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Comment by stupidcar | Hacker News Reader

I find it kind of hilarious that people seem to think the solution to the Chrome monoculture is them personally switching to Firefox and then writing a blog post / comment / tweet about it. It's like saying we need to get serious about climate change, so you're going to start cycling to work, and encourage your friends to do the same. If that salves your conscience, then great, but your individual actions are statistically irrelevant.

There are systemic trends and market forces at play here involving billions of people. And nowhere amongst the significant forces and trends will you find "there are insufficient nerds evangelising Firefox". Hacker News can upvote as many as these kinds of articles as it likes, but Chrome's market share will continue to grow until there is something far more substantial to stop it than philosophical objections by tech insiders.

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> I find it kind of hilarious that people seem to think the solution to the Chrome monoculture is them personally switching to Firefox and then writing a blog post / comment / tweet about it.

That's how change starts. "First they laugh at you..."

> nowhere amongst the significant forces and trends will you find "there are insufficient nerds evangelising Firefox".

Were you around when nobody knew what Firefox was?

Yes, my first browser was Mosaic, and I've been working as a professional web developer since before Firefox existed.

Firefox benefitted from years of stagnation and neglect of IE by Microsoft. And even then, when it was clearly the superior product, it took years to gain a significant portion of the browser market, and it still never managed to get much over 20%. Only Google, with the most popular website on the planet, and billions of dollars to spend, managed to actually dislodge IE.

As things stand, Chrome is not stagnating or neglected. Firefox is a good browser, but it is by no means a clearly superior product. There is a vastly larger number of deployed PCs, using Chrome as their default browser, than there was in the early 2000s. Mobile has replaced the desktop as the dominant consumer computing platform, where installing and using a replacement browser is far less likely. There are far more apps and content optimised for Chrome than there ever was even for IE, and the quantity is expanding all the time.

For all these reasons, and more, I am convinced that advocacy and evangelism alonge will not succeed to change the situation, and such efforts, while noble-minded, are mostly a waste of time.

But without healthy competition it's quite possible that Chrome will also start stagnating..

Nerd evangelism might not get something to 100%, but it can make something large enough to matter. Linux on the desktop matters, for example, because nerds like it and talk about it. The fact that some single-digit percentage of people use it means that the duopoly doesn't have absolute power.

Firefox, even in single-digit percentages, affects the ecosystem in the same way. If there weren't a choice, the browser would gradually turn into a cable TV interface.

So when MS controller the browsers we threw our arms in the air. But when google controls it we just sit here and go meh?

I didn't say the concerns are wrong, just that repeating them again and again, mostly within an echo chamber of tech people, will do nothing to change the facts.

I don't think people should sit there and go meh. They should just be realistic about what actions will and will not make an actual difference.

How does the next default Windows browser being forked from Chromium mean Google controls it?

You know what open-source is, right?

People threw their arms in the air because IE was substantially behind other browsers in stability and capabilities, and all their new features were IE-specific APIs that didn't work anywhere else.

Chromium is an open-source project that largely follows IETF/W3C/ECMA standards.

The two are not even remotely comparable.

It's great that it follows all these standards, but the browser (due to recent changes) and the company behind it doesn't seem to follow some necessary ethical standards.

It's open source, the recent changes you mention (which I'm not aware of, a reference to these changes would be nice) can be reverted and the ethics of the company behind it aren't really relevant because it's an open-source project, the only way Google really benefits from it's use is if they receive contributions back to the Chromium project, which also benefits everyone else.

We only started caring about Microsoft when they stopped updating IE up to the point it was very buggy, non-standard compliant, outdated and insecure. Then Firefox came along and gave us an alternative. Chrome might also be pushing their own standards a bit too hard, but it is fairly standard compliant, secure, cross-platform, up to date and actively developed. So of course we don't care so much.

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