3 ms·

Browsers are a "winner take most" market because of website support and extensions. IE and chrome have rich parents, and firefox had much better extension commu

by ippisl 14y ago

Browsers are a "winner take most" market because of website support and extensions. IE and chrome have rich parents, and firefox had much better extension community.

skrebbel 14y ago
I doubt the extensions have much to do with it. Where Firefox had a vibrant community of people making extensions for their favourite website's search box, Opera added a way to access any site's search box from the address bar. This is just an example - a lot of things that Firefox extensions have been most used for are natively supported in Opera, though typically in a very different way. I don't think anybody but a particular kind of power user like you or me would chose a browser for its extension community. I think the free firefox ads all over many websites helped more. I mean, at some point, the Dutch Linux user group collected money to pay for a full-page colour Firefox ad in the Netherlands' largest newspaper. From their own pockets! The holy war to promote Firefox was really going strong for quite a while, and only got stilled when the many of the same people decided to switch to Google Chrome because they discovered that speed was more important to them than that whole open source principle they financed that ad for, and that really the ad was against Microsoft / IE and not so much for Firefox.
- Nick_C 14y ago
  This. Opera has left a huge legacy of features that people take for granted nowadays: very low use of resources; using the URL box also as a search tool; editable search engines; tab and window sessions; savable sessions; more that I can't remember now. All these were invented at Opera and later picked up by the others. Ten or fifteen years ago, Opera was the browser for hackers and the smart technologically-aware user. Then they sort of lost their way a bit. I switched away when Opera's resource use became as hungry as the others. Darn all these useless gimcracks and prettiness, I want speed, something I'm still saying today (which shows I'm as out-of-touch as ever I was).

by ippisl 14y ago

Browsers are a "winner take most" market because of website support and extensions. IE and chrome have rich parents, and firefox had much better extension community.

skrebbel 14y ago

I doubt the extensions have much to do with it. Where Firefox had a vibrant community of people making extensions for their favourite website's search box, Opera added a way to access any site's search box from the address bar. This is just an example - a lot of things that Firefox extensions have been most used for are natively supported in Opera, though typically in a very different way. I don't think anybody but a particular kind of power user like you or me would chose a browser for its extension community. I think the free firefox ads all over many websites helped more. I mean, at some point, the Dutch Linux user group collected money to pay for a full-page colour Firefox ad in the Netherlands' largest newspaper. From their own pockets! The holy war to promote Firefox was really going strong for quite a while, and only got stilled when the many of the same people decided to switch to Google Chrome because they discovered that speed was more important to them than that whole open source principle they financed that ad for, and that really the ad was against Microsoft / IE and not so much for Firefox.

Nick_C 14y ago
This. Opera has left a huge legacy of features that people take for granted nowadays: very low use of resources; using the URL box also as a search tool; editable search engines; tab and window sessions; savable sessions; more that I can't remember now. All these were invented at Opera and later picked up by the others. Ten or fifteen years ago, Opera was the browser for hackers and the smart technologically-aware user. Then they sort of lost their way a bit. I switched away when Opera's resource use became as hungry as the others. Darn all these useless gimcracks and prettiness, I want speed, something I'm still saying today (which shows I'm as out-of-touch as ever I was).