4 ms·

> And yet, today Firefox has single-digit-percent market share, and the dominant player is in some ways worse than Microsoft was. MS seemed to want to make the

> And yet, today Firefox has single-digit-percent market share, and the dominant player is in some ways worse than Microsoft was. MS seemed to want to make the web stagnate, while Google wants to turn the web into (more of) a privacy-free, advertising machine, and has been steering web standards in that direction. I think that reinforces GP point that consumers aren't driven by privacy. Firefox didn't take off due to privacy, it took off because IE6 was a miserable experience. The killer features that drew people to firefox were pop-up blocking, tabbed browsing and less crashes.

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
And even then, Firefox's decline makes the same point; Chrome didn't win because it was more private, it won because it was fast, stable (when Chrome first launched, its process isolation features were unmatched - suddenly, one tab crashing didn't mean crashing the whole browser!), and of course because Google abused its search monopoly and bundling deals to cram it down people's throats. But for all that they cheated, they could have just won fair and square because they gave people features that people actually cared about; privacy was never relevant, and security was secondary.