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Why did Google in 2008 chose to built its own browser instead of helping to improve Firefox, which was around since 2002?
by Propelloni 2y ago
Why did Google in 2008 chose to built its own browser instead of helping to improve Firefox, which was around since 2002?
- layer8 2y agoThey wanted a browser they have full control over. And you can move much faster when you don’t have to negotiate every change with third parties. Also, Firefox 1.0 and Chrome 1.0 were released within months of each other (though Firefox 0.x had existed for a little while), so Firefox wasn’t that established yet. The main competition at the time was Microsoft Internet Explorer with over 90% market share.
- keyringlight 2y agoI'm fairly sure pretty much everything at google since the doubleclick acquisition has been a loss-leader in order to give users good 'viewers' for advertisements, there's some nice byproducts along the way of course.
- kasabali 2y agoFirefox 1.0: 2004 Chrome 1.0: 2008
- layer8 2y agoWhoops, you are right, I misread one source.
- culi 2y ago> They wanted a browser they have full control over Yup and they got it. Now we see them using that power and market dominance to further their business goals with their attempts to kill Manifest V2
- xnx 2y agoYou can read the comic that explains some of the reasoning here: https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/big_00.html https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/big_00.html IIRC one of the biggest reasons was a single misbehaving tab in Firefox being able to take down the whole browser.
- jhasse 2y agoThey didn't build it from the ground up but used WebKit.