5 ms·

The history of how Chromium got to such a dominant position is basically a history of Mozilla failing to see the next thing over the horizon.

JohnTHaller 4y ago
Don't forget all the shady bundleware installers that tricked people into installing Chrome via Adobe Flash, Avast, etc. https://imgur.com/gallery/WWZxj https://imgur.com/gallery/WWZxj
gkbrk 4y ago
Yes, it's due to Mozilla failing to keep up. Possibly Google paying companies to bundle Chrome with their software installers had a part as well. Perhaps putting a Chrome advertisement to the Google homepage and recommending an "upgrade" to all Google visitors played a part too. Maybe.
- zaphar 4y ago
  When Chrome came out it was unambiguously: * A safer browser. * A more performant browser. Which was more than enough for most of us to recommend everyone switch. Much the same was as when Firefox first came out it was unambiguously: * A safer browser. * A more performant browser. Which was more than enough for most of us to recommend everyone switch. The switching cost of a browser is quite low. The next browser to meet the above criteria will experience a similar jump in users. The challenge is in actually delivering a browser that can do so. The web standards are massively complex for many reasons, some of them legitimate. The barrier for entry is going up over time and shows no sign of slowing down.
  - imbnwa 4y ago
    I was coaching a HS debate team when Chrome dropped and all my students switched to Chrome organically with no input from myself, a techie, within a week of release. Don't even think they were running the ads yet, there was just the web comic.
- wolrah 4y ago
  I think the biggest boost to Chrome's initial success was the fact that it's capable of installing entirely within the user profile, so unless a corporate IT department has gone out of their way to lock a system down an unprivileged user can install it for themself. Remember, Chrome was released in 2008. Internet Explorer, with almost 2/3 of the browser marketshare, was on version 7 at that time and a stupid number of corporate IT departments would continue to default to IE 6 rather than updating or fixing their ancient garbage applications for years to come. Chrome provided a way for power users to have a non-shitty browser, which then blossomed from there as more and more web sites made use of modern browser capabilities and worked worse and worse in corporate-mandated IE instances. Putting on my BOFH hat obviously I'm not the biggest fan of such "shadow IT" processes but I understand that they happen when needs and wants aren't being met and sometimes this is the most effective way to force a necessary change.
- ldng 4y ago
  It's not Mozilla failing to keep up, it's Mozilla growing an unhealthy, greedy and complacent middle-management fat.
  - acdha 4y ago
    Firefox’s decline has been in progress for a long time, starting when Google deployed billions of dollars of Chrome ads and pushing users of Gmail, YouTube, etc. to switch, and as people moved onto mobile devices where Firefox couldn’t run (iOS) or was at a disadvantage competing with the OS developer (everything else). Don’t forget things like the video wars where Google made a promise to drop H.264 support in the name of openness, let Firefox suffer the compatibility hit, and then retracted that promise. Mozilla has made some bad decisions but we should acknowledge that a fair fraction of them were also flailing around trying to recover from those competitors’ actions. I don’t think Firefox OS would have happened if, for example, iOS allowed a real browser market.
    - ldng 4y ago
      My point is not that they were not struggling. But that they were (and somewhat still are) spending elsewhere in stuff barely related to Firefox and this amplify the problem. A lot of money was spent on project not really relevant that were then shelved/dump.
danielheath 4y ago
"Failing to see" is one explanation. "Struggling to keep pace" is another; there's really quite a lot of work involved in keeping up with web standards.
- pygy_ 4y ago
  And, surprisingly, Google has more employees on WICG (the W3C standards incubator) than all other relevant parties added together.
  - piva00 4y ago
    Instead of regulatory capture they are going for the standards' committee capture... I'm curious about other cases of corporations taking over standards' committees, anyone else has examples?
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      Most standards committees are either built from or heavily influenced by the corporate interests that are directly impacted by the standards.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    Well, unsurprisingly. The nature of the web ties 100% into everything Google does as a company. It's not just in their vested interest to be involved in that system; it's an existential underpinning to their company, akin to General Motor's interest in rubber standards.
    - pygy_ 4y ago
      That is also true of Mozilla and Facebook, and probably others...
  - phpisthebest 4y ago
    Not really surprising given that W3c is basically a subsidiary of Google at this point rubber-stamping any change to "standards" that google wants
solarkraft 4y ago
It's not even that. They had innovative things (arguably before the world was ready) and cancelled them.
causi 4y ago
Personally I'd split it into two eras. The first is "Chrome arises as a faster browser and then gimps performance of Google services like Youtube on non-Chrome browsers" which lost Firefox half its market share. The second era is "Mozilla waters-down the essence of Firefox by vainly trying to recapture Chrome's market share while ignoring what its core userbase actually liked about Firefox."
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  Did Google gimp performance on their services or did Mozilla not spend the resources to keep up? I can confirm that Google didn't wasn't testing on Firefox first as of the early-to-mid 2010s, but that was an efficiency-of-testing decision; how much should a company spend on testing a browser with a sub-10% market share?
  - causi 4y ago
    For example, they created a Youtube redesign which relied on a deprecated API that only Chrome implemented. It was deliberate and resulted in a 500% slowdown for Firefox and Edge users. It was and is a systematic campaign to use Google properties to damage the user experience of competing browsers.
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      So Mozilla didn't implement a deprecated API that would have made video 500% faster on the largest video site on the planet. ... That sounds like it's on Mozilla.
      - abdulmuhaimin 4y ago
        no. its called deprecated API for a reason. Its deprecated
        shadowgovt 4y ago
        shrug To do my actual job, I have to implement on deprecated APIs all the time. Deprecation is a declaration of intent, but intent rams into reality and changes continuously. There are two types of deprecated APIs: ones nobody uses and ones everybody uses. Sounds like Mozilla mis-guessed on which one of those Shadow Dom v0 would be. (From my limited experience: I bet while the Chrome team was trying to deprecate shadow dom v0, YouTube, which still operates as a pretty independent arm inside the Google ecosystem, built a new system on Polymer and in terms of Google's management architecture, nobody has authority to tell them not to do that. Far from an intentional shafting of other browsers, it was likely a failure to coordinate internally coupled with total apathy regarding what that meant for other browsers, since from YouTube's point of view, Chrome is free and available to everyone. Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by disorganized-bag-of-cats management style).
phpisthebest 4y ago
Chromium got to be a dominant position because google nagged every user that visit google for a period of 10+ years to install chrome for a "better experience"
- misnome 4y ago
  For at least the first half of that, it was completely true. One single change to make crashing sites stop crashing the browser. And, despite it being google - they don’t force me into the options menu to remove advertising off of my Home Screen, and have never forcibly installed extensions advertising TV shows.
freediver 4y ago
Is it? Or is the case of Mozilla innovation being suppresed by the virtue of its almost entire revenue coming from the main competitor? "Failing to see" could easilly be imposed.

JohnTHaller 4y ago

Don't forget all the shady bundleware installers that tricked people into installing Chrome via Adobe Flash, Avast, etc. https://imgur.com/gallery/WWZxj https://imgur.com/gallery/WWZxj

gkbrk 4y ago

Yes, it's due to Mozilla failing to keep up. Possibly Google paying companies to bundle Chrome with their software installers had a part as well. Perhaps putting a Chrome advertisement to the Google homepage and recommending an "upgrade" to all Google visitors played a part too. Maybe.

zaphar 4y ago
When Chrome came out it was unambiguously: * A safer browser. * A more performant browser. Which was more than enough for most of us to recommend everyone switch. Much the same was as when Firefox first came out it was unambiguously: * A safer browser. * A more performant browser. Which was more than enough for most of us to recommend everyone switch. The switching cost of a browser is quite low. The next browser to meet the above criteria will experience a similar jump in users. The challenge is in actually delivering a browser that can do so. The web standards are massively complex for many reasons, some of them legitimate. The barrier for entry is going up over time and shows no sign of slowing down.
- imbnwa 4y ago
  I was coaching a HS debate team when Chrome dropped and all my students switched to Chrome organically with no input from myself, a techie, within a week of release. Don't even think they were running the ads yet, there was just the web comic.
wolrah 4y ago
I think the biggest boost to Chrome's initial success was the fact that it's capable of installing entirely within the user profile, so unless a corporate IT department has gone out of their way to lock a system down an unprivileged user can install it for themself. Remember, Chrome was released in 2008. Internet Explorer, with almost 2/3 of the browser marketshare, was on version 7 at that time and a stupid number of corporate IT departments would continue to default to IE 6 rather than updating or fixing their ancient garbage applications for years to come. Chrome provided a way for power users to have a non-shitty browser, which then blossomed from there as more and more web sites made use of modern browser capabilities and worked worse and worse in corporate-mandated IE instances. Putting on my BOFH hat obviously I'm not the biggest fan of such "shadow IT" processes but I understand that they happen when needs and wants aren't being met and sometimes this is the most effective way to force a necessary change.
ldng 4y ago
It's not Mozilla failing to keep up, it's Mozilla growing an unhealthy, greedy and complacent middle-management fat.
- acdha 4y ago
  Firefox’s decline has been in progress for a long time, starting when Google deployed billions of dollars of Chrome ads and pushing users of Gmail, YouTube, etc. to switch, and as people moved onto mobile devices where Firefox couldn’t run (iOS) or was at a disadvantage competing with the OS developer (everything else). Don’t forget things like the video wars where Google made a promise to drop H.264 support in the name of openness, let Firefox suffer the compatibility hit, and then retracted that promise. Mozilla has made some bad decisions but we should acknowledge that a fair fraction of them were also flailing around trying to recover from those competitors’ actions. I don’t think Firefox OS would have happened if, for example, iOS allowed a real browser market.
  - ldng 4y ago
    My point is not that they were not struggling. But that they were (and somewhat still are) spending elsewhere in stuff barely related to Firefox and this amplify the problem. A lot of money was spent on project not really relevant that were then shelved/dump.

danielheath 4y ago

"Failing to see" is one explanation. "Struggling to keep pace" is another; there's really quite a lot of work involved in keeping up with web standards.

pygy_ 4y ago
And, surprisingly, Google has more employees on WICG (the W3C standards incubator) than all other relevant parties added together.
- piva00 4y ago
  Instead of regulatory capture they are going for the standards' committee capture... I'm curious about other cases of corporations taking over standards' committees, anyone else has examples?
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    Most standards committees are either built from or heavily influenced by the corporate interests that are directly impacted by the standards.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  Well, unsurprisingly. The nature of the web ties 100% into everything Google does as a company. It's not just in their vested interest to be involved in that system; it's an existential underpinning to their company, akin to General Motor's interest in rubber standards.
  - pygy_ 4y ago
    That is also true of Mozilla and Facebook, and probably others...
- phpisthebest 4y ago
  Not really surprising given that W3c is basically a subsidiary of Google at this point rubber-stamping any change to "standards" that google wants

solarkraft 4y ago

It's not even that. They had innovative things (arguably before the world was ready) and cancelled them.

causi 4y ago

Personally I'd split it into two eras. The first is "Chrome arises as a faster browser and then gimps performance of Google services like Youtube on non-Chrome browsers" which lost Firefox half its market share. The second era is "Mozilla waters-down the essence of Firefox by vainly trying to recapture Chrome's market share while ignoring what its core userbase actually liked about Firefox."

shadowgovt 4y ago
Did Google gimp performance on their services or did Mozilla not spend the resources to keep up? I can confirm that Google didn't wasn't testing on Firefox first as of the early-to-mid 2010s, but that was an efficiency-of-testing decision; how much should a company spend on testing a browser with a sub-10% market share?
- causi 4y ago
  For example, they created a Youtube redesign which relied on a deprecated API that only Chrome implemented. It was deliberate and resulted in a 500% slowdown for Firefox and Edge users. It was and is a systematic campaign to use Google properties to damage the user experience of competing browsers.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    So Mozilla didn't implement a deprecated API that would have made video 500% faster on the largest video site on the planet. ... That sounds like it's on Mozilla.
    - abdulmuhaimin 4y ago
      no. its called deprecated API for a reason. Its deprecated
      - shadowgovt 4y ago
        shrug To do my actual job, I have to implement on deprecated APIs all the time. Deprecation is a declaration of intent, but intent rams into reality and changes continuously. There are two types of deprecated APIs: ones nobody uses and ones everybody uses. Sounds like Mozilla mis-guessed on which one of those Shadow Dom v0 would be. (From my limited experience: I bet while the Chrome team was trying to deprecate shadow dom v0, YouTube, which still operates as a pretty independent arm inside the Google ecosystem, built a new system on Polymer and in terms of Google's management architecture, nobody has authority to tell them not to do that. Far from an intentional shafting of other browsers, it was likely a failure to coordinate internally coupled with total apathy regarding what that meant for other browsers, since from YouTube's point of view, Chrome is free and available to everyone. Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by disorganized-bag-of-cats management style).

phpisthebest 4y ago

Chromium got to be a dominant position because google nagged every user that visit google for a period of 10+ years to install chrome for a "better experience"

misnome 4y ago
For at least the first half of that, it was completely true. One single change to make crashing sites stop crashing the browser. And, despite it being google - they don’t force me into the options menu to remove advertising off of my Home Screen, and have never forcibly installed extensions advertising TV shows.

freediver 4y ago

Is it? Or is the case of Mozilla innovation being suppresed by the virtue of its almost entire revenue coming from the main competitor? "Failing to see" could easilly be imposed.