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There used to be an idea of "follow the alpha geeks", that while mass market adoption was a goal, a huge amount ofake or break came down to what the very good,

There used to be an idea of "follow the alpha geeks", that while mass market adoption was a goal, a huge amount ofake or break came down to what the very good, very involved users were up to. The relevance of extensions has somewhat faded, aside from ad blocking, byt back the day extensions were imo quite important for many, made the web a popular & more lively place. I'd have a number of extensuons telling me other related sites people were enjoying. I could annotate the page, chat about the page. I could easily save the page into my various bookmark services. Extensions made the web social, & helped it interconnect. Extensions interwove the web & drove cool at a critical time of adoption. Whatever the state today, to ignore the historical relevance of how important extensions were for generating an active, enthusiastic user base, for differentiating: these are not to be ignored or casually cynically written off.

notriddle 4y ago
The question isn't really whether people use extensions. Obviously they use and enjoy them when they're there. The question I'm asking is how Firefox manage to take 25% of Microsoft's market share, but Ubuntu didn't? Ubuntu has always been much more customizable than Windows, just like Firefox was much more customizable than IE. LibreOffice allows you to continue using the "classic" UI, just like how everyone on HN complains that Microsoft's Ribbon was a mistake, yet somehow LibreOffice remains at a partly 200 million to Microsoft Office's 1.2 billion. Why were customizable libpurple IM clients never as popular as the official ones? This is why I think Firebug breaking the compatibility/market-share death spiral and inducing developers to make their webapps work in Firefox irrespective of Firefox's market share is so important. It's the biggest factor I know of that's actually different between Firefox's situation and the situation with so many other FOSS products.

notriddle 4y ago

The question isn't really whether people use extensions. Obviously they use and enjoy them when they're there. The question I'm asking is how Firefox manage to take 25% of Microsoft's market share, but Ubuntu didn't? Ubuntu has always been much more customizable than Windows, just like Firefox was much more customizable than IE. LibreOffice allows you to continue using the "classic" UI, just like how everyone on HN complains that Microsoft's Ribbon was a mistake, yet somehow LibreOffice remains at a partly 200 million to Microsoft Office's 1.2 billion. Why were customizable libpurple IM clients never as popular as the official ones? This is why I think Firebug breaking the compatibility/market-share death spiral and inducing developers to make their webapps work in Firefox irrespective of Firefox's market share is so important. It's the biggest factor I know of that's actually different between Firefox's situation and the situation with so many other FOSS products.