Comment by pwg
3 years ago
One of the reasons: Massive advertising by Google to convince people to "try chrome". It is only relatively recently that visiting a google property was not met with: "Google X is best used in Chrome -- install Chrome now." (with "install chrome" being a link to the installer.
No such massive advertising campaign ever existed to try to convince folks to "install Firefox".
>No such massive advertising campaign ever existed to try to convince folks to "install Firefox".
I know HN tries to resist comments of this nature, but man do I feel old now.
Firefox's entire success pretty much owes itself to a campaign like that dating back to the early to mid 2000s. Hell, there was a massive NYTimes ad in 2004!
https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2004/12/mozilla-foundation-pl...
Edit: "there as" -> "there was"
True, there were Firefox advertising campaigns in the past.
How many days did that NYTimes ad run?
How does that compare in size to Google being able to spend somewhere around ten to twelve years constantly advertising "switch to Chrome" on every google property (search, youtube, mail, etc.)?
The massive size of googles advertising to "switch to Chrome" dwarfs all of the Firefox campaigns combined.
You are shifting the goalposts by trying to say it's about scale and reach, but scale and reach in 2004 wasn't the same as what Google has now. Firefox more or less blanketed the web in advertising to get the switch done.
Your point of "Google has a ridiculous playing field advantage" is noted and absolutely true, but you don't need to reach for the factually incorrect "Firefox has not had campaigns for switching" to make it.
2 replies →
There was a massive grassroots Firefox campaign in the aughts. It was very successful at growing share and I was proud to participate.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36760016
That and the fact that most people saw Google search as the first web page when they opened a browser (or if not then most just navigated to it) sure was a killer combo.
Chrome was started by Google as a push to improve the web, which was mired in the stagnation of Internet Explorer dominance. This was good and it worked, but now they are the new monopoly, controlling not just the majority browser but also the majority search engine, majority email platform, and majority online productivity tools. They naturally work to ensure that all that stuff works well with Chrome. Pretty much the only space they don't dominate is social media, but most people access that through apps, not a browser. Even if Firefox is a better browser (and I'm not saying it is, though I personally prefer it) there just isn't much space for Firefox to start driving a wedge in.
It's an alternative for those who want it, but it's hard to point to any technical reason to prefer it.
> This was good
Was it though? It seems like a lot of "ends justify the means" from hindsight. Were all the dark patterns that Google used to insure Chrome dominance enough to justify the ends of "stop IE stagnation"? In the exact same time period Firefox did really well on word-of-mouth. It didn't need dark patterns, and ultimately lost to Chrome's dark patterns and it is harder to argue that that wasn't at least somewhat evil by that point because I think it is a lot harder to argue that the ends of "defeat Firefox" justify those means. I think it is getting harder and harder to justify that Chrome did all those evil things, whether or not you think that Chrome itself is evil.
So, the only way to grow Firefox now is to have a website Google can't hijack to advertise Chrome, and also a website everyone wants to use.
"ChatGPT runs better in Firefox. Click here to install it."
DuckDuckGo has billboards. Mozilla has money. I think share growth is expressly a non-goal from Mozilla leadership, judging by some of the other comments.
> I think share growth is expressly a non-goal from Mozilla leadership, judging by some of the other comments.
I would agree, I have no idea what the actual goals from Mozilla leadership are. They don't make sense.