hopefully the target is people who don't know that similar software exists for Chrome].  Somewhat surprisingly, none of the features that Mozilla promoted in the recent past appear to have been convincing reasons for a switch. The problems may be that simple and basic issues that have been overlooked: Nethercote found that it took the experience of an expert user to install and configure Firefox. For casual users, Firefox may be too difficult to set up.

Read about his full process here.