4 ms·

Out of curiosity, before Chrome came along, why didn't Firefox eat IE's lunch? The Microsoft anti-trust case was 1999-2001 but Chrome came out in 2008.

philliphaydon 8y ago
There was basically no marketing of browsers in 2000... I found opera and Firefox on a cd from pc world. But never saw anything on the internet about it... Google pushes chrome easily by plastering it in front of you every time you go to Google or gmail...
llampx 8y ago
In the right circles, Mozilla Browser/Phoenix (and then Firefox) did eat IE's lunch until Chrome launched and Firefox started becoming slower and more bloaty. The only time I used IE from IE 5.5/6 onwards was to download Mozilla Browser and/or Opera after a fresh install. It was common knowledge to disable ActiveX and download Mozilla.
lmm 8y ago
Firefox was always slow - the GUI felt slower than IE to me - and while it theoretically had better standards support, there were no websites that didn't work in IE. (Personally I was using Konqueror in that era - even then it felt like a much better browser - and wish the open-source community had rallied behind it. But the US open-source folks never seemed to pay much attention to anything that had been implemented in Europe)
- eddieh 8y ago
  Did Konqueror conquer the browser? It was based on KHTML which became WebKit and eventually Blink which is Chrome.
- toyg 8y ago
  Konqueror was "suicided" by KDE themselves, right about the time Apple picked it up to make WebKit. The truth is that working on browser engines is hard and unfashionable work, nobody in opensource really wants to do it. Every desktop environment made its crappy half-baked reimplementation when it looked like deep desktop integration was inevitable and Netscape was a black-box (the IE 4/5 era), then dropped it when Firefox came about - it was good enough, and the integration fashion had passed. I do agree that KDE was (still is) ridiculously ignored in the US. The licence schism generated a certain tribalism that is now difficult to overcome. Which is funny, considering GPL is now The Devil in the US.
  - lmm 8y ago
    > Konqueror was "suicided" by KDE themselves, right about the time Apple picked it up to make WebKit. How so? The browser kept working nicely the whole time. Eventually Webkit was offered as a rendering engine option when development overtook mainline KHTML, but that was long after Apple first adopted it.
    - toyg 8y ago
      It was basically deprecated as a file manager, in favour of Dolphin, and all-around de-emphasized. It started lagging in development efforts. I have not really followed after about 4.2 (iirc), but at that time it already looked fairly dead in the water, at least in the attitudes emanating from the project.
      - lmm 8y ago
        > It was basically deprecated as a file manager, in favour of Dolphin Well sure, but I saw that more as splitting out the file manager and browser into separate apps, which seems perfectly sensible. > It started lagging in development efforts. I have not really followed after about 4.2 (iirc), but at that time it already looked fairly dead in the water, at least in the attitudes emanating from the project. Shrug. It was always a shoestring project in terms of how many developers they had, but the browser kept working well, was my experience.
adontz 8y ago
It kinda did, see 2010 https://www.w3schools.com/browsers/default.asp https://www.w3schools.com/browsers/default.asp Google pushed Chrome a lot. We need another antitrust for Google honestly. They are promoting Chrome everywhere they can.
scarejunba 8y ago
Web standards weren’t a thing. You had to be bug compatible with IE or websites wouldn’t work. Firefox was slowly catching up. It was up to some 30 something percent after the big operations at the grassroots to popularize It. Mozilla was making web standards a thing. When Chrome arrived, though, the paradigm shifted. Chrome was blazing fast. You double clicked it and it opened instantly. You closed it and it was gone. When you typed somrthing into the bar, it searched it or it went to the url. When you opened a new tab it opened instantly. It was amazing. And everyone knew who Google were - they’d made real search, they’d given us Gmail (upending all of webmail).
dTal 8y ago
It was on its way. Most people just shrugged and used the default browser (IE) and there wasn't much mindset that browsers were meant to be power tools - IE didn't even have tabs, it was just a window that held a webpage with a couple of back buttons. And IE felt clean after AOL, which was many people's first browsing experience. Among those who did switch, most switched to Firefox (and a small few switched to Opera). By the time Chrome was released, Firefox's market share was 20-25%, entirely through grassroots evangelism. It felt like a steady race that we were winning. Then Chrome came along with its minimalist interface, hyper-optimised JS engine, extreme attention to latency, and aggressive marketing from the front page of the internet (which was also growing more JS-heavy by the day), which contributed to Chrome not just feeling faster, but amazingly futuristic. Whereas Firefox was "you really shouldn't be using that crufty old IE, try this new hotness - it has tabs!", Chrome was more "OMG you have to try this, it makes your internet twice as fast". It didn't help that Chrome's strength was Firefox's weakness - for all its merits, its XUL-based interface sometimes made it feel a mite sluggish.
- lewisjoe 8y ago
  This is true. I wasn't much tech savvy back then. I switched to Chrome because it made my internet fast. Of course it might not really have, but the sleek look, the circular loader instead of a progress bar kind of a loader that Firefox had at that time, faster JS engine – all this combined to give me a wow factor in terms of browsing speed. Remember, this was at the time when 250kbps of broadband speed was the "normal". And speed was easily a critical factor.
Tomte 8y ago
In Germany it kind of did. "Everyone" was using Firefox. It's still bigger here than elsewhere, but Chrome has overtaken it here, as well.
ordu 8y ago
Firefox ate IE's lunch. Really, it was Firefox who begun a revolution in a web-space. At some point Mozilla rebranded their browser suite named 'Mozilla' into Seamonkey, and started Firefox as a separate product (not a part of suite of apps like mail client, IRC client, web browser, and calendar). It was around 2005, though I believe wikipedia can tell the precise date. The result was a rapidly growing market share, I remember celebrating this as the end of IE domination. I was linux-user then and IE domination and IE-only sites was a pain in the ass. Then in a couple of years Chrome emerged. It was a way simplier than FF, it had no firefox's complex dialogs to customize a lot of things. Chrome helped Firefox to eat the rest of IE market share, and then started to eat into Firefox market share. It was like this. Funnily that people doesn't remember that, believing instead that it was Chrome who overthrown IE. It was Firefox who changed web to a point when web-developers couldn't ignore non-IE users, and had to check compliance with standards, not just check whether their sites works with IE.

philliphaydon 8y ago

There was basically no marketing of browsers in 2000... I found opera and Firefox on a cd from pc world. But never saw anything on the internet about it... Google pushes chrome easily by plastering it in front of you every time you go to Google or gmail...

llampx 8y ago

In the right circles, Mozilla Browser/Phoenix (and then Firefox) did eat IE's lunch until Chrome launched and Firefox started becoming slower and more bloaty. The only time I used IE from IE 5.5/6 onwards was to download Mozilla Browser and/or Opera after a fresh install. It was common knowledge to disable ActiveX and download Mozilla.

lmm 8y ago

Firefox was always slow - the GUI felt slower than IE to me - and while it theoretically had better standards support, there were no websites that didn't work in IE. (Personally I was using Konqueror in that era - even then it felt like a much better browser - and wish the open-source community had rallied behind it. But the US open-source folks never seemed to pay much attention to anything that had been implemented in Europe)

eddieh 8y ago
Did Konqueror conquer the browser? It was based on KHTML which became WebKit and eventually Blink which is Chrome.
toyg 8y ago
Konqueror was "suicided" by KDE themselves, right about the time Apple picked it up to make WebKit. The truth is that working on browser engines is hard and unfashionable work, nobody in opensource really wants to do it. Every desktop environment made its crappy half-baked reimplementation when it looked like deep desktop integration was inevitable and Netscape was a black-box (the IE 4/5 era), then dropped it when Firefox came about - it was good enough, and the integration fashion had passed. I do agree that KDE was (still is) ridiculously ignored in the US. The licence schism generated a certain tribalism that is now difficult to overcome. Which is funny, considering GPL is now The Devil in the US.
- lmm 8y ago
  > Konqueror was "suicided" by KDE themselves, right about the time Apple picked it up to make WebKit. How so? The browser kept working nicely the whole time. Eventually Webkit was offered as a rendering engine option when development overtook mainline KHTML, but that was long after Apple first adopted it.
  - toyg 8y ago
    It was basically deprecated as a file manager, in favour of Dolphin, and all-around de-emphasized. It started lagging in development efforts. I have not really followed after about 4.2 (iirc), but at that time it already looked fairly dead in the water, at least in the attitudes emanating from the project.
    - lmm 8y ago
      > It was basically deprecated as a file manager, in favour of Dolphin Well sure, but I saw that more as splitting out the file manager and browser into separate apps, which seems perfectly sensible. > It started lagging in development efforts. I have not really followed after about 4.2 (iirc), but at that time it already looked fairly dead in the water, at least in the attitudes emanating from the project. Shrug. It was always a shoestring project in terms of how many developers they had, but the browser kept working well, was my experience.

adontz 8y ago

It kinda did, see 2010 https://www.w3schools.com/browsers/default.asp https://www.w3schools.com/browsers/default.asp Google pushed Chrome a lot. We need another antitrust for Google honestly. They are promoting Chrome everywhere they can.

scarejunba 8y ago

Web standards weren’t a thing. You had to be bug compatible with IE or websites wouldn’t work. Firefox was slowly catching up. It was up to some 30 something percent after the big operations at the grassroots to popularize It. Mozilla was making web standards a thing. When Chrome arrived, though, the paradigm shifted. Chrome was blazing fast. You double clicked it and it opened instantly. You closed it and it was gone. When you typed somrthing into the bar, it searched it or it went to the url. When you opened a new tab it opened instantly. It was amazing. And everyone knew who Google were - they’d made real search, they’d given us Gmail (upending all of webmail).

dTal 8y ago

It was on its way. Most people just shrugged and used the default browser (IE) and there wasn't much mindset that browsers were meant to be power tools - IE didn't even have tabs, it was just a window that held a webpage with a couple of back buttons. And IE felt clean after AOL, which was many people's first browsing experience. Among those who did switch, most switched to Firefox (and a small few switched to Opera). By the time Chrome was released, Firefox's market share was 20-25%, entirely through grassroots evangelism. It felt like a steady race that we were winning. Then Chrome came along with its minimalist interface, hyper-optimised JS engine, extreme attention to latency, and aggressive marketing from the front page of the internet (which was also growing more JS-heavy by the day), which contributed to Chrome not just feeling faster, but amazingly futuristic. Whereas Firefox was "you really shouldn't be using that crufty old IE, try this new hotness - it has tabs!", Chrome was more "OMG you have to try this, it makes your internet twice as fast". It didn't help that Chrome's strength was Firefox's weakness - for all its merits, its XUL-based interface sometimes made it feel a mite sluggish.

lewisjoe 8y ago
This is true. I wasn't much tech savvy back then. I switched to Chrome because it made my internet fast. Of course it might not really have, but the sleek look, the circular loader instead of a progress bar kind of a loader that Firefox had at that time, faster JS engine – all this combined to give me a wow factor in terms of browsing speed. Remember, this was at the time when 250kbps of broadband speed was the "normal". And speed was easily a critical factor.

Tomte 8y ago

In Germany it kind of did. "Everyone" was using Firefox. It's still bigger here than elsewhere, but Chrome has overtaken it here, as well.

ordu 8y ago

Firefox ate IE's lunch. Really, it was Firefox who begun a revolution in a web-space. At some point Mozilla rebranded their browser suite named 'Mozilla' into Seamonkey, and started Firefox as a separate product (not a part of suite of apps like mail client, IRC client, web browser, and calendar). It was around 2005, though I believe wikipedia can tell the precise date. The result was a rapidly growing market share, I remember celebrating this as the end of IE domination. I was linux-user then and IE domination and IE-only sites was a pain in the ass. Then in a couple of years Chrome emerged. It was a way simplier than FF, it had no firefox's complex dialogs to customize a lot of things. Chrome helped Firefox to eat the rest of IE market share, and then started to eat into Firefox market share. It was like this. Funnily that people doesn't remember that, believing instead that it was Chrome who overthrown IE. It was Firefox who changed web to a point when web-developers couldn't ignore non-IE users, and had to check compliance with standards, not just check whether their sites works with IE.