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Firefox took marketshare from IE because Microsoft abandoned it for several years (IE6) then did an half-assed update with IE7. It was a big pile of poop and Fi

Firefox took marketshare from IE because Microsoft abandoned it for several years (IE6) then did an half-assed update with IE7. It was a big pile of poop and Firefox succeeded not because it was a great product because because it was the right product at the right time. For Chrome on the other hand, its near-monopoly situation is worrisome but it's actually a pretty good product. So there is no pragmatic reasons to leave it for Firefox, only ideological reasons and it's a driver nearly not as powerful as suffering every day.

twoquestions 9y ago
It hogs battery life like nobody's business. I use Safari on my Mac because I want to use my MBP for more than 4 hours unplugged, even though Safari is objectively worse in every other category. If Firefox can deliver near-Chrome features with better battery life, I'll switch and never look back.
m3rc 9y ago
It's pragmatic to leave Chrome for the exact same reasons people left IE, the parent company has stopped improving the product. Chrome sold people on the promise of a much faster, lighter-weight browser than the heavy but competent Firefox of the time, a promise that Chrome no longer delivers on. The "added users" Mozilla has claimed in 2016 were developers realizing Chrome wasn't light or speedy anymore and if they were going to use a browser hogging all the RAM on their system they may as well use one with a functional extensions ecosystem. Chrome may not be comparatively "as bad" as IE was at the peak of Firefox's success, but it's still suffering from the same disease.
- scholia 9y ago
  Exactly right. I moved to Chrome when it came out, and moved back to Firefox a couple of years ago because of Chrome's growing memory-hogging problems and its inability to handle hundreds of tabs.
JoshMnem 9y ago
Firefox took marketshare from IE, because IE was terrible. It had no tabs. ActiveX was a security risk. Mozilla had amazing community management back then, and the community was completely in love with the product. Many of those core supporters have been lost, because Mozilla stopped listening to them. Chrome was able to gain users rapidly, because Google put a Google Chrome ad in the corner of the search results pages, claiming that it was faster, even when that claim became dubious.

twoquestions 9y ago

It hogs battery life like nobody's business. I use Safari on my Mac because I want to use my MBP for more than 4 hours unplugged, even though Safari is objectively worse in every other category. If Firefox can deliver near-Chrome features with better battery life, I'll switch and never look back.

m3rc 9y ago

It's pragmatic to leave Chrome for the exact same reasons people left IE, the parent company has stopped improving the product. Chrome sold people on the promise of a much faster, lighter-weight browser than the heavy but competent Firefox of the time, a promise that Chrome no longer delivers on. The "added users" Mozilla has claimed in 2016 were developers realizing Chrome wasn't light or speedy anymore and if they were going to use a browser hogging all the RAM on their system they may as well use one with a functional extensions ecosystem. Chrome may not be comparatively "as bad" as IE was at the peak of Firefox's success, but it's still suffering from the same disease.

scholia 9y ago
Exactly right. I moved to Chrome when it came out, and moved back to Firefox a couple of years ago because of Chrome's growing memory-hogging problems and its inability to handle hundreds of tabs.

JoshMnem 9y ago

Firefox took marketshare from IE, because IE was terrible. It had no tabs. ActiveX was a security risk. Mozilla had amazing community management back then, and the community was completely in love with the product. Many of those core supporters have been lost, because Mozilla stopped listening to them. Chrome was able to gain users rapidly, because Google put a Google Chrome ad in the corner of the search results pages, claiming that it was faster, even when that claim became dubious.