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Developers in general are very influential. Not only among our family and friends, but also because our choices create a lock-in effect due to the nature of ou

Developers in general are very influential. Not only among our family and friends, but also because our choices create a lock-in effect due to the nature of our work. When you use Chrome day in and out, your work is going to be optimized for Chrome and will work best on Chrome. This led to a Chrome-optimized web and while Google isn't necessarily to blame, we're back to the days of "works best in IExplorer 6". Companies and products that attract developers will eventually attract regular people as well. You could say that this is a chicken and egg problem, developers following the users, but with few exceptions (like the iPhone) in my experience thus far it's usually the developers that come first. --- It's worth mentioning that Chrome isn't popular only because of its technical excellence, but also because of Google's incessant marketing and bundling. But if we remember Microsoft and their declining browser market share, marketing and shoving your products down people's throats isn't enough. The product, especially if it's a platform, has to not suck and to be used by developers as well. So yes, if other browsers like Firefox want to stay relevant and grow, a major requirement is to provide excellent developer tools. Kudos to Mozilla for understanding that.

mrmonkeyman 7y ago
Influential? Please..
scarface74 7y ago
Developers and computer geeks have been overestimating their influence for over a decade. If geeks were influential, the “year of the Linux desktop” would have been years ago, no one would be on Facebook, and people wouldn’t buy into Apple’s wall garden and people would care about “freedom”. Definitely no one would have bought the iPod since it “had less space than the Nomad and no wireless”. (https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-ipod https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...) The consumerization of technology happened a long time ago.
- andybak 7y ago
  > Developers and computer geeks have been overestimating their influence for over a decade. I It's a lot easier to get people to switch browsers than OSs.
  - wolco 7y ago
    One is a click or two. The other feels like you are breaking this expensive machine. When someone buys a computer that works after turning it on switching oses seems risky.
- jakobegger 7y ago
  You can't talk about Chrome's market share without mentioning that it was (maybe still is? I don't know) prominently advertised on the google.com homepage. Everyone who went to search Google saw the ad. It said something like "Try a faster browser" The fact that Chrome was advertised on the most popular page in the world, and especially that it was the only ad on that page, definitely made a difference in adoption. The quality of the dev tools has nothing to do with it.
  - unityByFreedom 7y ago
    Source? I don't remember such an ad. Speaking as a dev, the dev tools had a ton to do with it.
    - progval 7y ago
      > Source? I don't remember such an ad. I too remember seeing this ad every time on Google's search page, but it's hard to search for articles mentioning it now, because any search on keywords "google chrome ads" return completely unrelated results. There are these old questions: * https://support.google.com/chrome/forum/AAAAP1KN0B0FrX8mjNQu-k/ https://support.google.com/chrome/forum/AAAAP1KN0B0FrX8mjNQu... * https://support.google.com/websearch/forum/AAAAgtjJeM41xpRdM-u1EU/ https://support.google.com/websearch/forum/AAAAgtjJeM41xpRdM... * https://support.google.com/chrome/forum/AAAAP1KN0B08liXq3dy9TM https://support.google.com/chrome/forum/AAAAP1KN0B08liXq3dy9... * https://www.quora.com/Why-am-I-being-shown-ads-for-Google-Chrome-despite-using-it https://www.quora.com/Why-am-I-being-shown-ads-for-Google-Ch... Also this news piece: https://www.techspot.com/news/79940-how-youtube-employees-killed-internet-explorer-6.html https://www.techspot.com/news/79940-how-youtube-employees-ki... While the article is about Google advertising three different browser in that particular banner, you can see on the screenshot there is another ad, that is just for Google Chrome. That's the ad that was shown all the time on Google Search and Youtube.
      - unityByFreedom 7y ago
        Thanks! I guess the Chrome ads on Google/Youtube show the influence devs can have after all =)
- unityByFreedom 7y ago
  All geeks don't hate FB and Apple. Your vantage point may be too far. Chrome's dev tools did have a lot to do with its rise in use among devs.
- cambalache 7y ago
  Over a decade? Try 3, and that is in the conservative side.
- booleandilemma 7y ago
  Dell once sold a “Developer Edition” laptop, so there is definitely a sizable market and developers do have some influence. https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/dell-laptops-and-notebooks/xps-13-developer-edition/spd/xps-13-linux https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/dell-laptops-and-notebo...
  - azdle 7y ago
    They still do: https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/cty/pdp/spd/xps-13-7390-laptop/cax13w10p1c606csu https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/cty/pdp/spd/xps-13-7390...
    - kulahan 7y ago
      Damn, that's kind of a nice laptop. Pretty tempting actually, though I'd probably install Windows on it personally. I was curious what specs made it "developer"-mode, and it looks like it's just a really big battery, very bright screen with good viewing angles, and easy to open with one hand (and a stable screen when you're moving around with it). Seems like it's specifically aimed at devs that work remote jobs and might be working outside from time to time? Still, neat idea.
  - Filligree 7y ago
    They still sell a Linux variant of the XPS series, which works mostly fine. It's not a patch on the X1 Carbon, but it's functional.
- bad_user 7y ago
  Not sure what you mean, but as an anecdote I quit using desktop Linux years ago and whenever I go to developer conferences, the majority are on MacOS and I think I see more people on Windows 10 than on Linux. That people wouldn't buy into Apple stuff is a big assumption, because we did do just that, for better or worse. Speaking of which, I see many more successful commercial desktop apps for MacOS than for Windows or Linux combined, even if Windows still has a much bigger market share. And this happened since before Apple's App Store for MacOS became a thing. I was also one of Facebook's early adopters, many of my programmer friends were too. Being from Romania, let me tell you, the early adopters here were all software developers ;-)
  - wolco 7y ago
    There might be some bias in there. " see many more successful commercial desktop apps for MacOS than for Windows or Linux combined" Office profits by itself would crush all MacOS application sales. Maybe it is easier for the single developer to create something profitable on MacOS but that's because the bigger players have marketshare over windows in the profitable niches.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      Office has always been available for the Mac. How many indy developers and small shops outside of games really have been successful making software?
  - michaelmrose 7y ago
    You can trivially pick out the macs visually how are you picking out who is running Linux?
- altShiftDev 7y ago
  > If geeks were influential, the “year of the Linux desktop” I don't see how that's relevant, if I set up or recommend Firefox on my parents computer with ad block they're going to trust me and use it over chrome/safari/edge. If I set up Linux instead of windows they're going to be extremely confused, annoyed and won't let me touch their computer again.. Geeks are extremely influential to their non technical friends but why would you ever impose Linux on them? I don't see how it would benefit them and you'd have to deal with the endless fallout and questions that arise.
- thenewnewguy 7y ago
  I think you're overestimating how unpopular those things are with devs/geeks. As a current (comp sci) college student, I can say that while less popular than in the general public - Windows, Facebook, and Apple's ecosystem are still used by a large number of my peers.
tripzilch 7y ago
> This led to a Chrome-optimized web and while Google isn't necessarily to blame-- Uh that seems to imply that Google has not been striving to accomplish exactly that. Because they surely haven't been working to prevent a browser engine mono culture. Which is kind of your only option, if your browser engine holds an absolute majority of usage and you don't want to be "to blame" for the browser engine mono culture. Seriously it puzzles me, how is this not Google's doing. I mean it's understandable they would do it. They're doing it. Who else would be doing it, the informed preference of millions of users? That would be a first ...
- bad_user 7y ago
  I don't understand your point. When you build a product, the purpose is to get customers / users, as many as possible. And when you win a majority market share, then that will make your product a de facto standard. Google could have introduced a lot of proprietary, non-standard extensions to Chrome (not Chromium, but Chrome itself, aka the proprietary version), screwing everybody else in the process. Think Microsoft's ActiveX or XAML. And while there are some glaring exceptions — like Chrome being responsible for the standardization of DRM, which is now keeping smaller open source Chromium forks out of the market, Google has been playing nice with web standards organizations, being major contributors, alongside Mozilla. And sure, they are in a position to impose pretty much anything they want, but they are fairly conservative in picking their battles, PNaCL versus WebAssembly comes to mind. Google might be guilty of anti-competitive practices, but in my opinion it is the software developers themselves that are to blame for a Chrome-optimized web. This is because they (we?) continue to use Chrome for optimizing and testing web interfaces, while neglecting Firefox and Safari.

mrmonkeyman 7y ago

Influential? Please..

scarface74 7y ago

Developers and computer geeks have been overestimating their influence for over a decade. If geeks were influential, the “year of the Linux desktop” would have been years ago, no one would be on Facebook, and people wouldn’t buy into Apple’s wall garden and people would care about “freedom”. Definitely no one would have bought the iPod since it “had less space than the Nomad and no wireless”. (https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-ipod https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...) The consumerization of technology happened a long time ago.

andybak 7y ago
> Developers and computer geeks have been overestimating their influence for over a decade. I It's a lot easier to get people to switch browsers than OSs.
- wolco 7y ago
  One is a click or two. The other feels like you are breaking this expensive machine. When someone buys a computer that works after turning it on switching oses seems risky.
jakobegger 7y ago
You can't talk about Chrome's market share without mentioning that it was (maybe still is? I don't know) prominently advertised on the google.com homepage. Everyone who went to search Google saw the ad. It said something like "Try a faster browser" The fact that Chrome was advertised on the most popular page in the world, and especially that it was the only ad on that page, definitely made a difference in adoption. The quality of the dev tools has nothing to do with it.
- unityByFreedom 7y ago
  Source? I don't remember such an ad. Speaking as a dev, the dev tools had a ton to do with it.
  - progval 7y ago
    > Source? I don't remember such an ad. I too remember seeing this ad every time on Google's search page, but it's hard to search for articles mentioning it now, because any search on keywords "google chrome ads" return completely unrelated results. There are these old questions: * https://support.google.com/chrome/forum/AAAAP1KN0B0FrX8mjNQu-k/ https://support.google.com/chrome/forum/AAAAP1KN0B0FrX8mjNQu... * https://support.google.com/websearch/forum/AAAAgtjJeM41xpRdM-u1EU/ https://support.google.com/websearch/forum/AAAAgtjJeM41xpRdM... * https://support.google.com/chrome/forum/AAAAP1KN0B08liXq3dy9TM https://support.google.com/chrome/forum/AAAAP1KN0B08liXq3dy9... * https://www.quora.com/Why-am-I-being-shown-ads-for-Google-Chrome-despite-using-it https://www.quora.com/Why-am-I-being-shown-ads-for-Google-Ch... Also this news piece: https://www.techspot.com/news/79940-how-youtube-employees-killed-internet-explorer-6.html https://www.techspot.com/news/79940-how-youtube-employees-ki... While the article is about Google advertising three different browser in that particular banner, you can see on the screenshot there is another ad, that is just for Google Chrome. That's the ad that was shown all the time on Google Search and Youtube.
    - unityByFreedom 7y ago
      Thanks! I guess the Chrome ads on Google/Youtube show the influence devs can have after all =)
unityByFreedom 7y ago
All geeks don't hate FB and Apple. Your vantage point may be too far. Chrome's dev tools did have a lot to do with its rise in use among devs.
cambalache 7y ago
Over a decade? Try 3, and that is in the conservative side.
booleandilemma 7y ago
Dell once sold a “Developer Edition” laptop, so there is definitely a sizable market and developers do have some influence. https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/dell-laptops-and-notebooks/xps-13-developer-edition/spd/xps-13-linux https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/dell-laptops-and-notebo...
- azdle 7y ago
  They still do: https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/cty/pdp/spd/xps-13-7390-laptop/cax13w10p1c606csu https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/cty/pdp/spd/xps-13-7390...
  - kulahan 7y ago
    Damn, that's kind of a nice laptop. Pretty tempting actually, though I'd probably install Windows on it personally. I was curious what specs made it "developer"-mode, and it looks like it's just a really big battery, very bright screen with good viewing angles, and easy to open with one hand (and a stable screen when you're moving around with it). Seems like it's specifically aimed at devs that work remote jobs and might be working outside from time to time? Still, neat idea.
- Filligree 7y ago
  They still sell a Linux variant of the XPS series, which works mostly fine. It's not a patch on the X1 Carbon, but it's functional.
bad_user 7y ago
Not sure what you mean, but as an anecdote I quit using desktop Linux years ago and whenever I go to developer conferences, the majority are on MacOS and I think I see more people on Windows 10 than on Linux. That people wouldn't buy into Apple stuff is a big assumption, because we did do just that, for better or worse. Speaking of which, I see many more successful commercial desktop apps for MacOS than for Windows or Linux combined, even if Windows still has a much bigger market share. And this happened since before Apple's App Store for MacOS became a thing. I was also one of Facebook's early adopters, many of my programmer friends were too. Being from Romania, let me tell you, the early adopters here were all software developers ;-)
- wolco 7y ago
  There might be some bias in there. " see many more successful commercial desktop apps for MacOS than for Windows or Linux combined" Office profits by itself would crush all MacOS application sales. Maybe it is easier for the single developer to create something profitable on MacOS but that's because the bigger players have marketshare over windows in the profitable niches.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Office has always been available for the Mac. How many indy developers and small shops outside of games really have been successful making software?
- michaelmrose 7y ago
  You can trivially pick out the macs visually how are you picking out who is running Linux?
altShiftDev 7y ago
> If geeks were influential, the “year of the Linux desktop” I don't see how that's relevant, if I set up or recommend Firefox on my parents computer with ad block they're going to trust me and use it over chrome/safari/edge. If I set up Linux instead of windows they're going to be extremely confused, annoyed and won't let me touch their computer again.. Geeks are extremely influential to their non technical friends but why would you ever impose Linux on them? I don't see how it would benefit them and you'd have to deal with the endless fallout and questions that arise.
thenewnewguy 7y ago
I think you're overestimating how unpopular those things are with devs/geeks. As a current (comp sci) college student, I can say that while less popular than in the general public - Windows, Facebook, and Apple's ecosystem are still used by a large number of my peers.

tripzilch 7y ago

> This led to a Chrome-optimized web and while Google isn't necessarily to blame-- Uh that seems to imply that Google has not been striving to accomplish exactly that. Because they surely haven't been working to prevent a browser engine mono culture. Which is kind of your only option, if your browser engine holds an absolute majority of usage and you don't want to be "to blame" for the browser engine mono culture. Seriously it puzzles me, how is this not Google's doing. I mean it's understandable they would do it. They're doing it. Who else would be doing it, the informed preference of millions of users? That would be a first ...

bad_user 7y ago
I don't understand your point. When you build a product, the purpose is to get customers / users, as many as possible. And when you win a majority market share, then that will make your product a de facto standard. Google could have introduced a lot of proprietary, non-standard extensions to Chrome (not Chromium, but Chrome itself, aka the proprietary version), screwing everybody else in the process. Think Microsoft's ActiveX or XAML. And while there are some glaring exceptions — like Chrome being responsible for the standardization of DRM, which is now keeping smaller open source Chromium forks out of the market, Google has been playing nice with web standards organizations, being major contributors, alongside Mozilla. And sure, they are in a position to impose pretty much anything they want, but they are fairly conservative in picking their battles, PNaCL versus WebAssembly comes to mind. Google might be guilty of anti-competitive practices, but in my opinion it is the software developers themselves that are to blame for a Chrome-optimized web. This is because they (we?) continue to use Chrome for optimizing and testing web interfaces, while neglecting Firefox and Safari.