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Comment by pherq | Hacker News Reader

The flaw with this notion, is that neither Firefox nor Opera beat IE.

Chrome did.

Most of the people who argue things like this seem to agree that Firefox and Opera were superior browsers to IE. If that was the case, why hadn't they eaten IE's market share long before Chrome was ever produced?

Could it be that Chrome being widely advertised on the most visited site on the internet helped?

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Stats give FF at 45% market share, before Chrome got heavily advertised and took over.

Chrome didn't beat IE. Firefox fought an all-out war and was not going anywhere either. What beat IE is an antitrust lawsuit actually.

I've never seen stats placing Firefox much above 30%, where are you getting 45% from?

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/

For reference, most of the surveys listed by Wikipedia[0] (not including that one, for some reason), list Firefox at about 30% in that period. I assume that the stats in your link comes from visitors to their own site, which given the focus (web development) seems like it could easily be biased towards more technical users (and thus over-represent Firefox compared to wider surveys).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

Regardless of the peak value, your data tends to confirm that IE was on its decline before the introduction of chrome.

It is true, however, that chrome came at about the right time to capture a large share of its users (as well as a good share of FF users).

FF was the better alternative to IE (windows-people we're actually just learning that there even _was_ an alternative) before Chrome was even created.

You seem to have messed up the timeline, or disregard the importance of being the first alternative to IE spread by word of mouth in the public.

The point I'm making is that despite FF being a better alternative for years, it didn't actually crush IE's market share. Chrome did, and I'd put that down to marketing more than quality (as evidenced by quality not being enough for Firefox or Opera).

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