Comment by LunaSea
2 days ago
The Firefox market share was eaten by being worse than Chrome, especially around the developer tools and extensions market places at the time.
2 days ago
The Firefox market share was eaten by being worse than Chrome, especially around the developer tools and extensions market places at the time.
It was eaten by Google flexing their search and mobile monopolies, to advertise it on one of the most visited websites in the world, and coming pre-installed on over a billion devices. Distribution lock in leading to market share dominance is a tale as old as computing to the point that we now have decades old case law specifically on the issue of software monopolies being the cause of browser market share dominance.
Interestingly the most recent anti-trust case against Google, one proposed remedy was spinning off the Chrome browser into its own company, but that option was judged to be unrealistic, because how would a browser survive on it's own without distribution advantages and all its costs subsidized by other revenue drivers? A great question.
There's a lot of opinions and anecdata in that. Firefox was almost never as bad as it was marketed to be (by its competition), and Chrome was certainly never as good as it was marketed to be (by an evil ad company pretending to be a good, well adjusted internet benefit company).
Firefox used to be the first browser with decent developer tools thanks to the Firebug extension.
Then Chrome pushed heavily the development of its own development tools and crushed Firefox in the process. Chrome has now been the best browser for developers for the last +10 years.
The consequence is also that when the new generation of headless browsers were developed (Puppeteer) they were based on Chromium because it is so hackable and developer friendly.
This means that Firefox lost a big chunk of the developer community which constituted also a non trivial amount of their user base and advocates.
I don't know why people left Firefox, but I know why *I* did. And it was three or four years ago (after using it for 15 years) because I got annoyed at them for removing many features that I used over the years, and because I tried a Crommium based browser and it just had better performance and better ad-blocking. That's just one anecdote, but feel free to correlate it with other anecdotes to find some patterns and reach your own conclusion.
My father, who is very non-technical has never left Firefox and stuck with it for decades, even against Microsoft and Chrome's tactics to try to claim default browser and constantly install them into his face. My father particularly hates Chrome because he never understands how it keeps reinstalling itself despite his best efforts. His taskbar is often a mess of all three browsers because he can't figure out how to keep Edge and Chrome unpinned. My father sees Chrome installing itself and auto-pinning to his taskbar and Start Menu as the exact same IE-level adware/spyware shenanigans that led to him fleeing to Firefox in the first place.
I returned to Firefox again after years of IE8+ and Spartan Edge. I've never liked the "mouthfeel" of Chrome, have generally felt it to be bloated and slow and ad-heavy adware (though not as strongly as my father and I often do know how Chrome gets backdoor installed through shameful adware deals like with Adobe), and when Edge switched to being just another Chromium I still felt the same in my dislike of Chromium and I went back to Firefox. (Spartan Edge had so much better performance and battery usage than Chromium. It's death was not mourned by enough people.)
Feel free to correlate these two counter-anecdotes with more and see if you find some patterns to reach your own conclusion. That's the fun of anecdata and marketing, there are patterns on every side, you can interpret it how you want. "Popularity" isn't facts, pattern matching based on popularity of certain anecdotes can lead to incorrect conclusions. Especially when Marketing is involved. Marketing is about making popular things that aren't necessarily facts, especially when an advertiser is unscrupulous and no one is busy enforcing truth in advertising laws.
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