
Chrome Won - fabrice_d
https://andreasgal.com/2017/05/25/chrome-won/
======
gkoberger
I agree with this blog post. But I don't think Mozilla lost.

I worked for Mozilla for a few years, after seeing John Lily (CEO at the time)
speak. It was right after Chrome started getting popular, and a smug person in
the crowd asked him about how he felt about Chrome.

John's response was awesome. "This is the web that we wanted. We exist not
because we want everyone to use Firefox, but because we wanted people to have
a choice" Firefox was a response to a world of "best viewed in IE" badges, and
it changed the browser landscape.

Now, we have options. Chrome is great, but so are Safari, Edge, Brave, Opera
and Firefox. There's a lot of options out there, and they're all standards
compliment. And that's thanks to Mozilla.

So, in my mind, Mozilla won. It's a non-profit, and it forced us into an open
web. We got the world they wanted. Maybe the world is a bit Chrome-heavy
currently, but at least it's a standards compliment world.

I hope Mozilla sees that. I hope they take credit, and move on to what's next:
privacy and net neutrality. Our privacy is under attack, and Mozilla is one of
the few companies that can (and would want to) help. I know, I know. Nobody
cares about privacy. Nobody cared about web standards, either, but Mozilla
bundled it into an attractive package and it worked. It's time for Mozilla to
declare victory, high five the Chrome team, and move on to the next big
challenge.

We really need someone to fight for our privacy and neutrality. And I really
believe that this could be Mozilla's swan song.

\-----

EDIT: Hey cbeard - My email is in my profile; I'd love to talk.

~~~
MBCook
The problem is we're moving extremely fast to a chrome only world. If it
wasn't for corporate sites and the success of the iPhone chrome would probably
be dominating the way IE used to.

I definitely run into sites that only work on chrome and not in any other
browser.

In my opinion chrome isn't doing a good job either. It's a massive energy hog
and waste more CPU than it needs to. Unlike IE and FireFox and Safari it comes
from a company that is notorious for wanting to know everything about you.

The time to celebrate victory was a few years ago. Now it's starting to look
like the new boss is the same as the old, maybe worse.

~~~
zacmps
Chrome is improving on the resource usage front. It's far from perfect but
it's getting better.

As for privacy you could use the open source chromium, there's a fork
somewhere which has all the Google removed.

~~~
wolco
On windows firefox does everything in one thread while chrome opens many.
Depending on the usage both can be fast or slow. Firefox handles multiple tabs
better. Chrome handles multiple tabs of videos better

~~~
krzyk
Chrome handles few tabs better, Firefox handles hundreds of tabs better.

~~~
dEnigma
This ultimately was what made me switch back to Firefox after I had used
Chrome for a couple of years. I regularly have several hundred tabs opened in
my browser, and Chrome was completely unusable in that situation, at least
back then.

~~~
PatentTroll
Honest question: why do you use hundreds of tabs at the same time? Why not
bookmarks and leave a couple of the most important ones open? I have never
understood the use case for "hundreds" of browser tabs

~~~
659087
If you want to be 10x, you need at least 10 stackoverflow tabs open to copy
and paste from.

I've always assumed people talking about having hundreds of tabs open just
don't understand how to properly use a browser. My grandmother, for example,
usually has 100 or so open by the time I get a call about her having computer
problems.

There's no logical reason I can come up with for doing this instead of using
bookmarks.

~~~
nirvdrum
I have a lot of tabs open. Not multiples of hundreds at the moment, but
probably around 100. I use the same computer for work and personal, so I have
different contexts I switch through at least once a day. Increasingly, things
are becoming web apps, so I have a dozen just to do basic tasks these days:
email, multiple chat clients, music player, code repository, issue tracker,
Twitter, online office suite, etc. Sure, I could bookmark and close and re-
open every time, but that's a waste of time when I want to quickly switch back
to something. And not every app has sensible bookmarking semantics.

Then throughout the course of the day I end up looking up API docs, get linked
to blog posts, news articles, and YouTube videos, and read articles which
themselves have relevant links to follow. Most of these I just open in a
background tab to check out later in the day. These accumulate until I have
time to go through and quickly review them. Those that I want to read and
don't have the time currently go to Pocket. The rest get read or summarily
closed out. I find bookmarks to be a terrible way to triage tabs.

This workflow works for me (and evidently others). It's faster than
bookmarking. It's less prone to failure, in my experience (I've suffered
bookmark corruption more than once). And a modern computer ought to handle
many background tabs just fine. Moreover, if browsers aren't expected to be
used in this fashion, they really should set an upper-limit on the number of
tabs that can be opened.

Hopefully this gives you some perspective on alternative use cases. It sounds
like your workflow works out well for you. I've tried it and couldn't get it
to stick. If that means I don't know how to use a browser, so be it. At this
point, there's enough of us (your grandmother included) that maybe the browser
vendors should just find a way to cope with it better.

~~~
sysadmin420
This is my flow as well, I have 3 monitors in a pyramid formation, each
monitor is both a personal and a business chrome browser running on separate
desktops.

Each browser instance is tabbed completely across, I keep them open until I
read the page fully, and then save it in keep to keep forever.

By Friday I can have hundreds of tabs that I go through and clean up. Web apps
are a huge pain to constantly log in.

I run Korora with 24GB RAM and an I 7, Chrome is never a system hog for me,
and most of the time it surprises me how well it handles my use.

~~~
nirvdrum
My issues with Chrome and tab management is that the tabs become progressively
smaller, to the point of being unusable. There's likely an add-on for that,
but Firefox handles it nicely with the Tab Center feature in Test Pilot. Also,
if I need to restart the browser, Chrome loads every tab at startup and that's
far from ideal. Firefox will only load the active tabs.

------
cies
So Mozilla lost Firefox OS. And their browser share is smaller then Chrome,
and then it was, but still top tier and winning from M$.

I'm much less pessimistic.

Besides a cross platform and extensible browser we see also the following
coming out of Mozilla:

* Rust, a modern low-level programming language with cutting edge "safety" build in at zero runt time cost, luring many system programmers.

* Servo, tomorrow browser, from scratch, in Rust.

* Thunderbird, x-platform desktop email client (interesting for those not trusting the cloud enough).

* MDN, everything MSDN and w3school wish they could be. :)

A lot with revolve around privacy and safety in the future, a space that
Mozilla is very well positioned to florish in.

Chrome is a good product. But I prefer Firefox. And seeing what is becoming of
Servo I will soon start using that. Form me Firefox has won, and is not at all
losing. I dont need the "most popular" browser, I need the most secure one.

And when I see what programming languages Google came up with... (Seriously?
Is Go the best money can buy?) Then I think Rust shows single handedly that
Mozilla beats Google in that arena as well.

~~~
StevePerkins
I understand that people who like rust REALLY like Rust, but you do realize
that your examples of a purpose for existence consist of:

1\. A programming language, that hasn't yet shown "escape velocity" to go
beyond D and other would-be-C++-successors in traction.

2\. The only major application of that language... a pre-alpha browser engine,
which may or may not eventually replace the engine in a browser that is
seriously declining in market share with no reversal in sight.

3\. A desktop email client, from which Mozilla has repeatedly made clear their
intentions to divest and move on.

4\. A JavaScript and HTML reference manual.

Mozilla is an organization with over $400 million in annual revenue. Where
that money is going baffles me.

~~~
pjc50
> Mozilla is an organization with over $400 million in annual revenue. Where
> that money is going baffles me.

This is astonishing. Anyone looked at their accounts?

~~~
Sylos
Most money does still go towards developers. If I remember correctly,
something like $230 million. As the other guy said, they publish their
financial reports (with about a two year delay), so you can find that in
there.

Besides that, a few things to consider:

* Mozilla is currently doing financially well, no one ever claimed otherwise. They are putting money to the side and also diversifying their income strategies, in case their market share falls even lower and revenue from search engines drops out. * They are still by far the smallest of the big browser vendors. Google, Microsoft and Apple could all easily invest far more money than that, if they wanted to. * Mozilla is currently developing two browser engines in parallel, implementing a new extension model, making Firefox multi-process capable and just in general dealing with a lot of technical debt. No way to truly know what Google, Microsoft and Apple are up to, but I can hardly imagine them currently doing more than Mozilla in terms of innovation and development.

------
JoshMnem
Firefox took marketshare from IE when that was impossible. It could do it
again with Chrome, if things change a bit.

Some problems with Mozilla are that they don't do community management well
any more. In the old days, there were amazing grassroots-driven projects like
spreadfirefox.com. It is not like that any more. Grassroots supporters have
trouble participating, even if they try.

For example, I tried to create a Firefox programmers' meetup group in
Berkeley, and even though some community people from Mozilla joined the group,
no one from Mozilla would reply to my inquiries. (I still would like to
restart that idea, but I don't have time to chase them down. We have 4,000
members in our various meetup groups at the moment.)

Another problem is that they are doing things that make their most-dedicated
core users lose interest. They should have realized the incredible enthusiasm
for Firefox that plugins like Pentadactyl were creating. They're killing off
the API that it depends on. Instead, they should have funded the development
of Pentadactyl and made it a reason why tech-savvy users choose Firefox. Tech-
savvy users drive adoption, but they have abandoned many of their tech-savvy
supporters.

There is still hope for Firefox if they are able to get the messages about
privacy across. Chrome is slower to use out of the box, partially because of
the auto-completion algorithm that tends to send people to Google Search to
click on ads before reaching their destination. The older Firefox search box
didn't waste users' time like that. (Recently it changed so that it shows
titles rather than URLs, which is also slow, because there is an extra
security risk of going to phishing sites, if you don't stop to look at the
URLs.)

Also, Firefox is the only mobile browser that allows add-ons, so that's
another benefit that they should be promoting.

~~~
eloisant
Firefox took marketshare from IE because Microsoft abandoned it for several
years (IE6) then did an half-assed update with IE7. It was a big pile of poop
and Firefox succeeded not because it was a great product because because it
was the right product at the right time.

For Chrome on the other hand, its near-monopoly situation is worrisome but
it's actually a pretty good product. So there is no pragmatic reasons to leave
it for Firefox, only ideological reasons and it's a driver nearly not as
powerful as suffering every day.

~~~
m3rc
It's pragmatic to leave Chrome for the exact same reasons people left IE, the
parent company has stopped improving the product.

Chrome sold people on the promise of a much faster, lighter-weight browser
than the heavy but competent Firefox of the time, a promise that Chrome no
longer delivers on. The "added users" Mozilla has claimed in 2016 were
developers realizing Chrome wasn't light or speedy anymore and if they were
going to use a browser hogging all the RAM on their system they may as well
use one with a functional extensions ecosystem.

Chrome may not be comparatively "as bad" as IE was at the peak of Firefox's
success, but it's still suffering from the same disease.

~~~
scholia
Exactly right. I moved to Chrome when it came out, and moved back to Firefox a
couple of years ago because of Chrome's growing memory-hogging problems and
its inability to handle hundreds of tabs.

------
aerovistae
> I started Firefox OS in 2011 because already back then I was convinced that
> desktops and browsers were dead. Not immediately–here we are 6 years later
> and both are still around–but both are legacy technologies that are not
> particularly influential going forward.

I don't understand this perspective. Browsers are legacy technologies that are
not particularly influential? What?

I feel like the web dominates our lives more than ever, and _everyone_ uses a
laptop or desktop for any actual work they have to do, professional or hobby.
While people use their phones for internet access throughout the day as they
move about, it must be one in 1000 or fewer who uses their phone or tablet for
real work.

Does someone see a replacement on the horizon for the supposedly "legacy"
laptop/desktop power combo?

~~~
geoelectric
I was also at Mozilla during the time period Andreas outlines--I worked on the
Firefox OS test team, for that matter, almost from the beginning of it
graduating from Boot2Gecko as a Labs project until right before it got killed.

While my perspective isn't as strategic or metrics-driven as his, I had a lot
of time to observe and think as both a community member and Mozilla employee.
FxOS also wasn't my baby, so there's that. Note also that I speak for myself
here and my own observations and paraphrases--whatever I say that pisses
someone off is something I'm saying, not that Mozilla said verbatim.

My primary takeaways were twofold:

(Long, TL;DR at bottom)

1) I agree with you. Desktop and mobile are two separate markets, period. The
first mostly serves a workplace audience and the second a personal audience,
but most people with a desk job at the very least will use a web browser as
part of their day. Desktop may be a minority of the overall, but it's a
minority that won't go away anytime soon and so will continue to influence
HTML and standards disproportionate to pure market share.

That's important because Mozilla's gambit for preserving the open web was
pretty simple (I say was because I think they're just not that focused at this
point):

Have enough people using your browser that websites absolutely have to support
the emerging standards that browser relies on-- and perhaps in doing so make
it less attractive for site providers _and_ browser providers to spend time on
proprietary tech that isn't significantly better than those standards, thereby
making other browsers move to those standards too.

Doesn't mean these people have to use it everywhere, or that it has to be a
majority share (10%+ was what I commonly heard as "enough") or otherwise
"win". But it does have to be enough that people will complain if the website
doesn't support their browser and that testers are influenced to test the site
against it.

(BTW, as a test professional, the fact that Firefox no longer appears in most
test matrixes I encounter due to lack of a blip on analytics is very telling,
and Firefox has a serious risk growing around site incompatibility or
instability in their browser).

That brings me to my second takeaway:

2) The grand majority of people don't use a web browser because of the browser
itself; they use it for one of a few reasons:

a) It's default on their system.

You will not win these people over because they're not there for any reason
other than it being the easiest or most integrated path. Note that this is
pretty much the whole mobile market, and why it was a dire mistake for Mozilla
to conflate the two markets, decide mobile was more important due to combined
market share, then go tilting at windmills.

It's also, any altruistic reasons aside, why the moonshot was to create an OS
so Firefox could be the default mobile experience.

b) Ethics/Community. This was a relatively small but very vocal part of
Firefox's userbase. Probably more people were there "against Chrome" than "for
Firefox," but whatever. Firefox succeeded in the first place because of
"against Internet Explorer" so it's a valid reason to be there. The nice thing
about these people is they pull in more people.

Unfortunately, one side effect of Firefox OS as a project was working with
proprietary partners who emphasized confidentiality such that you couldn't
share with the community in the way Mozilla did before. When Mozilla diverted
most of their effort to Firefox OS, it froze out a lot of the community
efforts.

I think Mozilla-the-org also became less skilled at working with community,
both for that shift and perhaps because they brought in a lot of people from
the mobile and other sectors who didn't have that background.

Whatever the case, this base wasn't well-maintained, and I don't think
operates as a core in the same way it might once have, at least for Firefox.

c) Customization, and this is really why Firefox (and Mozilla) is where it is
today IMO:

The add-on ecosystem is the most compelling reason both to start using but
especially _continue_ using a non-default browser, and Mozilla chased theirs
away.

Here's the thing:

You have one browser, whose job is to get the hell out of the way of the
content and fade into the background, and several installed extensions whose
jobs are to solve specific problems you have. 1 browser. Several extensions. 1
invisible, generic browser. Several hand-chosen extensions that make it your
own.

Which bit are you sticking around for? Probably the extensions. The browser is
a platform, a means, not an end--not just for the web but _for its own
functionality_.

That's why all the complaints are performance and crashes and things that make
you notice the browser, not generally native features or UI. It's the whole
rationale behind browser-as-OS efforts in the first place.

Syncs and reading lists are nice, but with an ecosystem you can get them after
the fact. With no ecosystem, you'd better either really like what you're
handed or be trapped into using it a la iOS--and even Apple has figured out
they have to be somewhat customizable or people will even switch OSes to get
it.

 _That 's_ where Chrome won.

Specifically, when Mozilla pretty much cargo-culted Google's rapid release
program without first creating a version-independent extension store and add-
on API, they seriously fucked up.

A ton of add-ons couldn't keep up with release and broke--Firefox's add-on
"API" was to either essentially monkeypatch the internals or to create binary
extensions, neither of which had any real abstraction from implementation. The
need to manually update the compatibility version number and reupload to AMO
for every single release froze more out (this was fixed server-side by auto-
incing the number but it was just a workaround to a real problem as now
extensions might not be really compatible). AMO always had a problem with
turnaround on submissions, and this didn't help.

In general Mozilla sent the message of being out of touch with the add-on
community, and that it wasn't a clear priority.

Jetpack/Add-Ons SDK was there as a not-really-mature portability measure to
mitigate this, but it wasn't powerful enough to support a lot of the best
extensions. It also happened in parallel with the rapid release shift, not
before it when it was strategically needed. Then Jetpack kind of died off,
probably partially because of the shift in efforts towards mobile/FxOS and
partially because Jetpack never really became kick-ass enough to make the type
of impact that gets more resources.

Meanwhile, right before Firefox stepped into this and never stepped out again,
the Chrome Web Store opens in 2010, ready to receive any disenfranchised add-
on makers. Talk about right place at the right time. Now Mozilla finally is
adopting Chrome's extension API, both because it probably works better with
multiprocess but maybe also to get some cross-platform extensions back. I
imagine that'll work OK, but maybe too little too late.

AMO isn't what it used to be at all. Meanwhile, Chrome's Web Store is
phenomenal. Combined with the (yes, unfair) Google Suite integration in Chrome
there's a lot of friction to keep people on Chrome as a platform, and short of
Chrome making a huge mistake that shakes people off like Mozilla/Firefox did,
there isn't much reason to switch browsers for a cross-platform extension
that's already on the one you use.

And when I look at the blog posts re: Firefox improvements, etc., I keep
coming back to "it's a platform, not an app" and wonder if they'll ever take
that ground back. Maybe if they somehow completely redefine the browser
experience or otherwise stay deeply opinionated (Opera is sort of going this
route) but otherwise, it'll just be parity and parity doesn't move people.

I'm thoroughly convinced Mozilla won't achieve much impact with Firefox until
they understand and execute on building the ecosystem as the vast majority use
case and never damage it again. However, that means them also understanding
that people came to and left Firefox for any number of reasons other than
Firefox itself or its native features, interface, etc., and I don't see that
yet institutionally in their execution.

Some bright spots: Rust and WebAssembly are both fantastic. In general, I
think Mozilla has been great at addressing the developer segment, both with
the browser dev tools themselves and especially with MDN. Maybe what'll
eventually preserve Mozilla is getting drummed out of the web browser business
and into more of a core tech business. Regaining browser relevance is going to
be a heck of an uphill for them.

TL;DR: Mozilla should never have gone full-tilt at mobile and made a grave
mistake in assuming desktop was becoming irrelevant to their mission; and by
far the biggest fuckup was alienating the add-on community since customization
is the most compelling reason why people would use a non-default browser. It's
entirely possible they won't come back from that. Their biggest recent impacts
have been peripheral to or completely orthogonal to the browser, and might be
their brighter future.

~~~
jcranmer
Having been a contributor (mostly to Thunderbird, though) for a decade, I hold
that Mozilla's biggest mistake was effectively killing off embedding and
stable extension APIs. They merrily took the opportunity afforded by the Gecko
2 transition to kill all the compatibility, which is understandable, but the
task of providing a simple frozen or at least not-going-to-change-soon API
kept falling off the radar. It meant that technology experiments like Node.js
or Electron--which is the sort of thing that was entirely in line with
Mozilla's philosophy--couldn't be effectively built on Gecko and SpiderMonkey,
at that means ceding a large captive market.

The extension ecosystem was always one of the strongest distinguishing facets
of Firefox. I think Mozilla panicked when Chrome threatened Firefox's market
share, and started trying to compete hard on things like being at the
forefront of new technology adoption at the expense of the existing extension
ecosystem. And in the process, Mozilla lost control of the messaging and it
came to be seen as constantly doing little more than aping Chrome. The Web
Extensions stuff is an example of the marketing issue. Mozilla new as far back
as 2010 that extensions were the biggest stumbling block to getting
multiprocess working. What they should have done was start developing the new
extension APIs that far back, and made Firefox use multiprocess mode only if
no legacy extensions were installed.

~~~
sjun
I see WebExtensions as taking a good/easy API that the Chromium team has
created and proven and standardizing it like they standardized the web.

I never worked on the previous Firefox extension API but I find it
ridiculously easy to have a cross platform extension that works on Chromium
and Firefox. That counts for something.

------
Mathnerd314
> exponential trend

They're market shares & hence bounded by 0 and 1, so exponential seems pretty
unrealistic. The logistic curve is a better starting point:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function#In_economics...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function#In_economics_and_sociology:_diffusion_of_innovations)

~~~
zumatic
This is what I came here to post, and you can see that, in the mobile chart,
Chrome and Safari already seem to be levelling off. Maybe a better model would
be like an ADSR (attack decay sustain release) envelope in sound synthesis
where the logistic curve represents the attack / initial adoption phase,
possibly followed by a mirror logistic curve representing mature saturation
then eventual replacement by competitors. That said, some products do come
back from the dead, like Mozilla itself; the Apple Mac is another example.

Saying "Chrome won" now feels like saying "IE won" in 2002 or so. Look at the
chart here:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_5](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_5)

~~~
Mathnerd314
I couldn't find a single chart from invention of the web browser to present,
but these two cover most of it:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Browser_Wars_(en).svg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Browser_Wars_\(en\).svg)
[http://i.imgur.com/kVocSvo.png](http://i.imgur.com/kVocSvo.png)

What strikes me is the diversity. Chrome has mostly been stealing market share
from IE; Safari is growing too and is by no means dead; FF has been declining,
but not that much. There are 4-ish strong browsers in the market now when
before there was only 1 (IE) and a half (Mozilla). Certainly a different
picture from the chart in the article.

------
Houshalter
Maybe they could compete on having a better extension system. Chrome
extensions are absolutely awful. Every single one I've ever used has had some
kind of serious bug, often deal breaking. I could easily fix many of them, but
there is no method to do so. Let alone fork it or submit a pull request. You
can't even load your own extensions, and you have to pay money to submit them
to the web store. A scary percentage of them are sold to malware developers,
and they silently update in the background.

They remove anything that violates the terms of service of a website. Like
popular extensions that modified youtube or reddit in ways the sites didn't
approve of. The only reason they don't remove adblock is because it has so
much momentum and there would be an uproar if they did. But they do pay to
have their ads whitelisted on the most popular adblock extension, and see to
it that it's the top result.

They also try to be a minimalist browser and shove any functionality to
extensions that can be shoved there. Since 99.999% of people never change the
default settings on anything, they miss out. I wonder if a browser could be
successful going the other way. Being "batteries included" and bundling it
with lots of useful extensions and features.

~~~
enra
You can easily your own extensions in Chrome by clicking the "Load unpacked
extension" which can be just a folder from your computer that has a
manifest.json file in. You can also easily inspect the extensions that you
have installed with the chrome developer tools, ie. copy them and fix them if
needed.

If anything, I'd say my experience between the Chrome and Firefox extensions
are completely opposite to yours. For one, Firefox has some 1-3 different
extension types/apis, so you have first understand which one to use from their
convoluted developer docs. Secondly, when you submit the extension, some
volunteer "reviews" it whenever they have the time, which can take days to
weeks. Once I got feedback and got rejected because there was a typo in the
extension.

With Chrome it's very easy to create an extension, you basically only need
that manifest.json file and then you can submit it to the store and it's
online less than an hour.

~~~
Houshalter
I don't remember what the restriction was. I believe it only lets you have one
third party extension at a time and auto disables it on startup. And I'm
pretty sure you can't modify webstore ones, I haven't tried it though.

I thought Firefox allowed third party extensions, have they changed that?

~~~
majewsky
I would be surprised if they blocked third-party extensions since, last time I
looked, Linux distributions were using these for their custom integration
parts with Firefox.

------
buu700
In fairness to Firefox, at this point I'm just waiting for their dev tools to
get as good as Chrome's before I seriously consider switching, and other
efforts like Quantum certainly make the prospect even more attractive. Once
they have me on desktop, I'll want to switch on mobile as well for the state
syncing benefits.

I wouldn't be surprised if a sizeable portion of Chrome users were in a
similar boat, quietly waiting for some small aspect of Firefox to improve.

~~~
ishbits
2 things keep me on Chrome. First, the overly large titlebar on Linux. I've
tried some addons to make it more like Chrome but they all look like shit. And
second, the dev tools. I find dev tools in Firefox clumsy to use. I believe I
originally switched to Chrome for the dev tools when I ventured into frontend
development.

~~~
kevingadd
Chrome's chrome (heh) is larger than Firefox's for me. I _hate_ how large its
titlebar is. They made it larger in the past couple releases, actually.

------
kenshi

      I started Firefox OS in 2011 because already back then I
      was convinced that desktops and browsers were dead. 
      Not immediately–here we are 6 years later and both 
      are still around–but both are legacy technologies that
      are not particularly influential going forward.
    
      ...snip...
    
      To stick with the transportation metaphor: Google makes the 
      best horses in the world and they clearly won 
      the horse race. I just don’t think that race matters 
      much going forward.
    

It certainly doesn't matter if what you are interested in is: catching
whatever the next technology wave is.

But the browser certainly still matters to all those Firefox users who
switched to Chrome, and are using it every day.

"Legacy" isn't seen as sexy in tech. It might not be exciting for someone who
wants to explore the next frontier or create the next platform. But, legacy is
important for users (customers). Legacy is your brand. It's your influence.
The foothold that will help you set the direction of what happens next. It's
what you bootstrap your play in the next tech wave upon. Legacy is yesterday's
hard earned success ready to be leveraged as a head start for tomorrow. (It's
just important that you remember to do the leveraging part, and not just sit
pretty and self-satisfied with your legacy).

Firefox's decline is abysmal and a failure of leadership.

FirefoxOS was a terrible, terrible decision.

How much influence does Mozilla really have on the direction of web if they
have don't have influence on the desktop? Don't many features in mobile
browsers start on the desktop browser first?

I hope whoever is in charge of Firefox now is a true believer of the power and
importance of the web browser, and the desktop that it's used on, by the most
influential band of users you can wish to have: creators.

Edits: formatting

~~~
bobajeff
The desktop couldn't save them either. Remember their biggest source of
funding and promotions came from Google. With Chrome out Google had no reason
to promote Firefox anymore.

So now Firefox has to look for more partners but there is little sense in
partnering with a browser vendor for anything outside of websites. Among those
nothing is as lucrative as and ubiquitous as a search engine.

Now a OS vendor could maybe get funded and promoted by a manufacturer or a
phone service company.

------
hacalox
I will not leave Firefox as long as I can keep working with it. I don't find
any substantial difference when I compare it with Chrome, so for me is just a
choice based on the Company behinds the product. Mozilla values and mine are
aligned and I would like people to think more about the companies and less
about the product. At the end that's what matter. What kind of Internet are
you willing to see in 10 years? It can be very different depending on your
choices.

~~~
vopi
Unfortunately I wish I had that experience. Firefox crashed more than chrome
and felt slower even with the multiprocessed​ thing. This happened on both
windows 10 and x/ubuntu

------
threepipeproblm
When you get a new long distance plan, do you worry if the plan you picked
isn't the most popular plan? Do you decide it means you got a 'loser plan'? Me
neither.

To me, this article was written from the perspective of a zero sum game
mentality. The author clearly wanted to be #1. Does this mean Firefox is
failing? I think the evidence is lacking there. And all the guy really offers
as evidence is, "From these graphs it’s pretty clear that Firefox is not going
anywhere." But Firefox market share was going _up_ at some point... by the
same standard, why wasn't that valuable evidence that Firefox would take over
everything? As an explanation, it's devoid.

The article would more sense if it were critical to Mozilla's mission that
Firefox have a dominant market share. But 18% of desktop installs is far more
than sufficient to influence standards (recent studies show that as little of
3-5% of a market can basically set standards).

IMO Mozilla should just focus on a browser that 10-30% of users -- especially
'influencers' and those who care about digital freedom -- love, and consider
that success.

~~~
Paul-ish
One issue is that building a browser take engineers, and that takes a lot of
money. Mozilla makes its money from search partnerships; they make money every
time someone uses default search. If less people are using Firefox, less
people are using default search, which in turn means less revenue. This means
fewer engineers. If they don't have enough engineers to maintain Firefox, the
browser falls apart. I am skeptical that Firefox could be maintained by
donations or volunteers when its competitors are backed by large companies.

A response is that even if Firefox's share falls, that the absolute number of
Firefox users continues to rise. ie that the total market is growing. In this
case Mozilla would still be generating the revenue it needs to keep going. The
author brushes this possibility off in the beginning of the article, saying
that browsers are a thing of the past.

------
millstone
Chrome may be technically great, but we should also acknowledge the fact that
it was the sole advertisement for years on the most valuable piece of web real
estate in the universe, the google.com home page. I can't think of any other
product with that distinction.

What would the browser war look like if google.com advertised Firefox instead?

~~~
cpeterso
Google has for years paid Adobe to bundle Chrome in the Flash plugin installer
on Windows. Imagine: a Firefox or IE user visits a website that needs Flash,
so they download Adobe's installer. Because they are eager to get back to that
Flash website or they don't read the installer's fine print, they don't
realize they need to opt out of the "Make Chrome my new default browser"
checkbox. Ironically Chrome bundles its own Flash PPAPI plugin, so the Firefox
or IE user has now downloaded two Flash plugins but won't actually use the one
they downloaded from adobe.com. This has probably been a long, slow leak of
Firefox users to Chrome and a hole that should have been plugged.

~~~
digi_owl
Not just Flash. I recall seeing it bundled with all manner of Freeware over
the years. Google was spending some big bucks to get Chrome onto every damn
Windows install out there.

------
TACIXAT
Funny to see this. I just downloaded Vivaldi [1] today. I still have all my
work stuff in Chrome, but I'm giving Vivaldi a second shot now that a more
stable version has been released. I like the idea of a browser with more
features for developers (as they put it, a browser for our friends). I'm
hoping it lives up to expectations.

This motivated me to go even further. I'm sick of the 1999 style popups and
redirects I get on mobile sites, especially the Android webviews that so many
applications have. I'm setting the AdBlock Browser to my default and disabling
in-app web browsers where possible. Until I can trust mobile sites to have
respectable ads, they lose revenue.

The more I think about this, the more annoyed I'm getting. The Youtube app has
also been redesigned to have a less 'friction free' UI. You now open a video,
see an ad first. Ok, that's fine. Back out of a video, it minimizes and you
view 'suggested videos' (which feel like more ads). Swipe video away, you're
still on the ad screen. Back out of Youtube. I want to watch a video and get
out, maybe be pestered by 1 skippable ad for a relevant product. Not hit back
8 times and swipe a video away.

The time might be right for disruption. On the other hand, I might just be
spoiled by debt supplemented user acquisition strategies that have very low
monetization. We'll see.

1\. [https://vivaldi.com](https://vivaldi.com)

~~~
drivingmenuts
I've been using Vivaldi as my daily driver for about two months or so and I'm
about to switch away. I'm not impressed with the performance on any level. In
fact, ATM, the only thing I like about it is the bookmark handling, which is
not really all that unique.

It's a tossup for me whether I'll go back to Chrome or Safari (there's
positives and negatives for both of them in my case).

YMMV.

------
hsivonen
I think the general sentiment that things that aren’t on a huge growth curve
aren’t relevant or worth doing is very unhealthy–especially for the purpose of
drawing conclusions about what Mozilla should do.

What should the conclusion have been from growth graphs back when IE was
growing? Everyone else just give up?

The growth of phones doesn’t make desktop irrelevant. Phones can’t replace the
desktop paradigm for many tasks, so desktops will stick around. When they
stick around, things are better if desktop browsers stay in good health.

As for mobile, people do browse the Web a lot of mobile. Maybe the numbers for
Facebook and Twitter apps are even greater in terms of minutes of use, but
that doesn’t make the Web on mobile irrelevant or not worth caring about.

Whether on mobile or desktop, we’d all be worse off if the Web becomes less
healthy due to neglect arising from being thought as not growing enough to be
cool or being left to only to operating-system-bundled browsers. (The low
switching cost of browsers due to not having to switch devices keeps the
browser space competitive even if also tough for Mozilla when Mozilla doesn’t
have an OS as an anchor.)

Sure, non-Web things (IoT and other) will exist and individual people may be a
bit tired of doing Web and go do those other things. That doesn’t mean that
the Web isn’t worth caring about anymore or that it doesn’t continue to be
important for the health of the Web for Mozilla to be there with an
independent engine–doing what Mozilla has always done without pivots to new
shiny.

When individuals grow tired of Mozilla or the Web, going to do some other
thing elsewhere for a change is cool, but I think spreading defeatism about
what those of us who stay do is not cool.

------
digitalshankar
If there's anything i can trust in the web it's none other than Mozilla
Firefox.

Google Chrome is not Open Source and your privacy is not guaranteed, you don't
know what's happening under the hood.

Please wait for the Servo project to complete, then you'll know who won.

Mozilla Firefox is not just a browser, it's the community of freedom, it's
what I have grown up with. Finally Firefox with Ublock Origin is just enough
to enjoy the Web. #MozillaFirefoxMasterRace

~~~
jkoll
What about all the FOSS Chromium forks?

------
amq
A rather toxic read which I wouldn't expect from a former CTO.

~~~
SOLAR_FIELDS
Indeed. I don't think it was out of line, since he basically ran the tech side
for awhile, but it's in kind of poor taste to do that at this point.

If you read the end though, he really is just using an attention grabbing
headline and article to bring up his startup. Not very classy.

------
101km
Ideological leanings aside as an end user I went back and forth between Chrome
and Firefox several times.

In fact I would visit [https://arewee10syet.com](https://arewee10syet.com)
every couple of months and sigh for years wanting to switch back.

On Firefox I used to have hundreds of tabs open and no visible ui chrome most
of the time, just vimperator/pentadactyl and usually hidden treestyle tabs.
Along with a rotating collection of adblockers and privacy extensions.

These days? I just use Safari on a Macbook with Content Blockers
([https://webkit.org/blog/3476/content-blockers-first-
look/](https://webkit.org/blog/3476/content-blockers-first-look/)). My battery
lasts double digit hours and everything is always snappy. Readability and
integrated 'read it offline later' mode is a cherry on top.

Ultimately I think we forget that with Flash being truly dead and buried on
pages with no junky javascript trackers even a NeXT computer, far less
powerful than your phone, should be enough.

And all the browsers are now able to limit the damage a heavy/crappy page
(like gmail) does to its own tab.

tldr; And Jesus wept for there were no more worlds to conquer.

~~~
baby
> Readability and integrated 'read it offline later' mode is a cherry on top

Pocket was a good move, but it is still not fully integrated to Firefox like
the 'read it offline later' mode of Safari. I really wish it was.

------
wodenokoto
> We all drive cars now. Some people still use horses, and there is value to
> horses, but technology has moved on when it comes to transportation.

This rings untrue to me, because I cannot believe he wrote this on his
smartphone. I get that desktop/laptop are no longer the main entry device to
the connected world, but they are essential to the connected world in a way
that horses are not important to the world of transportation.

------
brian-armstrong
I use firefox for entirely idealistic reasons, but it's hard to ignore the
fact that it is slower. There are times when it just feels so bloated, though
thankfully a quick restart gets it running smoothly again. I know firefox team
has had passes of perf improvements in the past, but it seems like it still
isn't a high priority. When it comes to browsers, speed is the #1 feature.

~~~
Crisco
Honestly, recently I've consistently noticed Firefox running faster than
Chrome for my usage scenario. It might be bias, but I find browsing on Firefox
a more enjoyable experience and uses a lot less of my system resources.

I stuck with Firefox through the times where it was much slower than Chrome
for idealistic reasons as well, but now I feel like speed is less of an issue
because they are both pretty even.

~~~
km3k
It might be a placebo effect, but I find that I switch back and forth between
Chrome and Firefox every 6-12 months after the one I'm using feels slow and
the other feels faster. Maybe they're actually leapfrogging each other in
performance, maybe not. I'm currently on my Chrome phase.

~~~
brian-armstrong
One thing that I think could be an interesting variable is how many tabs
you've accreted. Browser A with 100 tabs open versus Browser B with 1 tab.

~~~
km3k
I don't go crazy with tabs and I like to clean up my tab bar by closing old
tabs. It's rare that I have more than 20 at a time open.

------
yamaneko
I switched to Firefox because Chrome was keeping my fan always busy (high CPU
usage and temperature) and using too much RAM. It was always around 5GB for my
common usage. In Firefox it's always around 2.7GB. There were some privacy
concerns too.

Having said that, Firefox also has its issues. It is so unresponsive
sometimes, giving long hangs. That's the main problem to me. There are others,
like it being slower in some pages and some of its extensions UI give me a
pre-web 2.0 vibe or look abandoned. (But its Mendeley importer extension is
way better than Chrome's).

~~~
floatboth
Check about:support. Are Multiprocess Windows and Asynchronous Pan/Zoom
enabled?

~~~
yamaneko
They are disabled:

    
    
        Multiprocess Windows 	0/1 (Disabled by add-ons)
        Asynchronous Pan/Zoom	none
    

How can I enable them?

EDIT: I tried toggling browser.tabs.remote.autostart to true in about:config,
but it still gives the same message. Looking into it now.

EDIT2: I did it!

    
    
        Multiprocess Windows 	1/1 (Enabled by user)
        Asynchronous Pan/Zoom	wheel input enabled
    

Besides disabling all my extensions (except for uBlock) I had to disable
Ubuntu Modifications.

EDIT3: Wow!! This is so much better! I didn't know project Electrolysis was
already out. Thanks!

------
utku_karatas2
Mozilla the foundation did deserve this.

This is what you get when you force a perfectly technical CEO out and let the
MBA types steer the ship. A browser is a forever bleeding edge tech; you need
engineers all the way to the top. They chose political correctness over
technical prowess and the product has lost the edge.

~~~
467568985476
I don't buy it. Eich was hardly a wunderkind capable of carrying a browser on
his shoulders alone. And in a market for engineers that currently favors
labor, do you really want to be on the wrong side of the social issues that
your staff generally care about? Maybe they would have left to work on Chrome
if Eich had stayed. That doesn't even speak to the myriad technical and
resource issues that Mozilla faced prior to that particular incident.

~~~
reedlaw
> Eich was hardly a wunderkind capable of carrying a browser on his shoulders
> alone.

How about Brave [1]?

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_\(web_browser\))

~~~
detaro
Has most of the engineering done by Google, since it is based on chromium?

------
mnm1
"All browsers work pretty well, and being slightly faster or using slightly
less memory is unlikely to sway users."

Faster browsing and less memory use is the only reason I've ever heard anyone
switch browsers outside of privacy issues. If Servo is significantly faster
and uses less memory, and if it can keep that up for years like Chrome did, I
wouldn't be at all surprised to see this flipping in a few years. Thankfully,
he's no longer CTO at Mozilla so this actually has a chance of happening.

~~~
acdha
The key word is “slightly”. Beating IE6 after years of neglect was possible;
going against a very good team which isn't slowing down is much harder.

~~~
andreasgal
Google definitely not standing still. I hope that doesn't change despite the
near-monopoly status.

~~~
acdha
Agreed on both points

------
yellowapple
I don't understand the graphs. Chrome's growth seems to be slowing according
to the raw data part of the graph, yet the trend line suggests Chrome's growth
to be speeding up. The trend line basically doesn't seem to fit the data _at
all_ in the case of Chrome, aside from the fact that both point more-or-less
upward.

~~~
cyphar
It's a classic example of someone who hasn't had to deal with "hard"
statistics thinking that just drawing a trendline (and dismissing biases out-
of-hand) is all that statistics is.

The author is right that Chrome has a massive share, but everyone knows that.
Any analysis more specific than that requires more than just overplotting
exponentials on a graph.

------
richdougherty
Here are two ways that Mozilla could have a lot of impact:

\- If it is indeed too challenging for Firefox to compete against Chrome with
a separate browser, there might be value in Mozilla maintaining an open-source
fork of Chrome. This would allow Mozilla to borrow the good bits of Chrome for
relatively low effort, and focus development effort on the the things that
Google might not value so much (e.g privacy). It would also be a hedge against
a Google monopoly by having an open source competitor available.

\- I'd love to see a solid open source clone of Android—including a full clone
of Google Play Services. I think Mozilla could help a lot here, especially if
they integrated their fork of the browser.

~~~
bitmapbrother
Isn't that what Chromium is? Or did you want Firefox to fork Chromium and be
reliant on Google and keep pulling in all changes they pushed?

As for an open source clone of Android, it already exists and it's called
Replicant. Mozilla already tried the mobile OS thing and failed. Not sure why
you think they would suddenly have success. It's all about ecosystems in the
mobile space and Mozilla doesn't have it nor will they ever.

~~~
richdougherty
> did you want Firefox to fork Chromium and be reliant on Google and keep
> pulling in all changes they pushed?

I guess I was thinking that Mozilla could both contribute to the core browser
(Blink?) and maintain a fork similar to Chromium, but perhaps with more
independent features.

This is obviously not ideal for the ecosystem, compared to having a separate
browser engine. However it could be a useful approach if Firefox has trouble
getting enough users to be relevant, because at least it would mean that
Mozilla is influencing the web and its development.

> an open source clone of Android, it already exists and it's called Replicant

I don't think Mozilla needs to start an independent project. They could fund,
promote and improve one of the existing open source forks of Android.

------
10165
"Mozilla's founding mission was to build the Web by building a browser."

I have been using the Web since 1993.

I always thought the Web had the definition given in its Wikipedia entry.

Web servers and hyperlinks.

Apparently some people believe "the Web" is actually a browser, or a small set
of them.

This is like suggesting a galaxy is actually a telescope, or a small set of
"standards compliant" telescopes.

Browser-centrism is truly myopic.

What is relevant is the ever expanding practice of installing web servers into
all sorts of devices, not simply racks of computers in server rooms and
offsite data centers.

------
kakarot
> if the trend continues

If I used this argument 16 years ago it would have meant "Internet Explorer
won". Browsers will rise and fall and eventually a series of bad decisions by
Google will pave the way for a new leader.

I will never leave Firefox as long as Mozilla fights the good fight. As
internet privacy becomes an increasingly public issue, Google will face
evermore scrutiny over Chrome and all it takes is one fuckup on their part for
people to realize they've been supporting the wrong company.

~~~
bitmapbrother
Likewise, all it takes is one fuckup from Mozilla to bleed even more users and
sink into irrelevance.

------
tedajax
I finally switched to Chrome from Firefox just last week. I just couldn't take
the hang ups anymore. Here I am with an absurdly beefy game development
workstation and it's hitching switching tabs and scrolling pages. Absolutely
unacceptable. Moving everything over to Chrome took about 2 minutes since the
importer pretty much grabbed everything and it wasn't hard to get the
extensions I needed. The only thing that annoys me is that clicking on
links/bookmarks while on a pinned tab opens the link/bookmark on the pinned
tab and not in a new tab like Firefox does. Makes pinned tabs less permanent
and I have to remember to middle click these things but it's a minor
inconvenience compared to just how slow and unresponsive Firefox had gotten.

~~~
andreasgal
I had the opposite experience. I used Firefox the last 48 hours on Mac and it
works really well. I can't find a reason to not use it, but also no reason to
use it. Commodity products. I think this is the choice most users face. Add a
lot of marketing dollars and defaults on Android and you can explain Chrome's
growth curve.

------
ProfessorLayton
Firefox was my browser of choice on desktop, but its overall decline in
performance _forced_ me to switch. Now I use Safari when I care about saving
battery life, and Vivaldi for everything else.

Vivaldi is basically Chrome without the annoying Google bits.

I still use Firefox occasionally, but mostly for testing.

------
Yuioup
Browsers and desktops are legacy? Who knew? Do we need to invest in OP's
embedded AI technology now?

~~~
Spivak
Not really legacy, but not really a big growth area.

------
TheAceOfHearts
I think we're actually in a great spot right now. Safari is my main browser on
macOS, since it doesn't cause my computer to chug as much when the tabs start
to pile up. For development my primary browser is Chromium, because I prefer
their dev tools. On mobile I use Firefox Mobile, since it lets me install
uBlock Origin. On Linux and Windows I use Firefox, because it has the least
invasive default settings out of all the big-name browsers.

I'll admit I hold a rather strong resentment towards Internet Explorer. Aside
from having made me waste countless hours dealing with its quirks, I also feel
a bit better supporting browsers that are more open. I haven't heard a single
person in real-life saying they use Edge as their main browser.

------
partycoder
Regardless of what the outcome was, I think we all owe kudos to Blake Ross, a
guy that at age 16 became an intern at Netscape, and shortly later became the
driving force behind Firebird, the browser that later was renamed to become
Firefox, the browser that inspired a new generation of web browsers that would
later kill IE's market share and set the Internet free.

Also the unsung heroes behind KHTML, the HTML layout engine from the Konqueror
web browser (part of KDE), the ancestor of Webkit and Blink, the technologies
that power modern web browsers such as as Chrome, Safari and Opera.

------
iuguy
Chrome didn't win. Android did.

The proliferation of Android devices with Chrome is where that popularity is
coming from. Ironically, had FirefoxOS been a success, we'd probably see a
very different graph. Safari shows up for the same reason, just a different
platform.

As for a turnaround, I'm using Firefox to type this. It's easy to think
desktops don't matter in a world of tablets, phones and mobile devices but
they do.

Firefox is about choice and an open web. Chrome is about user tracking and
advertising. As long as Firefox exists, there will be people using it.

~~~
Markoff
Firefox on Android is just slowest browser you can try, simple as that,
everything else is excuse. tried many browsers recently and without hesitation
Firefox is slowest out of all and that's not some completely budget device but
SD808 with 3GB RAM, can't imagine how it's running on some budget phone

------
cetra3
No mention of Servo, which is quite interesting. A targeted omission?

~~~
fiatjaf
Well, I don't use Firefox mostly because debugging Javascript in it is much
much slower in all the old computers I use.

I'm hoping Servo will change that.

~~~
kbrosnan
Servo is not rewriting the JavaScript engine. Spidermonkey will continue to be
C++ for the foreseeable future.

------
keybits
The only thing preventing me from switching from Chrome to Firefox on the
desktop is poor support for multiple profiles. Chrome's 'People' feature is
essential for my workflow.

(I know you can launch multiple Firefox profiles, but it's awkward at best.)

On Android, Firefox is my favorite browser. So much better than Chrome. Thank
you Mozilla :-) Now please make using multiple profiles on the desktop as easy
as Chrome does.

~~~
drdaeman
Check out container tabs.

Either built-in (activate with `privacy.userContext.enabled` and
`privacy.userContext.ui.enabled` in about:config) or if you don't mind some
telemetry (non-sensitive stuff but YMMV) and random updates you can use their
Test Pilot experiment
[https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/containers](https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/containers)
(or you can just grab yourself an XPI and update on manual basis).

~~~
keybits
Thank you, container tabs look great :-)

------
aplummer
I disagree with the horse / car metaphor. Each platform is different, radio or
TV is a better metaphor for still being popular but different. I highly doubt
PCs will be relegated to a novelty few dozen in a cities.

~~~
andreasgal
Roc has a similar comment in the comment section. I agree and disagree.
Desktop PCs will be around, but the vast majority of interaction minutes will
be on mobile (and maybe in the future elsewhere). Most of the 6bn people or so
who arrived online once the Web took off don't have PCs, and don't need it.
Its a geographic/infrastructure issue (lots of LTE in Africa and Asia but no
landlines etc), and also a generational one. Kids grow up with smartphones.
Why use a PC if the phone works? PC won't go away, but if 90% or 95% or online
minutes are mobile, do PCs still matter?

~~~
roca
My kids are in school. Their peers aren't doing homework on their phones.

------
woranl
Firefox failed to innovate and alienate developers. Refusing to implement File
System API is a perfect example!

Mozilla can choose to be arrogant. Well.. guess what? We can also choose to
move on without you.

Broken apps make users to switch browsers. It's that simple. Mozilla can only
blame itself for the vicious cycle.

~~~
flukus
Good, a website doesn't need access to my file system. Stuff like that is why
we need firefox and why SaaS companies shouldn't be making browsers.

~~~
woranl
It's sandboxed. I would love to see Firefox to succeed. That would be good for
the web. But Firefox cannot succeed if Mozilla is unwilling to innovate. Stuff
like this is why Firefox is falling behind. Stuff like this is what
differentiated Chrome. Without Chrome and Google's push on the technical
boundaries of the browser, many HTML5 features wouldn't exist. I, like many,
don't want to stay in the web Stone Age.

~~~
flukus
If you want innovation then take a look at reader mode. That's done more to
improve my browsing experience than any HTML5 features ever will.

~~~
woranl
Nowadays, browser is not just to render a page. The web itself is a platform.
Try turn off javascript, and you'll see what I mean.

Mozilla is failing because they are being arrogant and don't listen to
developers. It's not just on desktop, but also on mobile. At first, they
refused to make a browser on iOS because they have to use "WebKit". Well guess
what.. they missed the bus. After realizing it, they caved. But it's already
too late.

------
rufugee
I use Chrome begrudgingly at times because I value its security record. The
fact that in 2017 you still can't do tabs in a vertical row down the side, or
the fact that when too many tabs are open (you know, like...always), you can't
tell what is actually open in that tab...these are the reasons I'll never feel
great about a full switch. Firefox makes similar things easy.

Oh, and I don't like that Google tracks everything I do while using it...

If you're looking for a Chrome experience without the privacy concerns, take a
look at [http://iridiumbrowser.de](http://iridiumbrowser.de). It's Chrome will
(supposedly, I've not personally verified) all the Google tracking stripped
out to the extent possible.

------
jrs95
Despite all of this, I refuse to use Chrome on anything other than my desktop
because it's a battery killer. Safari/Edge have a strong advantage here. I
pull out Chrome only when I need its dev tools, which isn't very often these
days.

------
joemi
Without starting any holy war arguments, why is Chrome adoption so high?

On the Windows machines at work, I use both Firefox and Chrome all day long
for customer support and light web development. They're both pretty
interchangeable for me, neither really being any better than the other. Since
such high adoption of Chrome means the general public are using it, not just
the more tech-saavy people like us, I doubt the reason is any deep developer
niceties. So I don't really know why...

~~~
notamy
Personal opinion: Chrom/ium is significantly snappier for me, on a R7 1800X /
GTX 1080 / 64GB RAM box. I can't speak to why from a technical perspective,
but that's simply what I've experienced. Firefox feels significantly slower,
so I stay away from it unless I have absolutely no other choice.

~~~
nerflad
This is it. Firefox feels half as fast, or worse, for JS performance. For
example, I have Chromium installed just to use sites like Zillow and Google
Maps. I know these aren't the best examples, for a variety of reasons (Zillow
is a mess and of course Google Maps performs better in Google's browser), but
those are the main two in recent memory.

------
digi_owl
Mozilla lost its way the day Firefox started chasing Chrome on look and feel
rather than sticking to its guns and making the most standard compliant
technical browser there is.

~~~
floatboth
That doesn't make sense, both Firefox and Chrome are working on being "the
most standard compliant technical browser there is". Check browser scores on
[https://caniuse.com](https://caniuse.com) — Firefox and Chrome are very
close, Safari is behind, Edge is way behind.

~~~
digi_owl
Thing is that Chrome has a history of exposing all manner of "experimental"
stuff to the world, leading to situations where Firefox either have to be seen
as a laggard or implement things that have yet to be formally defined. This
then allows Chrome to de-facto define the standard.

------
esaym
Weird, because here are the browser stats from my personal blog page
[http://imgur.com/a/1COo4](http://imgur.com/a/1COo4)

Edit:

Err correction, looks like 3,294 of those FF hits are from a bot trying to
break into my fake wp-login.php page with an agent id of "Firefox/34". But
still, minus those hits, FF is neck and neck with Chrome.

------
skybrian
Focusing on market share will miss anything new, since it's not mainstream
yet. Use your imagination.

There's a pretty popular sort-of-fork of Chromium called Electron. People
claim it's bloated though. Could Servo do better?

Also, this looks interesting from a privacy standpoint:
[https://beakerbrowser.com/](https://beakerbrowser.com/)

------
fiatjaf
If web browsers won't matter in the near future why all the fuss about
Javascript, ES6, ES7, ES8 and whatever? What about WebRTC and all its
implications? What about new exciting new API getting shipped to browsers
everyday? What about CSS improvements and so on?

Do you think all this people is wasting their efforts in trying to make web
apps much more like native apps?

------
EdSharkey
The discussion here got me thinking about my own sluggish Firefox vs. Chrome
experiences. I took a look at my extensions config panel in Firefox 53.0.3,
and wondered if there was a way to tell which of my myriad of addons (most of
which I don't use regularly) might be blocking electrolysis from turning on.

Well, there's an addon for that: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/add-on-compat...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/add-on-compatibility-reporter/?src=api)

If you install it, it will mark on the panel which of your extensions are not
using the new plugin API, and it will tell you at the top of the panel if
Multiprocess Firefox is enabled. I got mine enabled by cleaning house. I'm
curious to see how well it behaves under load now!

~~~
floatboth
Just use Nightly. It disables the incompatible addons and marks all (even e10s
compatible) legacy addons with a big "LEGACY" mark.

Also use about:support to see if e10s and async pan/zoom are enabled.

------
cx42net
I don't know if it's just me or others feel the same, but for me, the main
reason why Chrome gained more market shares than the others was primarily
because of their developer's toolkit embedded with Chrome.

This helped a lot of developers to switch from Firefox (which was the best at
the time) to Chrome and the result was that most websites were first Chrome
compatble, then the others. Visitors quickly understood it, and made the
switch too.

I sincerely believe that the core reason is the developers, and if Firefox
would focus more on that part, it would help get back many of it's old users.

I don't say here that the dev toolkit on Firefox is garbage, absolutely not,
but it feels clumsy, and a lot of elements are not evident to use and requires
more thinking than Chrome. (this is MY opinion).

I'm curious to know if you feel the same?

------
ryanmarsh
I'm not so worried about a near browser monoculture if Chrome is the dominant
browser.

With IE Microsoft was originally driven to use the web to maintain Windows
lock in, to control the platform.

Google (I would assume) is driven by the desire to keep the web as desireable
a development platform overall. Web usage means ad sales. Google has knocked
it out of the park on this one. Chrome really is an incredible piece of
software.

IE by comparison has always been a piece of shit because it never mattered.
Microsoft was leveraging it for OS adoption not a successful web.

Today it's the web vs. apps and who knows what it will be in the future. This
may sound crazy to some but the web will become a "truck" to some other
technology's "car". Sort of how desktop office productivity apps are a
monoculture and no one really cares.

------
sengork
The single most effective thing I've done to speed up my web browsing is to
install an advertisement blocker extension/plugin/addon.

Based on this I wonder whether web browser benchmarks should be based on how
fast they are after adverts are blocked, not only their rendering engine per
se.

------
staticelf
The issue I have with Mozilla is that they seem too technical focused. They do
stuff like Rust which must be an incredible investment of time.

If you're going to make a new browser engine from scratch, why not use a
language that already exist? I understand there's reasons but stuff like that
is just wtf imho.

Also, they've done stuff like Firefox Hello, that login thing etc. Many were
good ideas but they should really focus on their core product and making it
solid as a fucking rock. I still feel that Chromes developer tools are better,
that Chrome is snappier and doesn't crash as often etc. etc.

I use Chrome at my work computer but Firefox at home because Chrome developer
tools is still better when it comes to stuff like debugging, viewing json and
profiling.

I mean why is that not more awesome in Firefox?

~~~
pcwalton
> The issue I have with Mozilla is that they seem too technical focused.

All of your complaints are technical.

> They do stuff like Rust which must be an incredible investment of time.

Rust is a very small team.

> If you're going to make a new browser engine from scratch, why not use a
> language that already exist?

Because no language other than Rust offers good support for safe concurrency
and memory safety without performance compromises.

> I understand there's reasons but stuff like that is just wtf imho.

> Many were good ideas but they should really focus on their core product and
> making it solid as a fucking rock.

The desire to do that _is_ the reason for Rust.

~~~
staticelf
Okay, well I hope the best for the new engine. Can't wait untill it's actually
deployed live into normal Firefox builds.

I love Firefox and I really like Mozilla (even though they like everyone else
does stupid stuff sometimes, like fireing Brendan). I hope Firefox will take
back some market share from Chrome.

------
eveningcoffee
What I find most heart breaking is that too many people who stick around here
helped it to prosper. Web site not fast enough, use Chrome, web site broken in
other browsers, use Chrome. Google services suspiciously slow in other
browsers, use Chrome.

------
grizzles
Judged on it's own mission statement, Mozilla has failed as an organization,
and that's been clear for at least the last 5 years.

The two biggest internet trends over the last decade have been app store
distribution of mobile apps and the social graph.

Mozilla has did little, maybe nothing to make either of those open and
accessible to all. This is due to an ongoing lack of vision and leadership for
an organization that tries to do 1000 things and fails at doing the 1 or 2
important things.

It's pretty safe to say that the nextgen decentralized internet will be built,
but it won't be built by Mozilla. Instead, they will do probably do something
silly like buy Brave. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

~~~
swiley
I'm pretty glad Mozilla avoided both of those. They where probably some of the
most unpleasant fads of the past decade. It's nice to have a company that
isn't pushing them as an alternative to those that are.

~~~
grizzles
They are not fads. Both are still growing strongly.

------
ultim8k
It's not only chrome. Actually Google, FB and Amazon have eaten the whole IT
market. There is no space left to innovate or do anything else. They will copy
the shit out of you in no time. IT is a lost ground.

~~~
drdaeman
There is some space, but it's highly unlikely it'll be explored by anyone with
enough weight to make an impact.

I'd really want to see a browser that's a collection of very loosely coupled
independent cooperating programs. There are Uzbl and Surf, but they're only
modular systems around a big monolithic core.

That would mean the real end of the browser war, because there won't be any
browsers. There will be rendering engines, there will be UI layers, cookie
storages and databases, data synchronization programs, etc - and compilations
of those (because while everyone wants to have flexibility options and ability
to customize and control, no one normally wants to build system piece by
piece).

I doubt something like this would happen.

------
a_imho
Imo all rendering engines are fine as they are, content and 3rd party blocking
is what makes web browsing fast. My 2 cents is if you want to offer the best
web experience today you need to add in blazing fast native content blocking
and make it _default_ (without shady whitelists). Don't underestimate the
power of defaults and network effect.

Then let's see how long does it take from start to watch a youtube video. Will
beat default Chrome experience anywhere between 20-90 secs. Let's see whether
Google can match that.

------
kn8
Interesting that there's no mention of UC Browser in this thread. I actually
only learned about this browser myself today, but seems to be gaining a lot of
marketshare: [https://www.statista.com/statistics/268254/market-share-
of-i...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/268254/market-share-of-internet-
browsers-worldwide-since-2009/)

------
stuaxo
I think as we see Servo components move over to Firefox it will become
significantly faster once more, and things might start moving in the other
direction.

------
zebraflask
"low market share numbers further accelerate the decline because Web authors
don’t test for browsers with a small market share"

Very true. There is absolutely no point in spending dev hours on a browser
that might net you . . . I don't know . . . a fraction of a percent of
whatever audience or target you're after? I had to do that before, it makes
the developers upset and their managers even more upset.

------
sriku
While this goes on, Safari is still more complete on functionality that
matters to some folks like me. Here is a chrome bug that's unaddressed for
over a year, but works perfectly on Safari -
[https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=591346](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=591346)

------
timwaagh
i really like ff. more specifically i like vimperator. i like to use that.
since i discovered it, i have not used chrome very much.

performance is great already. but firefox would be even better if it 'loaned'
these two features from chrome.

1\. built-in flash player. i do not like that i have to install chrome just so
that i can view flash videos on ubuntu. html5 is not everywhere yet.

2\. better debugging. although i like the ui, the debugger suffers from a real
flaw. today i was evaluating the value of some piece of code in the debugger.
i expected it to be 1. it reported a 0 because the code had not executed yet.
chrome does this better and does not report anything. then after the code has
executed it gives the correct value, 1.

these two issues make firefox hard to recommend to 1. users and 2. developers,
unless they are vim addicts.

oh yeah: perhaps firefox should do something to support vimperator. perhaps
incorporate it into firefox. support it. vim users are a small group but they
are the people who will be advising others on technical things.

------
yy77
Chrome is good, but not that better than firefox to lead to a chrome only
world. Just like in the past, whenever you open a windows PC, you see IE on
it, so IE ruled. Now whenever you open google to search something, you see
suggestion to ask you to install chrome. However, nowhere on internet will
suggest you to install firefox. That is a huge difference.

------
systematical
I only jumped ship to Chrome when FireFox was having performance issues way
back in the day. Since then FireFox improved its performance to be on par with
Chrome, but Chrome isn't broke so I'm not switching back.

FireFox probably had the greatest contribution ever to modern browsing though
giving us developer tools, plugins, and tabbed browsing.

------
baby
Be realistic, the browser war has ended a long time ago. Chrome, Firefox,
Opera, Safari, (Edge?)... are all good browsers now. It's wonderful that we
have choice.

I personally wouldn't switch to chrome just because it doesn't have tabs on
the side (tree style tabs on firefox). This headline doesn't make much sense
for many of us.

------
voidmain0001
I use SRWare Iron, a privacy aware derivative of Chrome. It's fast, supports
the Chrome store, and claims to send less data to Google. In the end though,
what does it matter if Google owns the browser? The browser could change to a
non-Google product and they will still collect their data on everyone
regardless.

------
Markoff
the reason went Firefox lost it's because it's extremely see and unstable

i try it usually once a year to confirm there is no progress and experienced
this few weeks ago, loading and rendering pages it's slowest compared to
Chrome, CAF browsers or Brave, heck Firefox doesn't even have pull down to
refresh which is showstopper, add-ons are nice but most of the users don't
care and i can block ads just with adaway

as for desktop, again unable to handle more tabs properly, freezing and
unresponsive while no such problems on Chrome

i dunno maybe Chrome devs test their browser on actual real life desktops and
mobiles, while Firefox devs think everyone has flagship and computer with 16gb
of RAM?

TLDR: Firefox is significantly (not slightly as article honey talk) slower on
mobile and freezing and unresponsive on desktop compared to Chrome and real
users notice this, they don't care about add-ons

------
shmerl
Chrome can't properly compete privacy wise, same as Google in general can't.
Privacy will be an issue, and increasingly so.

Personally, I never understood Chrome hype, though I admit, that Mozilla's
focus on FirefoxOS was distracting, and slowed down their desktop progress.
It's good they are back on track now.

~~~
a2decrow
> Privacy will be an issue, and increasingly so.

Do you really believe that? The way I see it, most people just don't care. At
all. Else they wouldn't sell their souls to private companies (e.g. Facebook
and Google) without a second thought and we'd see more outrage against
government surveillance that's being pushed in nearly every country all over
the world.

Firefox is unlikely to gain much of a market share with only privacy-focused
changes. People care about ease of use and especially performance. FF lost a
lot of market share due to its horrible performance, compared to Chrome.

~~~
shmerl
I think more people care about it than you think, when their attention is
brought to the issue. Mozilla should keep that in mind, and make it part of
their marketing efforts.

~~~
a2decrow
Every time I try to educate friends or family about it, I get the tinfoil look
and they call me paranoid. Same with strangers when the topic comes up.

The most common (pretty much only) answers I get are that I'm nuts or that
they don't care. And this is in Germany, a country where data protection laws
and privacy are usually valued and cared about. But recent development over
the last few years has shown that it's really just a small subset of the
population that cares.

------
jokoon
A better question is, apart from memory usage, which of the two had more
security issues. That would matter to me...

------
jonnycomputer
Probably counts all those chromebook users. Can't install Firefox on a
Chromebook. Or at least, not easily.

------
doktrin
I can credit this post and resultant discussion from pushing me to try FF
again, and I have to say I'm happy with what I'm seeing. Chrome has been
disappointing for a while now from both a privacy and performance standpoint -
I simply kept using it out of habit.

------
tbihl
Clearly my experience is not normal, but chrome is on its way out in my life.
On Android, I've been pushed to Firefox for ad blocking, while on Windows it's
such a battery hog that I've switched to edge almost completely (they finally
added ad blocking.)

------
yladiz
I don't have the perspective of a Mozilla CTO, but I feel like it's just
history repeating itself. 15ish years ago, IE had "won", but eventually
Firefox had pushed for better web standards with extensions, and then Chrome
doing the same thing, but at the time, significantly faster and more secure
than other browsers. But trends always change, and I'm sure in a few years
(maybe a short few, maybe a long few) we will have a browser that will "win"
over Chrome. The major advantage that Chrome has currently is that it's pushed
heavily by Google, but that is also fickle, as evident by older search engines
that went away like Yahoo, Ask Jeeves. I know a lot of people that won't use
Chrome because it sucks on a laptop. The major benefit now is that we have all
major browsers targeting standards compliance, unlike when IE was biggest.

Besides, why is it a competition? It's not a zero sum game to see who is the
biggest, best browser.

------
reedlaw
I've stuck with Firefox for years because I value open source and open web but
today I finally switched to Chrome. It feels like I have a new computer.
Firefox constantly pegs my CPU. It seems to have gradually gotten slower.

------
aashishkoirala
I like Chrome, it is my go-to browser as a user. As a developer, though, I
hate how it spits on the face of standards, like not expiring cookies when the
HTTP response says, and instead turning them into session cookies instead.

~~~
wfh
file a bug - [https://new.crbug.com](https://new.crbug.com) or is there an
existing one?

------
dmh2000
I understand why Google gives Chrome for free, to bring people into their
sphere of influence. But what does Mozilla get for giving out Firefox? Is it
monetized somehow? Or is it just to win an imaginary distinction.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
One of the ways Firefox makes money is the default search provider. Google
gave Firefox a billion dollars at one point to keep Google as the default
search. More recently, when Firefox switched it's default to Yahoo in the
U.S., it would be because Yahoo outbid Google. The defaults are set by
country, in many places it still defaults to Google, and I think it may
default to other search engines in some countries too.

------
galfarragem
As an early adopter, I _felt_ that Chrome had won since the beggining and they
had only 1% market share. The speed difference was evident and it would be a
matter of time until the market acknowledge it.

------
suckerberg
Google giving "free" money for mozilla org ? \- you should know by now, google
is not your friend. \- why tesla do not give free development money to bmw ?

Wakeup Mozilla, this sounds silly.

------
SeanDav
> _" If even Eric–who heads Mozilla’s marketing team–uses Chrome every day as
> he mentioned in the first sentence, ..."_

Right there is why Chrome is eating Firefox's lunch.

------
peter_retief
Chrome are on top at the moment, like Internet Explorer was, Mozilla is still
a powerful force, used by many developers. I am using FireFox ESR at the
moment and its great

------
sliken
Thank god, before chrome run using firefox on linux has a frustrating
experience. Sites often targeted IE or even mozilla. Trying to file taxes,
connecting to a school website, libraries, etc often hit various snags. Some
would work but you'd have to lie about your agent.

These days with chome being so popular linux users can feel like a first class
citizen. Reminds me of the comic showing a dog using a computer and "On the
internet nobody knows you are a dog". With chrome nobody on the internet knows
you are running linux.

You can even _gasp_ use office/adobe clouds based apps.

~~~
pcwalton
> Sites often targeted IE or even mozilla.

Er, Firefox and Mozilla are/were both Gecko.

------
rhabarba
Firefox 57 will be just another Chrome clone with a different rendering
engine. Yeah, totally curious why Firefox loses market share...

------
theprop
I primarily use the Epic Privacy Browser (it is chromium based). No other
browser except TOR comes close to them in terms of privacy.

~~~
nabaraz
So many mention of Epic browser in this thread. Is this some kind of marketing
effort? How can a closed-source software be better in terms of privacy?

------
wnevets
It's simple UI and it's fastest start up time are the main reasons why I use
chrome most of the time.

------
notsohuman
I am curious are browsers like brave, Vivaldi etc... that depend on chrome
being classified as chrome??.

------
Grue3
It sure did. We could've had at least one open-source, configurable,
programmable browser for power users, now Firefox is removing XUL, and power
users don't have a choice of a browser anymore. And for what purpose?
Mozilla's management should be listed in the dictionary as the definition of
"incompetency".

------
z3t4
Web developers! Try opening your site in a text based web browser (like w3m)
...

------
notsohuman
How was this data collected?? could you provide the source of the data??

------
deckarep
Is it just me or do the chart lines all makeup Googles typical colors?

------
VectorLock
"democratizing the IoT with AI" thats buzzword bingo.

------
TekMol
Chrome won because Mozilla forgot what made FireFox successful in the first
place. That it was a slim alternative to the bloated Netscape.

Everytime FireFox got some new feature I checked if they _still_ don't support
GPU accelerated Video on my Linux machine. No. They don't. They don't to this
day.

This is how I imagine FireFox Devs:
[https://xkcd.com/619/](https://xkcd.com/619/)

Chrome is simple and fast. And that's why it won. I wonder when the Google
devs will forget about it and some other browser will take over by focussing
on making core features work fast and flawless.

------
romanovcode
No king rules forever

------
shermozle
Statcounter? Really?

~~~
IshKebab
What's wrong with statcounter?

------
ksec
As a long time Firefox users, ( back to Netscape Netvigator Era ) I think what
Firefox / Mozilla end up now were faults of their own, and personally I think
it was their Management's problem.

From My Memory:

If we look back now from a grand Overview, IE5, IE6 and IE 7 wasn't that much
difference. And these browsers were formed and used widely during the Internet
explosive growth era. M$ didn't care about Web Standard, and they dont want to
improve either. So in the very early stage of Web and Internet we have a
Industry Giant stopping all the improvement to make the Web usable.

And the Firefox "movement" started, not only is Firefox leaner, faster, better
and there were a lot of love and organisation pushing for it, at least from a
Web standard prospective, they ALL wanted something better then IE. From
Macromedia, Adobe, Yahoo, etc.

And Firefox wasnt that good of a browser, it was simply better then IE. So you
could argue Mozilla were simply in the right place at the right time. And it
didn't really succeed like Chrome had now, at its best Firefox only had 30% of
the market share.

We all wanted a faster browser. And Firefox didn't deliver, somewhere around
2008 Google show the world what a fast browser really meant. In reality we
already knew how fast it was possible looking at ( old ) Opera. ( Opera failed
to gain traction because it wasn't playing well with old IE code. ) Being
Google they get a lot of press about it. And since Google being the Gateway to
the Internet, we all knew if your site dont play well with Chrome, what the
possible consequence were.

If I remember correctly, 2008 was around Firefox 3 time. Lot of bloat were
already added to Firefox. People wanted a Multi Process ( a la Chrome ) and a
much faster browser. And e10s ( Electrolysis ) were born. What was suppose to
be an Firefox 4 features nearly became Duke Nukem Forever, shipped sometimes
this year, in Firefox 5x.

Reading from the post and comment, Mozilla never intend Firefox to win the
browser war and hence it didn't matter. Sometimes in 2010 or 2011, Firefox 4
was released, If I remember it was a long delay at the time when Chrome was
rapidly improving. But Mozilla didn't give a damn, they thought offering an
alternative was enough. And they were happy with their market share. They
thought both Firefox and Chrome will both eat into IE's market.

They thought they were safe on the Desktop, or they didn't care, or they
really think they could do another Firefox in Mobile Market. So they decide to
neglect the much needed attention of Desktop Firefox, and start chasing the
Firefox OS for Mobile. Only this time, their oppenont is no longer Microsoft
sitting still with IE, it was Apple who has a head start of nearly 10 years if
you include the R&D spent before the release of first iPhone. And Google who
has a head start of nearly 5 years with 100x the resources of Mozilla, and
Google actually has an Engineering company culture compared to Microsoft.

You could argue Mozilla were very noble to put up a fight ( if it was ever a
fight at all ), or they were, silly. Not only did they choose the worst
possible tools to develop on, ( They wanted EVERYTHING to be Javascript ) they
also aimed at the WORST possible market segment, the low end $25- $50 dollar
Smartphone. So they want to use an inefficient system + tools with the lowest
end Smartphone. And they thought it was an good Idea.

Fast forward a few years where they still could not accept defeat on their
Mobile OS, no pivot, their Desktop Firefox was making a slow death. Browser
Market share used to an Interesting Story, Ars used to run an article on it
every month, and now no one cares.

And Later Firefox OS was stopped, my guess were the new Desktop Firefox
finance wasn't enough to continue it. Mozilla relent and supported H.264,
which it didn't support for the longest time it could. The Never Firefox on
iOS became an Abandoned Firefox Sync, discontinued, and reappeared on iOS
again.

So Mozilla, by putting it Values and Ideals first, even if it is against its
own users' interest or UX, lost its user base, and with that also lose the
influence it onces ( barely ) had on the Web.

------
apatters
Whatever war Mozilla dives into next, I really hope it's a winnable one,
because free software can't afford to have execs who keep on making dumb
mistakes. I was telling anyone who would listen from day one that both Firefox
OS and Ubuntu Phone were doomed to failure.

All it took to make that prediction was a basic understanding of network
effects and the history of client platform businesses.

Jumping into the mobile market after Google and Apple had carved it up was
insanity. As a consumer, changing the platform you use to access your apps and
services carries a high switching cost--most likely you'll lose some of those
apps and services and be forced to find replacements.

Customers don't like to make that switch because it's hard, and it's
exceedingly hard to think of cases where it's happened. Microsoft established
its dominance over the APIs for building IBM PC software in the 1980s _and is
still the only game in town._ It established its dominance over the formats
for business documents in the 1990s _and is still the only game in town_
(nearly - Google Docs is at around 20%). Facebook established its dominance
over the social graph by the end of the aughts and, you guessed it, _is still
the only game in town._

Now the web platform is an interesting case because Mozilla and Google really
did succeed in wresting that away from Microsoft, but this situation was
special for two reasons: one, because Microsoft stopped investing in its
browser for more than half a decade (discouraged in part by government
action), and two, because the web platform was largely standardized so most
sites that worked with IE worked with other browsers. But it was still a tough
fight.

Perhaps winning that battle made Mozilla overconfident and contributed to
their belief that they could lay a claim to the mobile platform as well. But
it was almost impossible from the beginning because _there were no users left
to win._ Once people have settled on a platform they just don't want to leave
it. Mozilla did identify the necessary strategy: you have to go after people
who aren't yet locked in, and it was their intent to do that in emerging
markets. But there really weren't that many people left who were ready to own
phones yet didn't, and this time they were facing incumbents who weren't
asleep at the wheel.

So, they lost, and underinvested in the desktop browser market in the process,
and lost market share there too.

When your management team makes bets it can't win and loses its core market in
the process, it's just called bad management. Anyone who was involved in these
decisions and is still at Mozilla should be sacked. I think Andreas is wrong
about the desktop browser market being lost because in 2017 a website will
still render just as well in Firefox as it does in Chrome. In 2022 that might
not be the case.

As an aside, with a $400M annual budget and a big win against Microsoft back
in the day under their belt, I can see how hubris could have gotten the better
of Mozilla. But what I cannot see is how Mark Shuttleworth went and did the
same thing: fighting an unwinnable platform war against Apple and Google. He
is a smart guy. The decision to do Ubuntu Phone boggled my mind from day one.

If I were at Mozilla I would focus on the desktop browser and I would aim to
win there. It's where they have the best shot. If they lose and Google comes
to truly dominate the market then Google will use every dirty trick they can
to lock it down, control it, and turn it into profits, they are a corporation.
If they're going to try to fight some other battle, it should be for a blue
ocean, preferably one they can leverage their existing position into.

------
yuhong
As a side note, Mozilla bought Pocket more than a year after this debacle:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/3vijxi/psa_mozilla...](https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/3vijxi/psa_mozilla_does_make_money_off_of_the_pocket/)

Removal of Firefox Hello took only 6 months:
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1287827](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1287827)

------
jjawssd
I am eternally grateful for Firefox being a viable alternative which properly
supports low level HTML5 <video> tag features with less crazy behavior than
Chrome.

Videos are not seekable in Chrome unless the server implements HTTP 206.

[https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=66631](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=66631)

This has been a bug since 2010. I simply cannot seek in arbitrary h264 videos
without glitching and failure in any version of Chrome.

------
employee8000
I use Firefox and chrome regularly. Firefox is worse by an order of magnitude
but I still use it. The main issues for me are any type of video is terrible
on FF vs chrome. It also feels much much slower.

But I trust it a bit more than I do chrome. I don't feel like they are storing
all my data like Chrome does. Maybe that's the angle they should be pursuing.

------
porfirium
>Browsers are a commodity product. They all pretty much look the same and feel
the same. All browsers work pretty well, and being slightly faster or using
slightly less memory is unlikely to sway users.

Not really. Buy a cheap laptop and see Firefox freeze all the time rendering
pages while Chrome keeps up like a champ.

All your remaining users are the die-hard users like me, who stay because they
like the addons, or some other thing. But Mozilla has decided they'll remove
those too, so...

------
RodericDay
I will never ever leave Firefox voluntarily for an ad-infested Chrome
alternative.

~~~
dashundchen
Especially on Android, where Chrome doesn't have uBlock or extensions, and
Firefox does.

Not to mention the million hooks Google's apps put into Chrome search,
browsing history, etc. If you use the Google Search launcher to open an app,
it sends which app and the time it was opened to Google!

I'm disappointed that the death of Firefox OS and Ubuntu phone leaves us with
little choice for FOSS smartphones.

~~~
a2decrow
Android is not FOSS. The _Android Open Source Project (AOSP)_ is, but that
excludes all the closed Google apps upon which more and more Android apps rely
on. Almost every smartphone ships with Android, not AOSP, therefor there
really isn't a FOSS smartphone market.

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hl5
how awesome would it be if mozilla forked chromium?

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hl5
i guess it's more awesome to have a bunch of talented developers working on a
dead product :/

