Mozilla was founded out of Netscape's product failure, and survived largely on the coattails of the search revolution.
Desktop Linux's failure is a matter of perspective, but there were more than a few products built around it... they just failed. It turns out, that was the wrong vision.
That's because the place to make inroads was elsewhere... in mobile, embedded, etc., which we don't count as "desktop" (though at one point, desktop was basically anything with a GUI). You throw in Android phones, Chromebooks, browsers in embedded devices, etc., the picture looks quite different.
Desktop Linux never became significantly better than Mac OS or Windows, that's why it failed to grow. It's worse in a lot of aspects except ideology.
Firefox is arguably better than Chrome and has a much nicer ideology as well, but it's not so much better than Chrome that the majority of users is switching by default.
Non technical people need a reason other than ideology to switch. The product needs to provide a new value that doesn't exist or be so much better that it's obvious to everybody who tries it.
> Non technical people need a reason other than ideology to switch. The product needs to provide a new value that doesn't exist or be so much better that it's obvious to everybody who tries it.
It's not even that.. often it's just distribution. Often consumers don't really want to make a conscious choice, so taking it away from them in the distribution channel is the way to go. I remember doing studies on search engine switching rates. No matter how awful we made the default search engine, the vast majority of users would not even try using Google. It was AMAZING.
I would argue that the browser wars have, to a much larger degree than we're prepared to acknowledge, been driven by distribution. Users don't want to make a choice.
So that means you just need a strategy for winning the distribution channel game. Product design be damned.
It failed to grow because it was never preinstalled on a sufficiently large number of machines at BestBuy, there's nothing else to it. If people were buying PCs with Linux on them, they'll use Linux and nobody would find anything weird about it.
Firefox was pre-installed (just not by OS makers) and it didn't so much beat IE as Chrome beat IE and didn't harm Firefox nearly as much (likely because Google prioritized converting systems where neither Firefox nor Chrome were the default browser).
Installing an alternative browser alongside your existing one requires minimal investment. Backing up all your data, converting to alternative formats, adopting a whole suite of new programs, different conventions etc. is an entirely different investment if you're already on Windows - if you had purchased the PC with Linux, it would be the same amount of hassle switching back to Windows.
Desktop Linux's failure is a matter of perspective, but there were more than a few products built around it... they just failed. It turns out, that was the wrong vision.