3 ms·

All of the other browsers have some other vector to push their browser. Safari, Edge and Chrome are all preinstalled on OSs and chrome is advertised on the bigg

All of the other browsers have some other vector to push their browser. Safari, Edge and Chrome are all preinstalled on OSs and chrome is advertised on the biggest website in the world. Even if firefox is slightly better than the rest it doesn't matter. Chrome only exists because IE was so bad people went out of their way not to use it.

sciurus 8y ago
Considering that, it's interesting that Firefox still has more desktop market share than Edge and Safari.
muxator 8y ago
Historically, that crown goes to Firefox. Its 2004 1.0 release was also publicized in the New York Times. Way before Chrome came out.
- godelski 8y ago
  To be fair, FF shot themselves in the foot. They didn't keep pace with Chrome. I use FF and think it is better NOW, but that wasn't always the case. I think that's where they lost their market share. I'm glad they put the work into Quantum. But it is going to be hard to regain that market share.
  - wvenable 8y ago
    The classic problem of being first to market in software, is that your competition can learn from your design and move forward with a fresh code. Firefox is still trying to shed off code from a decade ago. The history of browsers is littered with legacy code being defeated by new code.
    - baroffoos 8y ago
      The rust rewrites are ripping out loads of old code.
      - dralley 8y ago
        "Loads" is relative. There's still 20x more C++ in Firefox than Rust.
    - zanny 8y ago
      Except Chrome wasn't some brand new project. It was Webkit which was KHTML and dated back to the mid 90s. They just wrote their, uh, chrome layer and js engine a half decade later which were, and still are, reaping tangible benefits.
  - broodbucket 8y ago
    Easier said than done when comparing a traditional open source project with a strategically important project for a massive corporation...
_wmd 8y ago
Chrome only exists because Google were afraid of lacking control over the stack they use to deliver their content. Firefox was already 'good enough' long before it ever appeared, and Google could easily have dedicated engineering resources if the problem with Firefox was purely technical, much as they do with Linux. FWIW a lot of Google behavior can be cast as an analogy to a paranoid control freak. Net neutrality is an obvious one, the incredible lack of any demarcating information useful for traffic shaping in QUIC is another. But of course both of these are really about citizen rights and privacy :)
- acqq 8y ago
  > Firefox was already 'good enough' long before Only if you as "good enough" define "with Javascript even slower than IE." I've personally never used Chrome, because since even the first days it already had more "protected" installation than some malware, and that never made me confident in their intentions (and I've never liked Chrome UI) but Firefox has always had performance problems. As Chrome appeared it had extremely fast JS, and only then others "woke up."
  - jcranmer 8y ago
    Mozilla was working on a tracing JIT for JS before Google announced V8, although I believe V8 was released before the first version of Firefox with TraceMonkey was.

sciurus 8y ago

Considering that, it's interesting that Firefox still has more desktop market share than Edge and Safari.

muxator 8y ago

Historically, that crown goes to Firefox. Its 2004 1.0 release was also publicized in the New York Times. Way before Chrome came out.

godelski 8y ago
To be fair, FF shot themselves in the foot. They didn't keep pace with Chrome. I use FF and think it is better NOW, but that wasn't always the case. I think that's where they lost their market share. I'm glad they put the work into Quantum. But it is going to be hard to regain that market share.
- wvenable 8y ago
  The classic problem of being first to market in software, is that your competition can learn from your design and move forward with a fresh code. Firefox is still trying to shed off code from a decade ago. The history of browsers is littered with legacy code being defeated by new code.
  - baroffoos 8y ago
    The rust rewrites are ripping out loads of old code.
    - dralley 8y ago
      "Loads" is relative. There's still 20x more C++ in Firefox than Rust.
  - zanny 8y ago
    Except Chrome wasn't some brand new project. It was Webkit which was KHTML and dated back to the mid 90s. They just wrote their, uh, chrome layer and js engine a half decade later which were, and still are, reaping tangible benefits.
- broodbucket 8y ago
  Easier said than done when comparing a traditional open source project with a strategically important project for a massive corporation...

_wmd 8y ago

Chrome only exists because Google were afraid of lacking control over the stack they use to deliver their content. Firefox was already 'good enough' long before it ever appeared, and Google could easily have dedicated engineering resources if the problem with Firefox was purely technical, much as they do with Linux. FWIW a lot of Google behavior can be cast as an analogy to a paranoid control freak. Net neutrality is an obvious one, the incredible lack of any demarcating information useful for traffic shaping in QUIC is another. But of course both of these are really about citizen rights and privacy :)

acqq 8y ago
> Firefox was already 'good enough' long before Only if you as "good enough" define "with Javascript even slower than IE." I've personally never used Chrome, because since even the first days it already had more "protected" installation than some malware, and that never made me confident in their intentions (and I've never liked Chrome UI) but Firefox has always had performance problems. As Chrome appeared it had extremely fast JS, and only then others "woke up."
- jcranmer 8y ago
  Mozilla was working on a tracing JIT for JS before Google announced V8, although I believe V8 was released before the first version of Firefox with TraceMonkey was.