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Comment by dao- | Hacker News Reader

> At the time I started using Chrome IE was the dominant web browser and firefox was losing the war [...]

This is false. Firefox's market share was continuously rising until Chrome came along (and Google marketed it aggressively). IE was still strong but already losing.

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You are correct. For some reason, I keep seeing this history repeated over and over, but even the chart in the article confirms you're correct. Firefox was taking over like crazy before Chrome came along...

... I'm talking about before that. Netscape went from 90% to 6% once IE started bundling on Windows. Firefox "taking over like crazy" is a later comeback.

Netscape Navigator was something like 90% at one point. Netscape fell down to single digits against IE and then started climbing back up. That's the point at which the chart in the article begins. That's what I'm referring to when I say "losing the war". 90% -> 6% is losing.

I'm not like an IE fan - I don't user Windows for anything other than gaming, I just remember what the browser wars were like in the early 2000s.

It's share was definitely stagnating around the time Chrome came out. I advocated heavily for Firefox at the time, but it was not enough. Not a surprise that many Firefox engineers went on to create Chrome at Google, Firefox codebase was still carrying the burden of old Netscape and it took them 10 years to modernize it.

> Not a surprise that many Firefox engineers went on to create Chrome at Google,

Google paid a bunch of engineers to work on Firefox, then pulled them to create Chrome. They weren't given a choice. So yeah, not surprising at all.

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