3 ms·

I’m not being coy by phrasing this as a conjecture; it is just a hypothesis: perhaps Google is worried that FF could gain mind share under technical people , wh

I’m not being coy by phrasing this as a conjecture; it is just a hypothesis: perhaps Google is worried that FF could gain mind share under technical people , who might then cause a ripple effect by installing it for everyone whose computers they “manage” or influence (friends & family). Which could up being a lot of people, in the end. I have a feeling that’s how MSIE originally got dethroned.

twblalock 9y ago
I'm pretty sure it was Chrome that dethroned IE, not Firefox. It had really good marketing, and nontechnical people started to adopt it rapidly because it had a really clean interface and was a lot faster than IE or Firefox were at the time. Here's a chart of browser market share from 2009 to 2017: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/media/File:StatCounter-browser-ww-monthly-200901-201707.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m... It seems pretty clear from that chart that the rapid decline of IE was accompanied by the rapid rise of Chrome. Firefox seems to have peaked in popularity in 2010, when IE was still a lot more popular than Chrome. Chrome ate both their lunches.
- Sylos 9y ago
  People say that Firefox did the hard work, because back then the web was just entirely built for IE. It was much harder to steal market share from IE at that point, because the web that you were able to display, if you were not IE, was just broken. You had to be so much better than IE at everything else to get people to use your browser despite the web being broken. The small differences between browsers today would not suffice for that. So, the total number of percentage points that Chrome ate up is bigger, but it would never have gotten off the ground, if Firefox had not shaved off market share beforehand.
- oblio 9y ago
  > It had really good marketing Good marketing? They put a freaking ad for it on Google.com! They still have it and there's no way to even disable the nagware. I've clicked "No" to it I don't know how many hundreds of times over these years.

twblalock 9y ago

I'm pretty sure it was Chrome that dethroned IE, not Firefox. It had really good marketing, and nontechnical people started to adopt it rapidly because it had a really clean interface and was a lot faster than IE or Firefox were at the time. Here's a chart of browser market share from 2009 to 2017: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/media/File:StatCounter-browser-ww-monthly-200901-201707.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m... It seems pretty clear from that chart that the rapid decline of IE was accompanied by the rapid rise of Chrome. Firefox seems to have peaked in popularity in 2010, when IE was still a lot more popular than Chrome. Chrome ate both their lunches.

Sylos 9y ago
People say that Firefox did the hard work, because back then the web was just entirely built for IE. It was much harder to steal market share from IE at that point, because the web that you were able to display, if you were not IE, was just broken. You had to be so much better than IE at everything else to get people to use your browser despite the web being broken. The small differences between browsers today would not suffice for that. So, the total number of percentage points that Chrome ate up is bigger, but it would never have gotten off the ground, if Firefox had not shaved off market share beforehand.
oblio 9y ago
> It had really good marketing Good marketing? They put a freaking ad for it on Google.com! They still have it and there's no way to even disable the nagware. I've clicked "No" to it I don't know how many hundreds of times over these years.