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I do wonder how much of it was really in their control. Firefox had its rise when Microsoft had basically slowed IE development to a crawl, which allowed them

by Macha 2y ago

I do wonder how much of it was really in their control. Firefox had its rise when Microsoft had basically slowed IE development to a crawl, which allowed them to build a lead of how much better they were than IE that no browser developer would be dumb enough to allow to reoccur. Tabs, Adblock, Firebug, performance for youtube and google maps that wasn't appalling at a time when these apps were themselves new and exciting. Like you could show a normal person who was using IE6 tabs and adblock, and that's a clear use case to switch browsers. The only feature anywhere near that compelling in the recent or not-so-recent past is sync, which is why every browser manufacturer has their own version of it. And sync still isn't tabs or adblock. And they had a clear revenue model with Google (and not yet irrelevant competitors) paying for search and not yet starting to squeeze them. I'm sure that revenue model was partly undermined when they moved to yahoo in the US and everyone just went and switched back to Google, which caused Google to question how valuable that really was. At the same time, Google developed Chrome because it let them push features that were useful for their revenue generating products. And google pushed hard. Some of its early market share was to wooing us with performance and tab isolation, for sure. But a lot of it was bundling with new laptops, flash player, anti-virus programs etc. to automatically set it as the default for non-tech users who may not recognise what a browser is really. And I mean, even the tech influencer effect was weakened a bit by the fact that your hypothetical grandma recognised the name Google, unlike Mozilla or Firefox, even if she had been actively using Firefox on her last laptop. One of the big misses from Firefox was being so late to Android. They couldn't have Firefox on iOS, and it took ages for government regulation to meaningfully change that, but they could have been on Android much sooner, and used some of their desktop network effects and sync to build market share, but instead they left it so late and missed the mobile market such that their poor mobile market share turned browser sync into something that harmed their desktop market share, as people wanted a desktop browser to sync their mobile Chrome tabs etc. Firefox's headcount (and the pace of web platform development) had ballooned over this period, and this was fine when the Google money was still a given, but now that's looked to be decreasing or entirely at risk, Mozilla has needed to make Firefox pay for Firefox (unlike Chrome, which doesn't really need to pay for Chrome as long as it's a channel for Google's revenue generating products). This has put them in pretty direct conflict with their users, as ways to monetise the browser goes against a lot of why their remaining users are their users to begin with.

thewebguyd 2y ago
> And I mean, even the tech influencer effect was weakened a bit by the fact that your hypothetical grandma recognised the name Google, unlike Mozilla or Firefox, even if she had been actively using Firefox on her last laptop. The tech influencer effect also switched to pushing Chrome at the time, especially outside of Linux/FLOSS communities. Chrome was released back when Google was still viewed favorably. People were high on gmail, google docs, and they still had "don't be evil." It took pretty much no time at all to start seeing Chrome everywhere Firefox used to be. So yeah, I agree with you - no doubt some of it is Mozilla's doing, but I think more or less it was out of their control and I think "we" (the tech crowd) are just as much at fault for Chrome's dominance and the downfall of Firefox. It only took 5 years from release for Chrome to surpass Firefox, and the tech crowd were very much the early adopters and drivers of that.
bee_rider 2y ago
Yeah, Firefox made a lot of sense when the problem was Microsoft’s incompetence and inability to make any real progress or support standards. In the modern era, Google is the opposite problem. They DDoS the community by developing standards fast enough that nobody can keep up with them. Actually, it seems impossible to compete with them on their turf. We need an alternative that somehow avoids that competition. Unfortunately Google is quite good, they managed to embrace-extend the whole internet. Not sure what the options are. Somewhere a filter needs to be applied to reject more proposals.
seba_dos1 2y ago
> One of the big misses from Firefox was being so late to Android. Was 2011 "so late"? It was already there when Android 4 came out, still before Android gained a really significant market share (15%, same as Blackberry and half as much as Symbian at the time). Two years before that there were versions for Maemo too (which was much easier to port to), and Android versions used the same codebase at the time.
- Macha 2y ago
  What country's market share are you looking at? Figures I found for global share are Android 48%, iOS 20%, Symbian 16%, Blackberry 10% (https://mobiforge.com/research-analysis/2011-handset-and-smartphone-sales-statistics-worldwide-big-picture https://mobiforge.com/research-analysis/2011-handset-and-sma...) which matches my memory of that time much better.

by Macha 2y ago

thewebguyd 2y ago

> And I mean, even the tech influencer effect was weakened a bit by the fact that your hypothetical grandma recognised the name Google, unlike Mozilla or Firefox, even if she had been actively using Firefox on her last laptop. The tech influencer effect also switched to pushing Chrome at the time, especially outside of Linux/FLOSS communities. Chrome was released back when Google was still viewed favorably. People were high on gmail, google docs, and they still had "don't be evil." It took pretty much no time at all to start seeing Chrome everywhere Firefox used to be. So yeah, I agree with you - no doubt some of it is Mozilla's doing, but I think more or less it was out of their control and I think "we" (the tech crowd) are just as much at fault for Chrome's dominance and the downfall of Firefox. It only took 5 years from release for Chrome to surpass Firefox, and the tech crowd were very much the early adopters and drivers of that.

bee_rider 2y ago

Yeah, Firefox made a lot of sense when the problem was Microsoft’s incompetence and inability to make any real progress or support standards. In the modern era, Google is the opposite problem. They DDoS the community by developing standards fast enough that nobody can keep up with them. Actually, it seems impossible to compete with them on their turf. We need an alternative that somehow avoids that competition. Unfortunately Google is quite good, they managed to embrace-extend the whole internet. Not sure what the options are. Somewhere a filter needs to be applied to reject more proposals.

seba_dos1 2y ago

> One of the big misses from Firefox was being so late to Android. Was 2011 "so late"? It was already there when Android 4 came out, still before Android gained a really significant market share (15%, same as Blackberry and half as much as Symbian at the time). Two years before that there were versions for Maemo too (which was much easier to port to), and Android versions used the same codebase at the time.

Macha 2y ago
What country's market share are you looking at? Figures I found for global share are Android 48%, iOS 20%, Symbian 16%, Blackberry 10% (https://mobiforge.com/research-analysis/2011-handset-and-smartphone-sales-statistics-worldwide-big-picture https://mobiforge.com/research-analysis/2011-handset-and-sma...) which matches my memory of that time much better.