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I wish them well, but browsers are very much pay-to-play. Google had to pay their way to their current dominant position.
by liquid_thyme 1y ago
I wish them well, but browsers are very much pay-to-play. Google had to pay their way to their current dominant position.
- mouse_ 1y agoDon't forget, Firefox didn't succeed because Firefox was good, it succeeded because IE was bad. People don't like having to choose between Google Chrome and Google Firefox.
- npteljes 1y agoAd blockers were another huge draw, in my experience.
- liquid_thyme 1y agoNot anymore.. https://imgur.com/a/CARfuHZ https://imgur.com/a/CARfuHZ
- npteljes 1y agoAd-blockers are not just for YouTube. Moreover, addons can still be a draw for Firefox. For example, the built-in Multi-Container addon, and the ones that build on it, are very useful privacy and web testing tools.
- liquid_thyme 1y agoMy prediction is that they're going to slowly ban them from their properties, and also from websites where their ads are hosted. They will slowly pressurize Mozilla and anyone else they're funding.
- postepowanieadm 1y agoI'm not sure about it - there were other contestants: Opera, Netscape, even the big Mozilla Suite.
- Klonoar 1y agoThose other browsers are footnotes in the browser wars era of 2000s IE6 territory. Yes, even Opera - it never hit the heights that Firefox did outside of niche markets, even though they were great about a lot of other things.
- lenerdenator 1y agoDepends on what you mean by "pay-to-play". Google's business model was to take FLOSS software, ostensibly make it work without them being involved, but make it obvious that if you wanted things to be as simple as possible, you needed to use their version of it. Can you use Chromium as your daily driver? Sure, but it's not as simple as just using Chrome. Android is even more like this. And of course, the simplest way to use this software also just happens to give Google a ton of your data, which enabled them as an ad-serving company. They wouldn't have given the browser away for free if they weren't making at least the cost of the browser development back in the take from ad revenues. I guess you could argue that the moves to buy services like YouTube and other big pillars of the web and have that reflected in Chrome development cost money.
- liquid_thyme 1y agoI meant paying for distribution via the usual channels (toolbar vector, s/w bundling, etc) and paying for their browser as a default with system integrators. They also had a good browser (before it became spyware), but there is no conceivable way to get a billion people to care about javascript performance and memory usage.
- lofaszvanitt 1y agoPay? You mean putting the "you are using X, why not try chrome" adtext everywhere for every search result?
- gkbrk 1y agoAnd paying money to software vendors to bundle Chrome with "Set Chrome as default browser" ticked by default. This is exactly the same thing all the malware browsers and toolbars did in the time period too.
- nicoburns 1y agoMore like having a team of between 1000 and 1500 full time software engineers working on it over a period of more than a decade.
- liquid_thyme 1y agoEven if you had 1000 developers who worked for free, you can't get a billion people to care about software quality beyond a certain point.
- lofaszvanitt 1y agoThere is zero difference between firefox and chrome for a layman.
- liquid_thyme 1y agoYes, but also paying for distribution and paying for it to be the default browser.
- dmix 1y agoThat plus making the best browser on the market for 15yrs
- liquid_thyme 1y agoA browser spying on users for marketing purposes is a disqualifier for me.