The Holy Grail Of Chrome-To-Firefox User Conversion?

A Firefox developer just posted some revealing information about a process of how Chrome users could be converted into Firefox users. The good news may be that there is now a reasonable hint why Mozilla may not be able to gain users once they have become Chrome users. The bad news is that Firefox, in its current form, is not equipped with a critical feature to lure influential Chrome users.

Sometimes, the solution to a complicated problem could be buried in simplicity and, if Nicholas Nethercote is right, Mozilla could relatively quickly remove a hurdle that is, for many browser users, too high to cross. Nethercote, who usually works on Firefox’ memory consumption, blogged about his experience of  how a casual Chrome user was converted to Firefox and what it took.

The targeted user, a previous IE user who switched to Chrome and apparently liked Chrome, was suggested in this sort-of experiment to try Firefox. Nethercote found that it was especially appealing to this user that Firefox was built by a non-profit organization. However, the hurdle after the installation was that Firefox does not have a feature that would allow a new Firefox user to import bookmarks from Chrome. This is acceptable as long as there are just a few bookmarks, but if there are dozens or potentially hundreds of bookmarks that need to be moved manually, Mozilla may be hitting a brick wall.

Nethercote also discovered that while the new user liked AdBlock, the experience of dealing with add-ons after the installation was generally “awful”. The conclusion was that it required the experience of an expert Firefox user to actually install and configure Firefox for a new Firefox user in a way that would deliver the experience that Mozilla promises. This may be a very special case, but there is certainly some advice Mozilla should be considering – as well as other browser features that are being commoditized such as Google’s Sync that is still much simpler to use than Mozilla’s solution.

So, in the end, all those fancy new features, including UI improvements may not matter so much to users and Mozilla may have to deal with much more basic problems to compete with Google’s Chrome.

Wolfgang Gruener in Business on November 04