This is missing the (very effective) anti-competitive tactics used to grow Chrome market share. In addition to things most folks are aware of, they also used dark patterns and bundleware installers in products like Adobe Flash, Avast, etc to trick users into installing Chrome and making it their default browser:
Why Firefox Deserves Its Sad Decline
31–40 of 44 posts
Re: Why Firefox Deserves Its Sad Decline
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, which is why the EU’s recent legislation is a terrible, terrible thing. The People’s cry for other rendering engines on iOS is a sham (the free market chose iOS among other, more permissive and equally viable platforms). Real people don’t care, and real people won’t notice because they do not care what rendering engine is powering their browser. They only care that websites work and that browsers provide the fea…
Amen. I was a complainer about Apple's insistence on WebKit, but when I thought it through I realized that it's the only bulkhead against a total Chrome takeover. I admire a lot of Europe's consumer protections, but this EU legislation is a huge overreach, written by politicians pandering to hype that they are too ignorant to assess.
KHTML from the KDE project was Apple's surprise choice for the Safari browser, in preference to Gecko. Everyone expected Apple to choose Gecko for their rendering engine.
Chrome and Safari both ran WebKit for many years until Google forked to the Blink engine.
Blink (as a descendent) is far closer to Webkit than either are to Gecko.
Re: Why Firefox Deserves Its Sad Decline
#33I can't tell if I'm having a brain fart Sunday morning or this is just generally a very poorly written article. Can someone give a summary? I read half of it and I still don't see a single "point" being made. The closest it got making a point is: > It seemed to be this software that tried to keep up with the pace of Google Chrome more than a software that actually had its own ideas. That sentence answers itself. Obvi…
And not altogether accurate:
> It all started with an app called Netscape Navigator ... believed to be the very first web browser ever
Netscape Navigator was at least the 3rd web browser.
The first web browser was Nexus by Tim Berners-Lee, renamed from the WorldWideWeb which was too easily confused with the distributed hypertext system known as the World Wide Web. [1]
The second web browser was Mosaic (originally xmosaic) by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, which some of us are old enough to remember using. [2]
Re: Why Firefox Deserves Its Sad Decline
#34Why is Firefox's slow decline a bad thing? Firefox seems to be leveling out at 5% of users. Perhaps serving those 5% of users is more important than selling out and becoming another Chromium-based browser? Sometimes I think open-source advocates have an obsession with "winning" and think that increasing market share is the only goal. (You can also see this in the way that this article throws Brave and Vivaldi under the bus... lol)
Re: Why Firefox Deserves Its Sad Decline
#35> 'Mozilla Firefox was the very first web browser to popularize the idea of “tabs”'.
Except that it was Opera that did that.
> It also started implementing other ideas like popup blocking(now ad blocking),
Opera...
Re: Why Firefox Deserves Its Sad Decline
#36At this point it is clear that Mozilla is not really an engineering driven organization. They are mainly a political organization with a browser attached. In addition, as some have mentioned, they really don’t have the resources of the big players (Apple/Google) Given that the web browser is basically ground zero for malware and exploits, I think it is safer to go with the browsers with more resources behind them.
This has been the track they've been on since Brandon Eich was booted for wrongthink. It's a joy to watch, really. Meanwhile Brave is nice.
Re: Why Firefox Deserves Its Sad Decline
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amen. I was a complainer about Apple's insistence on WebKit, but when I thought it through I realized that it's the only bulkhead against a total Chrome takeover. I admire a lot of Europe's consumer protections, but this EU legislation is a huge overreach, written by politicians pandering to hype that they are too ignorant to assess.
KHTML from the KDE project was Apple's surprise choice for the Safari browser, in preference to Gecko. Everyone expected Apple to choose Gecko for their rendering engine. Chrome and Safari both ran WebKit for many years until Google forked to the Blink engine. Blink (as a descendent) is far closer to Webkit than either are to Gecko. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML
Thanks for the info.
Re: Why Firefox Deserves Its Sad Decline
#38These days FF is just as fast and lighter than most Chromium browsers. With a better curated add-on store (my god google store sucks), a clean UI (which they'll hopefully stop messing around with), and more importantly, it just works for day to day use, and is customizable enough for most people's needs. While Mozilla have themselves to blame for a lot of the decline. A big part of it is Google's dominance over the w…
Yes, which is why the EU’s recent legislation is a terrible, terrible thing. The People’s cry for other rendering engines on iOS is a sham (the free market chose iOS among other, more permissive and equally viable platforms). Real people don’t care, and real people won’t notice because they do not care what rendering engine is powering their browser. They only care that websites work and that browsers provide the fea…
Apple's ban on third-party browsers on iOS has caused enormous damage to the web ecosystem.
We explain this in great detail including browser diversity arguments here: https://open-web-advocacy.org/files/OWA%20-%20Bringing%20Com...
Re: Why Firefox Deserves Its Sad Decline
#39Any article about Firefox and it's relevance that doesn't strongly highlight the "David v. Goliath" nature of what it's up against -- and implies that it gets developed in roughly the same way and for the same purposes as its competitors -- is dumb at best and dangerously misleading at worst.
Mozilla was getting $50m from search to develop a browser that gained market share. How is that different from the goals of Google or Microsoft?
I don't know what's worse about this response, the backwards causation logic or the bad math.
Re: Why Firefox Deserves Its Sad Decline
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mozilla was getting $50m from search to develop a browser that gained market share. How is that different from the goals of Google or Microsoft?
$50M is tiny compared to how much Google invested in Chrome. That barely pays 100 engineers.
Then maybe Mozilla should move to Europe where they can pay 5x engineers with that money :)