People keep asking why Firefox is losing market share to Chrome and how to reverse it.
The answer to the first question is simple: it doesn't do anything Chrome doesn't, so there's no particular reason to use it unless you care about maintaining competition among browsers.
The answer to the second question is also simple: start acting in the interest of the user! Get rid of the annoying sticky headers. Increase the contrast when it's too low. Increase the font size when it's too small. Word wrap when stuff is going to go off the edge of the page. Narrow the display width when text is too wide.
Yes, I know you can do all of the above with various tools. I've started using the kill-sticky tool in Chrome. But that's not as good as having the browser do it proactively for you. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit there that would be vastly easier then trying to crank another zillionth of a percent out of JavaScript benchmarks. All it takes is the will to do it.
I think that Firefox lost most of that market share mainly because Google is pushing chrome really hard on Google Search... They ask you to install it at every corner. But if they would care about privacy, they would still avoid it.
Reader view is a good start but it needs to be extended. As a user I want to be able to turn it on universally and opt out for certain sites, or at least make it the default on some sites.
When I rebuilt my blog (http://flukus.github.io/) I tried to build it with reader mode in mind but it's hard, there are some hidden heuristics to trigger it's availability, you need a paragraph with at least 67 characters or something like that. So the articles work in reader mode, but the index doesn't. It doesn't work at all on file:// paths, so not great for proof reading.
As a developer I'd love to be able to put a meta tag in the page to always turn it on. There are a million other ways they could improve it too. I hope this is the future of the web.
Considering that reader view has it's own dedicated button and all, I'm not sure how it possibly could be made more promenient without being annoying. The popup already was bit on the edge of being annoying.
It's a cool idea! It could be a community-styled web experience, with the best user-style automatically applied and a button to easily return to plain mode. The "value" of an user-style could be treated as a multi-armed bandit problem, minimizing the number of return to plain mode.
Then perhaps they need to choose between their goal of adhering to the letter of web standards and their goal of having anyone use their browser. To be more exact, they need to understand that this is the choice they are making, whether they realize it or not.
The answer to the first question is simple: it doesn't do anything Chrome doesn't, so there's no particular reason to use it unless you care about maintaining competition among browsers.
The answer to the second question is also simple: start acting in the interest of the user! Get rid of the annoying sticky headers. Increase the contrast when it's too low. Increase the font size when it's too small. Word wrap when stuff is going to go off the edge of the page. Narrow the display width when text is too wide.
Yes, I know you can do all of the above with various tools. I've started using the kill-sticky tool in Chrome. But that's not as good as having the browser do it proactively for you. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit there that would be vastly easier then trying to crank another zillionth of a percent out of JavaScript benchmarks. All it takes is the will to do it.