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Firefox got market share for not being IE6

by jitl 2y ago

hinkley 2y ago
No. Software that doesn't work well for developers will eventually not work well for users either. In the age of early Firefox, we had employers telling people specifically not to support Firefox, but we just smiled and waved until they left. Because nobody wants to debug shit on IE6. You'd get it working on FF first and then fix the four things that broke only on IE6.
- jitl 2y ago
  > nobody wants to debug shit on IE6 Yes that's what i'm saying! It wasn't IE6. It was better in so many ways, and I don't think it's primarily the devtools. It had tabs!!!! Firebug (a few years in). form data didn't go "poof". Basic security happening by default. Regular improvement. Faster. I think if anything the devtools situation made Firefox viable because so much of the web was ActiveX or refused to talk to or work with non-IE browsers in other ways. But I think if it was just a set of good devtools, and otherwise was slow or annoying for general usage, all it would have done is capture the market for good devtools. Back in the day when I started using Chrome, it was in spite of the devtools situation – I had been using Firefox devtools daily for years at that point, but checked out Chrome for its other improvements: speed, omnibar, tabs on top, even better stability. Those improvements were enough to win me over in spite of needing to learn new devtools. Now when I think about switching to Firefox, it seems like it has parity in devtools. Certainly the Firefox profile explorer is better, I do all my profile analysis on https://profiler.firefox.com/ https://profiler.firefox.com/ even for Chrome profiles because it has a real flamegraph, not just a stack timeline. But it means learning new habits, and besides the profile explorer, it is just at parity with Chrome, or perhaps a little bit ahead in places like performance, but not enough to really keep me there. Stability of both is so good its hard to see an improvement mattering to me. The biggest problem is that as a web developer, I know Chrome represents the average user agent pretty darn well - it's closer to Safari/Webkit than Firefox, and its a perfect match for all the Android users. So even if the Firefox tooling is 20% better overall, it's still gonna be hard to overcome the network effect for me as a developer unless its amazingly better somehow, or embeds Blink/Webkit or something.

Firefox got market share for not being IE6

by jitl 2y ago

Firefox got market share for not being IE6

No. Software that doesn't work well for developers will eventually not work well for users either. In the age of early Firefox, we had employers telling people specifically not to support Firefox, but we just smiled and waved until they left. Because nobody wants to debug shit on IE6. You'd get it working on FF first and then fix the four things that broke only on IE6.

jitl 2y ago
> nobody wants to debug shit on IE6 Yes that's what i'm saying! It wasn't IE6. It was better in so many ways, and I don't think it's primarily the devtools. It had tabs!!!! Firebug (a few years in). form data didn't go "poof". Basic security happening by default. Regular improvement. Faster. I think if anything the devtools situation made Firefox viable because so much of the web was ActiveX or refused to talk to or work with non-IE browsers in other ways. But I think if it was just a set of good devtools, and otherwise was slow or annoying for general usage, all it would have done is capture the market for good devtools. Back in the day when I started using Chrome, it was in spite of the devtools situation – I had been using Firefox devtools daily for years at that point, but checked out Chrome for its other improvements: speed, omnibar, tabs on top, even better stability. Those improvements were enough to win me over in spite of needing to learn new devtools. Now when I think about switching to Firefox, it seems like it has parity in devtools. Certainly the Firefox profile explorer is better, I do all my profile analysis on https://profiler.firefox.com/ https://profiler.firefox.com/ even for Chrome profiles because it has a real flamegraph, not just a stack timeline. But it means learning new habits, and besides the profile explorer, it is just at parity with Chrome, or perhaps a little bit ahead in places like performance, but not enough to really keep me there. Stability of both is so good its hard to see an improvement mattering to me. The biggest problem is that as a web developer, I know Chrome represents the average user agent pretty darn well - it's closer to Safari/Webkit than Firefox, and its a perfect match for all the Android users. So even if the Firefox tooling is 20% better overall, it's still gonna be hard to overcome the network effect for me as a developer unless its amazingly better somehow, or embeds Blink/Webkit or something.