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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

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.

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.