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Let's be clear on one thing that seems to be perpetually discussed whenever there is a Firefox thread: what has lead to its declining usage. It is not removing

Let's be clear on one thing that seems to be perpetually discussed whenever there is a Firefox thread: what has lead to its declining usage. It is not removing XUL 'power' extensions and replacing them with 'neutered' WebExtensions mechanism. It is not choosing to closely align with Chrome in terms of UI/UX and functionality. It is not the letting go of Brendan Eich and the newer (much criticised) management. It is not because of Mozilla foundation highlighting a few 'social justice' issues here and there. The decline of Firefox is because of one thing only - the enormous marketing and engineering clout of Google and their utterly ruthless, relentless, anti-competitive pushing of Chrome across Android and all their web properties and even through ads all over the world. More specifically, it is their bundling of Chrome as the default, preset browser on the world most popular mobile operating system that really swung the tide decisively in their favour. Once ordinary users got used to Chrome on Android, they would naturally seek out the same browser on their laptops and desktops, to minimise interoperability issues and maximise familiarity. And while pre-installing Chrome on Android (and by the way, it is pre-installed even on most laptop/desktop purchases by "helpful" OEMs - such is its viral reach) may not be strictly illegal as per anti-monopoly laws (because alternatives are 'freely' available on the default app store), the fact remains that if a program that comes with the OS is "good enough", the very vast majority of users will not bothering changing it, and thus Google managed to cripple all other browsers while still subtly side-stepping any potential lawsuits. So the decline of Firefox is in my opinion a social/political phenomenon and nothing to do with its technical competence or extendibility vis-a-vis Chrome. It is certainly a more than competent drop-in replacement for Chrome (unlike say w3m or NetSurf), but who will bother to do the replacement in the first place, as long as Chrome continues to be "good enough" (which is does excellently) and it doesn't outrageously hurt the user base by some extraordinarily shocking screw-up (and Facebook shows, even such odious abuse will be condoned by the user base by and large when the network effects are too big).

Fej 6y ago
I would recommend readers to skim the Wikipedia article on tying, or a similar article on the subject: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce) A shorter article: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/tying.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/tying.asp Microsoft was convicted by the US for tying Windows and IE in the 90's, and Google was more recently convicted by the EU for tying Android and Chrome. US regulators have declined so far to do the same for the latter, although the political winds seem to be changing.
cheph 6y ago
> The decline of Firefox is because of one thing only Personally I would use Firefox if it was not slower than Chrome. I like most things about it more, but it is noticeably slower in some cases, it randomly becomes unresponsive in some cases and it consumes more system resources. And actually when they dropped XUL I started using Firefox a lot less than before because now the extensions that kept me using Firefox were no longer available. Maybe it is just me, but I really do think there is plenty Firefox is doing that hurts them. I really really want to like Firefox, and I really don't like chrome. But for what they are, browsers, Chrome is better than Firefox in my experience.
lenkite 6y ago
My friends and I stopped using Firefox after they broke our favourite XUL extensions. So did my parents. So did many, many developers I knew. Everyone moved to using Chrome and never went back. Breaking XUL dropped Firefox adoption considerably. But folks who did this don't want to accept it. XUL extensions gave Firefox unique power which it lost and never regained back. Firefox chopped off its powerful , special tentacles and grew flimsy, poor hands back. Firefox defanged itself.
- The_Colonel 6y ago
  Your favorite XUL extension broke so you "solved" that by migrating to a completely different browser which also doesn't provide the desired functionality. Something doesn't add up.
  - lenkite 6y ago
    At the time, Chrome had Chrome Apps. If you recall, several XUL extension authors quit in disgust and started developing chrome apps. Google wasn't considered 'evil' at the time... Firefox had a unique, special power which differentiated it and Mozilla chose to kill it. No wonder its browser share dropped like a stone.
    - The_Colonel 6y ago
      Chrome Apps were in no way replacement for XUL. They could not change the behavior of the Chrome itself, they just opened their own window and did their thing there. Not really an extension, more of a separate app. To talk on more specific terms, which XUL extension did you replace with Chrome App?
      - lenkite 6y ago
        I finally ended up using alternate tools since even the replacement Chrome Apps were pale imitations of what Firefox offered. The good ones needed to use Nacl just to do basic stuff and still couldn't reach what XUL extensions natively supported. But I changed my browser to Chrome since Firefox lost its value proposition. It had a differentiating factor of superior experience and features that it chose to deliberately abandon.
nightfly 6y ago
> More specifically, it is their bundling of Chrome as the default, preset browser on the world most popular mobile operating system that really swung the tide decisively in their favour. Once ordinary users got used to Chrome on Android, they would naturally seek out the same browser on their laptops and desktops, to minimise interoperability issues and maximise familiarity. Most android phones I've had have shipped with a stripped down "web" browser as the default. I use primarily Chrome on my Android phones because performance is consistent. I keep Firefox (with an add blocker) installed and use it for sites where that's needed, but it just doesn't do a good enough job to me fore regular browsing on mobile. This is the same reason I used to stick with Chrome on the desktop too, though since Firefox Quantum I've been able to cope with Firefox for regular use on the desktop.
k__ 6y ago
Is it? I had Huawei and Xiaomi phones and until 3 years ago they didn't even come with Google apps by default.
- sp332 6y ago
  What browser did they ship with?
  - k__ 6y ago
    At least the Xiaomi device came with "Mi Browser"
ekianjo 6y ago
> The decline of Firefox is because of one thing only - the enormous marketing and engineering clout of Google and their utterly ruthless, relentless, anti-competitive pushing of Chrome across Android and all their web properties and even through ads all over the world. OK, so your answer is that world is super simple and comes down to a single variable explaining everything? Sorry but that does not sound very convincing to say the least. There was a time where Firefox needed to be installed manually on Windows where IE was provided by default and it become the leading browser. Ask yourself why it's not the case anymore.
- ohgodplsno 6y ago
  Internet Explorer was an absolutely awful browser, in a time where word of mouth was enough to get people to change. Google plastered Chrome ads everywhere to get on everyone's mind, and was good enough that you didn't need changing.
  - ekianjo 6y ago
    You forgot the tiny, not so important fact that Google Chrome was overall better than Firefox in responsiveness, speed and rendering for YEARS.
- oblio 6y ago
  Tabs. IE6 did not have tabs, Firefox did. It really is that simple. Opera had tabs but it also had ads. No other browser was from a trusted source. Chrome is good enough and from a trusted source.
  - gsich 6y ago
    IE7 also had tabs, yet Firefox still managed to gain marketshare.
jabirali 6y ago
> The decline of Firefox is because of one thing only - the enormous marketing and engineering clout of Google and their utterly ruthless, relentless, anti-competitive pushing of Chrome across Android and all their web properties and even through ads all over the world. That probably had an effect, but I don't agree that its the single biggest factor. Before Chrome arrived, my experience in general was that Firefox had gotten slow and buggy, and when one tab crashed the whole browser went down with it. It was a once great product that had stagnated. Compared to that, Chrome was a breath of fresh air, so me and many people I know migrated and then recommended it to friends and family. That had nothing to do with the Android version; at the time I didn't even have a smartphone, and many other tech people that migrated had iPhones. The desktop browser was simply a better product; and since at the time Google wasn't considered evil, and its Chromium base was open-source software, there was no reason not to use it. I eventually migrated back to Firefox myself, and am currently very happy with its performance, stability, and exploration of privacy features like Container Tabs. However, it wasn't before e10s I felt I could really recommend Firefox over Chromium to anyone else.
- tarkin2 6y ago
  I worked in a non-tech office where people used Firefox. At one point firefox was taking 30 seconds to load. I’d experienced this too and it seemed to be a bug in the profile manager. Nonetheless my colleagues were unimpressed. This was before Chrome was released. And when Chrome was released it was frankly better for most users, even without extensions at the start. Yes it was heavily advertised, but it also felt faster and gave a better experience. Now Firefox after the quantum reactor, and getting rid of XUL, upsetting plugin users, has caught up with Chrome—but they did this from what was once a leading position, and getting back those users lost seems less likely.
  - Izkata 6y ago
    > I’d experienced this too and it seemed to be a bug in the profile manager. I'd experienced this as well, and the most common fix was indeed to create a new profile and import your bookmarks/etc - but at least for me, it was totally unnecessary: All I had to do was delete history older than 6 months, and it was back to being snappy as new.
blablablerg 6y ago
Amen.
anton96 6y ago
There was definitely a time we're Firefox had performance issue. I don't speak of those benchmark milliseconds things.The entire browsers was so slow scrolling was a problem and more and more time the entire OS (Mac os) freezes for 10 seconds or so. That's where I left and years later why coming back if it doesn't have any more interesting features than chrome.
- chinathrow 6y ago
  Phoenix user from day 1 here, then Firefox. Had never the need to abandon it due to slow performance.
- Yoric 6y ago
  > I don't speak of those benchmark milliseconds things.The entire browsers was so slow scrolling was a problem and more and more time the entire OS (Mac os) freezes for 10 seconds or so. Could it have been every 15 seconds? I think I was part of the team that fixed that bug :)
Causality1 6y ago
Google's anti-competitiveness is easily the biggest reason Firefox doesn't have a majority market share. I would argue, however, that several of those things are the reasons Firefox can't hold onto a minority share either. Sure XUL, themes, tabs on bottom, etc were never going to keep Firefox on top but they might have been enough to hold onto 10%. Google is evil so I still use Firefox, but it just feels like Chrome without Google. The evangelizing passion I had for it ever since version 1.5 is dead and Mozilla killed it.
luckylion 6y ago
Citation needed. Chrome had already beat Firefox' in market share before it was even released on Android. Unless they included time-travel in that release, there's no way that influenced them overtaking Firefox before it happening. When they released on Android, Chrome already was the biggest on Windows, having surpassed Internet Explorer as well. Sorry, but you're either intentionally misleading people or you haven't actually looked at the timelines.
- Liquid_Fire 6y ago
  And they did aggressively market it to get to that point. If you visited Google on Firefox or IE you would get a banner suggesting you to try Chrome. It was bundled with all sorts of software, including Flash which would install it by default unless you found the right checkbox. (Many non-technical people I know ended up unintentionally installing it this way) They even had offline (real-world) advertising for it. I'm sure word of mouth had an effect, but it was only a small part of why it succeeded. Remember that Firefox only ever achieved a fraction of Chrome's (current) market share, and relied mostly on word of mouth (though they did have the occasional real-world ad campaign), despite its superiority to IE.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    Sure, and as I mentioned elsewhere: before they had Chrome, they aggressively marketed Firefox, paying referral commissions for every Firefox install that included their toolbar. That was in 2005/2006 and ran for years, and was a large part why Firefox became successful: websites got paid to recommend it to their users. Marketing is a large part of everything, I agree. But the argument I replied to was that it was the monopoly & bundling that made it successful. That's obviously completely false and pure propaganda, trying to absolve Firefox of anything and everything, essentially saying "none of those things matter, it was only Google's evil behavior". > I'm sure word of mouth had an effect, but it was only a small part of why it succeeded. I'm not so sure. Internet Explorer as "the perfect tool to download Chrome" wasn't a meme because people watched ads, but because Chrome (on Windows) was easy to download & install and fast & stable. Firefox wasn't any of that in comparison, that's why lots of people I know switched to Chrome back then. And once you've gotten used to something, you really need a reason to switch back - something that Firefox never provided. Privacy might become that, but Chrome with plugins isn't terrible either, and Firefox sent data to Google for analytics "out of the box" as well (and probably still does?). I understand that it's nice to have a boogeyman that can be blamed, but I don't think that's accurate. Firefox lost because of Mozilla, not because of Google.
rimliu 6y ago
I went so Safari as my default browser when Firefox (which I was using from Phoenix 0.3 irrc) became slow and bloated. Chrome and Google marketing had nothing to do with it.
goto11 6y ago
The user experience of Chrome is just better for non-geek users. This makes a big difference although geeks have a hard time accepting that this should matter.
cypressious 6y ago
You're certainly right but it also didn't help that Firefox for Andorid was _really_ bad for a long time. Fenix is a glimpse of hope but it came to late.
izacus 6y ago
So let me get this straight: You're saying that Google is so amazing at marketing, that they beat Apple, Microsoft and Firefox at marketing that browser, although Chrome wasn't even the default preinstalled browser on most devices? Chrome isn't the default on Windows, it's not the default on macOS, it's not the default on Linux, it's not the default even on most Android devices (Samsung Browser is, since Samsung is still handling the majority of Android market, followed by Chinese manufacturers who don't bundle Chrome at all). That for all the efforts of Apple to push Safari as default, Microsoft to push Edge as default... Chrome had no other merits than just ONLY Google marketing which has somehow managed to beat out the default preinstalled well marketed browsers without any special additional technical merits? You reasoning is missing something fundamental. Is it possible, and entertain the thought for a bit, that Chrome was just the better browser for a long time? Maybe?
- square_usual 6y ago
  > You're saying that Google is so amazing at marketing, that they beat Apple, Microsoft and Firefox at marketing that browser. Google literally had a banner on their homepage prompting users to try Chrome. E: Of course, I don't mean to say Chrome was a bad browser and won entirely through marketing. But its current market position has as much to do with Google's explosive marketing (they had billboard ads for Chrome! For a free browser!) as much as with Chrome's technical qualities.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    Google spent money to market Firefox as well. Back in 2005, they'd pay $1 commission per successful install of Firefox with the Google Toolbar included. I don't recall when they cancelled that offer, but it ran for years.
    - Yoric 6y ago
      For comparison, I've read estimates (I don't know whether they're correct) that the marketing budget just for launching Chrome was equivalent to two billion dollars, if you include the ad space that Google was providing for free. That's just for the launch. I may be forgetting things but I don't remember ever seeing launches for a free product that were so heavily marketed.
syshum 6y ago
While you are correct that the Google's marketing power is a leading factor in the decline of market share by firefox The other items on your list, when you proclaim not to be a factor, were and are a factor as well. A significant facto in my opinion. While google has a marketing and monetary edge, FireFox can not stop shooting itself in the foot either.
indymike 6y ago
Hmm. In the beginning on Andorid, there was nothing called chrome. Only a primative, webkit based browser usually called "internet" that OEMs would customize. Other browsers have always worked fine on Android - from Dolphin to yes... Firefox. I'd say that Firefox on Android wasn't suitable for daily use until sometime in 2019... and there's still a lot of work to do. Chrome on Android is a miserable experience right now because someone at Google thinks that hiding URLS and making it difficult to edit them is a feature.
- Ygg2 6y ago
  New Firefox on Android is bad as well. It takes me more time to open new web page. I also hate the bottom focused layout.
gsich 6y ago
>The decline of Firefox is because of one thing only - the enormous marketing and engineering clout of Google and their utterly ruthless, relentless, anti-competitive pushing of Chrome across Android and all their web properties and even through ads all over the world. The other factors contributed though.
nindalf 6y ago
I was with you for the first 5 lines - it's not because of any of those reasons. But listen to the Firefox developer in the article - Chrome was making a better product because they weren't tied down with backwards compatibility issues. It was genuinely faster, more secure and they were shipping features quicker. Meanwhile Firefox wasted years attempting and failing to become multiprocess because they were tied down with the legacy of XUL. But you have to give Chrome credit for making a good product. No doubt marketing helped, bundling with Android helped. But for a solid 5-7 years, it was clearly the best. And I say that as someone who has used Firefox for a decade.
math0ne 6y ago
Me and everyone I know stopped using when they removed XUL extensions, that may not be representative of the general populace but losing the mindshare of power users could not have helped them. For a decade when non technical users asked me what browser to use I told them Firefox, that stopped then they abandoned powerful extensions.

Fej 6y ago

I would recommend readers to skim the Wikipedia article on tying, or a similar article on the subject: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce) A shorter article: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/tying.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/tying.asp Microsoft was convicted by the US for tying Windows and IE in the 90's, and Google was more recently convicted by the EU for tying Android and Chrome. US regulators have declined so far to do the same for the latter, although the political winds seem to be changing.

cheph 6y ago

> The decline of Firefox is because of one thing only Personally I would use Firefox if it was not slower than Chrome. I like most things about it more, but it is noticeably slower in some cases, it randomly becomes unresponsive in some cases and it consumes more system resources. And actually when they dropped XUL I started using Firefox a lot less than before because now the extensions that kept me using Firefox were no longer available. Maybe it is just me, but I really do think there is plenty Firefox is doing that hurts them. I really really want to like Firefox, and I really don't like chrome. But for what they are, browsers, Chrome is better than Firefox in my experience.

lenkite 6y ago

My friends and I stopped using Firefox after they broke our favourite XUL extensions. So did my parents. So did many, many developers I knew. Everyone moved to using Chrome and never went back. Breaking XUL dropped Firefox adoption considerably. But folks who did this don't want to accept it. XUL extensions gave Firefox unique power which it lost and never regained back. Firefox chopped off its powerful , special tentacles and grew flimsy, poor hands back. Firefox defanged itself.

The_Colonel 6y ago
Your favorite XUL extension broke so you "solved" that by migrating to a completely different browser which also doesn't provide the desired functionality. Something doesn't add up.
- lenkite 6y ago
  At the time, Chrome had Chrome Apps. If you recall, several XUL extension authors quit in disgust and started developing chrome apps. Google wasn't considered 'evil' at the time... Firefox had a unique, special power which differentiated it and Mozilla chose to kill it. No wonder its browser share dropped like a stone.
  - The_Colonel 6y ago
    Chrome Apps were in no way replacement for XUL. They could not change the behavior of the Chrome itself, they just opened their own window and did their thing there. Not really an extension, more of a separate app. To talk on more specific terms, which XUL extension did you replace with Chrome App?
    - lenkite 6y ago
      I finally ended up using alternate tools since even the replacement Chrome Apps were pale imitations of what Firefox offered. The good ones needed to use Nacl just to do basic stuff and still couldn't reach what XUL extensions natively supported. But I changed my browser to Chrome since Firefox lost its value proposition. It had a differentiating factor of superior experience and features that it chose to deliberately abandon.

nightfly 6y ago

> More specifically, it is their bundling of Chrome as the default, preset browser on the world most popular mobile operating system that really swung the tide decisively in their favour. Once ordinary users got used to Chrome on Android, they would naturally seek out the same browser on their laptops and desktops, to minimise interoperability issues and maximise familiarity. Most android phones I've had have shipped with a stripped down "web" browser as the default. I use primarily Chrome on my Android phones because performance is consistent. I keep Firefox (with an add blocker) installed and use it for sites where that's needed, but it just doesn't do a good enough job to me fore regular browsing on mobile. This is the same reason I used to stick with Chrome on the desktop too, though since Firefox Quantum I've been able to cope with Firefox for regular use on the desktop.

k__ 6y ago

Is it? I had Huawei and Xiaomi phones and until 3 years ago they didn't even come with Google apps by default.

sp332 6y ago
What browser did they ship with?
- k__ 6y ago
  At least the Xiaomi device came with "Mi Browser"

ekianjo 6y ago

ohgodplsno 6y ago
Internet Explorer was an absolutely awful browser, in a time where word of mouth was enough to get people to change. Google plastered Chrome ads everywhere to get on everyone's mind, and was good enough that you didn't need changing.
- ekianjo 6y ago
  You forgot the tiny, not so important fact that Google Chrome was overall better than Firefox in responsiveness, speed and rendering for YEARS.
oblio 6y ago
Tabs. IE6 did not have tabs, Firefox did. It really is that simple. Opera had tabs but it also had ads. No other browser was from a trusted source. Chrome is good enough and from a trusted source.
- gsich 6y ago
  IE7 also had tabs, yet Firefox still managed to gain marketshare.

jabirali 6y ago

> The decline of Firefox is because of one thing only - the enormous marketing and engineering clout of Google and their utterly ruthless, relentless, anti-competitive pushing of Chrome across Android and all their web properties and even through ads all over the world. That probably had an effect, but I don't agree that its the single biggest factor. Before Chrome arrived, my experience in general was that Firefox had gotten slow and buggy, and when one tab crashed the whole browser went down with it. It was a once great product that had stagnated. Compared to that, Chrome was a breath of fresh air, so me and many people I know migrated and then recommended it to friends and family. That had nothing to do with the Android version; at the time I didn't even have a smartphone, and many other tech people that migrated had iPhones. The desktop browser was simply a better product; and since at the time Google wasn't considered evil, and its Chromium base was open-source software, there was no reason not to use it. I eventually migrated back to Firefox myself, and am currently very happy with its performance, stability, and exploration of privacy features like Container Tabs. However, it wasn't before e10s I felt I could really recommend Firefox over Chromium to anyone else.

tarkin2 6y ago
I worked in a non-tech office where people used Firefox. At one point firefox was taking 30 seconds to load. I’d experienced this too and it seemed to be a bug in the profile manager. Nonetheless my colleagues were unimpressed. This was before Chrome was released. And when Chrome was released it was frankly better for most users, even without extensions at the start. Yes it was heavily advertised, but it also felt faster and gave a better experience. Now Firefox after the quantum reactor, and getting rid of XUL, upsetting plugin users, has caught up with Chrome—but they did this from what was once a leading position, and getting back those users lost seems less likely.
- Izkata 6y ago
  > I’d experienced this too and it seemed to be a bug in the profile manager. I'd experienced this as well, and the most common fix was indeed to create a new profile and import your bookmarks/etc - but at least for me, it was totally unnecessary: All I had to do was delete history older than 6 months, and it was back to being snappy as new.

blablablerg 6y ago

Amen.

anton96 6y ago

There was definitely a time we're Firefox had performance issue. I don't speak of those benchmark milliseconds things.The entire browsers was so slow scrolling was a problem and more and more time the entire OS (Mac os) freezes for 10 seconds or so. That's where I left and years later why coming back if it doesn't have any more interesting features than chrome.

chinathrow 6y ago
Phoenix user from day 1 here, then Firefox. Had never the need to abandon it due to slow performance.
Yoric 6y ago
> I don't speak of those benchmark milliseconds things.The entire browsers was so slow scrolling was a problem and more and more time the entire OS (Mac os) freezes for 10 seconds or so. Could it have been every 15 seconds? I think I was part of the team that fixed that bug :)

Causality1 6y ago

Google's anti-competitiveness is easily the biggest reason Firefox doesn't have a majority market share. I would argue, however, that several of those things are the reasons Firefox can't hold onto a minority share either. Sure XUL, themes, tabs on bottom, etc were never going to keep Firefox on top but they might have been enough to hold onto 10%. Google is evil so I still use Firefox, but it just feels like Chrome without Google. The evangelizing passion I had for it ever since version 1.5 is dead and Mozilla killed it.

luckylion 6y ago

Citation needed. Chrome had already beat Firefox' in market share before it was even released on Android. Unless they included time-travel in that release, there's no way that influenced them overtaking Firefox before it happening. When they released on Android, Chrome already was the biggest on Windows, having surpassed Internet Explorer as well. Sorry, but you're either intentionally misleading people or you haven't actually looked at the timelines.

Liquid_Fire 6y ago
And they did aggressively market it to get to that point. If you visited Google on Firefox or IE you would get a banner suggesting you to try Chrome. It was bundled with all sorts of software, including Flash which would install it by default unless you found the right checkbox. (Many non-technical people I know ended up unintentionally installing it this way) They even had offline (real-world) advertising for it. I'm sure word of mouth had an effect, but it was only a small part of why it succeeded. Remember that Firefox only ever achieved a fraction of Chrome's (current) market share, and relied mostly on word of mouth (though they did have the occasional real-world ad campaign), despite its superiority to IE.
- luckylion 6y ago
  Sure, and as I mentioned elsewhere: before they had Chrome, they aggressively marketed Firefox, paying referral commissions for every Firefox install that included their toolbar. That was in 2005/2006 and ran for years, and was a large part why Firefox became successful: websites got paid to recommend it to their users. Marketing is a large part of everything, I agree. But the argument I replied to was that it was the monopoly & bundling that made it successful. That's obviously completely false and pure propaganda, trying to absolve Firefox of anything and everything, essentially saying "none of those things matter, it was only Google's evil behavior". > I'm sure word of mouth had an effect, but it was only a small part of why it succeeded. I'm not so sure. Internet Explorer as "the perfect tool to download Chrome" wasn't a meme because people watched ads, but because Chrome (on Windows) was easy to download & install and fast & stable. Firefox wasn't any of that in comparison, that's why lots of people I know switched to Chrome back then. And once you've gotten used to something, you really need a reason to switch back - something that Firefox never provided. Privacy might become that, but Chrome with plugins isn't terrible either, and Firefox sent data to Google for analytics "out of the box" as well (and probably still does?). I understand that it's nice to have a boogeyman that can be blamed, but I don't think that's accurate. Firefox lost because of Mozilla, not because of Google.

rimliu 6y ago

I went so Safari as my default browser when Firefox (which I was using from Phoenix 0.3 irrc) became slow and bloated. Chrome and Google marketing had nothing to do with it.

goto11 6y ago

The user experience of Chrome is just better for non-geek users. This makes a big difference although geeks have a hard time accepting that this should matter.

cypressious 6y ago

You're certainly right but it also didn't help that Firefox for Andorid was _really_ bad for a long time. Fenix is a glimpse of hope but it came to late.

izacus 6y ago

So let me get this straight: You're saying that Google is so amazing at marketing, that they beat Apple, Microsoft and Firefox at marketing that browser, although Chrome wasn't even the default preinstalled browser on most devices? Chrome isn't the default on Windows, it's not the default on macOS, it's not the default on Linux, it's not the default even on most Android devices (Samsung Browser is, since Samsung is still handling the majority of Android market, followed by Chinese manufacturers who don't bundle Chrome at all). That for all the efforts of Apple to push Safari as default, Microsoft to push Edge as default... Chrome had no other merits than just ONLY Google marketing which has somehow managed to beat out the default preinstalled well marketed browsers without any special additional technical merits? You reasoning is missing something fundamental. Is it possible, and entertain the thought for a bit, that Chrome was just the better browser for a long time? Maybe?

square_usual 6y ago
> You're saying that Google is so amazing at marketing, that they beat Apple, Microsoft and Firefox at marketing that browser. Google literally had a banner on their homepage prompting users to try Chrome. E: Of course, I don't mean to say Chrome was a bad browser and won entirely through marketing. But its current market position has as much to do with Google's explosive marketing (they had billboard ads for Chrome! For a free browser!) as much as with Chrome's technical qualities.
- luckylion 6y ago
  Google spent money to market Firefox as well. Back in 2005, they'd pay $1 commission per successful install of Firefox with the Google Toolbar included. I don't recall when they cancelled that offer, but it ran for years.
  - Yoric 6y ago
    For comparison, I've read estimates (I don't know whether they're correct) that the marketing budget just for launching Chrome was equivalent to two billion dollars, if you include the ad space that Google was providing for free. That's just for the launch. I may be forgetting things but I don't remember ever seeing launches for a free product that were so heavily marketed.

syshum 6y ago

While you are correct that the Google's marketing power is a leading factor in the decline of market share by firefox The other items on your list, when you proclaim not to be a factor, were and are a factor as well. A significant facto in my opinion. While google has a marketing and monetary edge, FireFox can not stop shooting itself in the foot either.

indymike 6y ago

Hmm. In the beginning on Andorid, there was nothing called chrome. Only a primative, webkit based browser usually called "internet" that OEMs would customize. Other browsers have always worked fine on Android - from Dolphin to yes... Firefox. I'd say that Firefox on Android wasn't suitable for daily use until sometime in 2019... and there's still a lot of work to do. Chrome on Android is a miserable experience right now because someone at Google thinks that hiding URLS and making it difficult to edit them is a feature.

Ygg2 6y ago
New Firefox on Android is bad as well. It takes me more time to open new web page. I also hate the bottom focused layout.

gsich 6y ago

nindalf 6y ago

I was with you for the first 5 lines - it's not because of any of those reasons. But listen to the Firefox developer in the article - Chrome was making a better product because they weren't tied down with backwards compatibility issues. It was genuinely faster, more secure and they were shipping features quicker. Meanwhile Firefox wasted years attempting and failing to become multiprocess because they were tied down with the legacy of XUL. But you have to give Chrome credit for making a good product. No doubt marketing helped, bundling with Android helped. But for a solid 5-7 years, it was clearly the best. And I say that as someone who has used Firefox for a decade.

math0ne 6y ago

Me and everyone I know stopped using when they removed XUL extensions, that may not be representative of the general populace but losing the mindshare of power users could not have helped them. For a decade when non technical users asked me what browser to use I told them Firefox, that stopped then they abandoned powerful extensions.