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Strongly disagree - I think the reason Firefox market share is in a tailspin is because once they "rationalized" the codebase by getting rid of power features -

by dman 6y ago

Strongly disagree - I think the reason Firefox market share is in a tailspin is because once they "rationalized" the codebase by getting rid of power features - there was no moat around them to keep even simple upstarts like Edge away. Programmers often make the mistake of classifying all complexity as cruft - when much of that are use cases accumulated over time that reflect your competitive advantage - one that any competitor has to overcome. The more Firefox streamlines the more they will cede ground to better funded alternatives.

acdha 6y ago
Firefox’s market share started declining when Google ran huge ad campaigns for Chrome and made some of the most popular sites on the web promote Chrome and, in the case of YouTube, run better on it. Microsoft Edge didn’t affect Firefox much, and fared equally poorly against that juggernaut. Any theory which talks about niche features without accounting for that push is unlikely to be right.
- robenkleene 6y ago
  Quibi had a big ad budget too. Marketing gives you leg up, but at the end of the day, a product's merits have to live up to it. Both IE and Safari had an even bigger advantage than marketing by being built-in to their respective platforms, and both have lost marketshare to Chrome. I'll say pointblank I don't know what people see in Chrome, but they clearly see something in it. To me today, Safari, Firefox, and Chrome are essentially identical, which is a bad spot to be in for everyone except the market leader, because there's no incentive to switch. UPDATE: There's a stronger case regarding Google sabotaging Firefox, but I don't think that accounts for the magnitude of the switch, here's a detail of the accusation[0]: > A Mozilla Program Manager named Chris Peterson accused Google of making Youtube performance slower on the Firefox explorer in July 2018. Peterson alleged that Google was aware that both Firefox and Edge, Microsoft’s browser, were performing better with regard to loading the popular video sharing platform YouTube and decided to switch to a Javascript library which was incompatible with Firefox. Google Chrome became the dominant browser around 2012, after being released in 2008. That's an astronomically fast takeover, if there were any shenanigans that accounted for it, they'd have to be quite aggressive (and therefore discussed more at that time). [0]: https://btcmanager.com/former-mozilla-executive-accuses-google-sabotage/?q=/former-mozilla-executive-accuses-google-sabotage/& https://btcmanager.com/former-mozilla-executive-accuses-goog...
  - acdha 6y ago
    Back in the day, Chrome was faster — almost as fast as Safari to launch and faster when executing heavy sites. When it took IE and Firefox longer to load, installing Chrome was something which had an immediate benefit and Google's heavy promotion of it meant that most people gave it a try. These days, I agree that the main problem is that any modern browser is good enough that people don't feel a huge pressure to switch. I prefer Firefox's developer tools but that's not exactly a mainstream need. The most obvious angle would be something about ad blocking and privacy where Google has significant financial incentives not to follow but I' m not sure how much of an audience that could add up to and it will definitely get hostility if effective.

by dman 6y ago

acdha 6y ago

Firefox’s market share started declining when Google ran huge ad campaigns for Chrome and made some of the most popular sites on the web promote Chrome and, in the case of YouTube, run better on it. Microsoft Edge didn’t affect Firefox much, and fared equally poorly against that juggernaut. Any theory which talks about niche features without accounting for that push is unlikely to be right.

robenkleene 6y ago
Quibi had a big ad budget too. Marketing gives you leg up, but at the end of the day, a product's merits have to live up to it. Both IE and Safari had an even bigger advantage than marketing by being built-in to their respective platforms, and both have lost marketshare to Chrome. I'll say pointblank I don't know what people see in Chrome, but they clearly see something in it. To me today, Safari, Firefox, and Chrome are essentially identical, which is a bad spot to be in for everyone except the market leader, because there's no incentive to switch. UPDATE: There's a stronger case regarding Google sabotaging Firefox, but I don't think that accounts for the magnitude of the switch, here's a detail of the accusation[0]: > A Mozilla Program Manager named Chris Peterson accused Google of making Youtube performance slower on the Firefox explorer in July 2018. Peterson alleged that Google was aware that both Firefox and Edge, Microsoft’s browser, were performing better with regard to loading the popular video sharing platform YouTube and decided to switch to a Javascript library which was incompatible with Firefox. Google Chrome became the dominant browser around 2012, after being released in 2008. That's an astronomically fast takeover, if there were any shenanigans that accounted for it, they'd have to be quite aggressive (and therefore discussed more at that time). [0]: https://btcmanager.com/former-mozilla-executive-accuses-google-sabotage/?q=/former-mozilla-executive-accuses-google-sabotage/& https://btcmanager.com/former-mozilla-executive-accuses-goog...
- acdha 6y ago
  Back in the day, Chrome was faster — almost as fast as Safari to launch and faster when executing heavy sites. When it took IE and Firefox longer to load, installing Chrome was something which had an immediate benefit and Google's heavy promotion of it meant that most people gave it a try. These days, I agree that the main problem is that any modern browser is good enough that people don't feel a huge pressure to switch. I prefer Firefox's developer tools but that's not exactly a mainstream need. The most obvious angle would be something about ad blocking and privacy where Google has significant financial incentives not to follow but I' m not sure how much of an audience that could add up to and it will definitely get hostility if effective.