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Comment by ilitirit | Hacker News Reader

> Mozilla lost the browser wars

Honest question... who did they lose to? Google Chrome?

For me personally, Firefox has been better than Chrome for several years now. The only reason I still load up Chrome is when I want to stream to my Chromecast.

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Came here to react on first words in article too.

Netscape lost. Original Opera lost. IE lost. Edge lost. As in killed off by creators and no new work is done on it.

Mozilla Firefox at this point is going strong and growing. It is a better browser than Chrome for me.

Unfortunately it's not growing: look at Mozilla's own usage data at https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

Lot of this telemetry is blocked on corp networks. No idea how big a piece of the pie it really is though.

Staganting indeed.

I was under impression things were going up since move to new faster engine.

Pretty sure android firefox should be going up.

I'm not helping things by having the stats reporting turned off as a first thing.

Yes, statistically the majority of people are using Chrome

Which sadly includes me these days, since it's such a pain to run multiple versions of Firefox and there are legacy extensions I can't do without for some things.

Did you miss that those extensions don't work on chrome either?

What are these features that are built into chrome, but only available as legacy Firefox extensions?

I interpreted the comment to mean, they run old FF (with extensions) alongside chrome (incompatible), because they don't want to run two versions of FF. I don't quite understand this either, but it makes more sense than the other interpretation, I think.

Bingo. DownThemAll is something I would describe as "mission-critical". I had trouble getting two different versions of Firefox to not interfere with one another in odd ways such as everything running fine until I open a file with Firefox as the associated program and one version would open but have all the settings from the other version and Portable Firefox refusing to save settings or extensions at all. Using Chrome for casual browsing was just less of a headache.

>I had trouble getting two different versions of Firefox to not interfere with one another

This shouldn't be an issue if you run your secondary instance with -no-remote -profile="your separate profile".

>Using Chrome for casual browsing was just less of a headache.

That still doesn't answer the original question though. Why choose chrome over firefox, when it has no legacy firefox extensions? Does chrome have those legacy extensions' features built in? Was chrome better than firefox, and the only thing keeping you on was the legacy extensions?

I run both Chrome and Legacy Firefox at the same time.

Because they want an up to date browser for purposes that don't require the extension.

FWIW, DownloadThemAll works fine on current Firefox. I used it a few weeks back to grab a bunch of SNES roms from an open directory without issue. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/downthemall/

Hey that's fantastic, thanks for the info. I'd given up hope.

The majority of people are not digitally literate enough to care about what they're using. How do people preserve social justice if they're not aware that it is being violated in the first place? Who would deliberately step sideways and do something that requires effort when they have no incentive to? Most people just do what is convenient, without bothering to think twice about it.

"People made a different decision than I did, therefore those people must be ignorant."

Google used a lot of its gigantic resources and ad spaces to advertise Chrome everywhere. It's been installed and enabled by default on most mobile devices for years. Google paid software publishers to have Chrome distributed through other software installs (it also bundled it with its own software like Picasa and Google Earth). It also paid my local (state-owned) public transport operator to display gigantic banners in my train station. It organized events in my work community to promote its software and services, including Chrome of course. For years, its search engine told me to install Chrome every time I access google.com from another browser. Google stills serves old and ugly results page when I do search from Firefox (e.g no chart shown when searching from Firefox, although every other financial websites is able to perfectly display their stock charts in non-Chrome browsers). They've even been fined billions(!) of EUR for illegal practices involving the distribution of Chrome)[0].

People may have made different decisions to chose their browser for good reasons, but Google also built a monopoly for very good reasons, too. Users were and are still constantly pushed and incentivized to use Chrome, because of extensive, multi-year PR campaign, digital and outdoor ads, but also technical tricks.

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_18_...

That's not what they said or meant.

The unwashed masses are the only ones that actually matter for a non-premium product.

Mostly to themselves. First they lost track when they became successful. Then they lost track again when they started their FfOS. And now they lost track again, being more like a political organization than a software company.

No surprise they lost all their market share.

Because Google had a big advantage:

- that started the race later slowing the to put certain "new" tech in it from the get to go instead of trying to retrofit it later

- Google had far more money for engineers and marketing.

- Google has a kinda unfair advantage through Android and Google Search.

Especially starting later after some technological shifts happend allowed them to get a technological advantage over Firefox for some time, combined with the much better image they had in the past and Android/Google search it was pretty hard for them not to become the dominant browser.

The question is why thinks didn't shift noticably in recent years?

This brings the problem that the futures doesn't look too good given the power Google now has to just push through theire stuff and given that there has been a bunch of cases where certain Google program _seem_ to have been intentionally "optimized" to be fast on chrome but _only_ on chrome and no other browser...

Edited for spelling fixes.

Yep, everyone lost to Chrome, by a margin so large it can only be correlated to Android's formidable dominance.

See this other comment I made: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22299884

There's s link to a video by DataIsBeautiful which, if you think of OS market share (notably switch to mobile big time at the detriment of x86 in the early 2010s), is as clear as it gets. Mainstream users in their vast majority do not even think of using a different browser — there's one out-of-the-box, right?.. more pressing concern is getting on with one's life.

Yep. Google and Google Chrome. I remember years back when Flash was still all over the place, the big reason (at least among users I dealt with) for installing Chrome was its sandboxed Flash plugin.

The only reason I use Chrome now is for that pesky site that still hasn't gotten away from Flash. Unfortunately this is the case with some online training modules we are required to finish. At least now I can throw away Google Chrome and use Microsoft Edge. A tiny political victory, perhaps.

They won the first one, breaking IE's monopoly. Then they lost the second one to Chrome, which as of 2015 attained >50% browser market share and only keeps going up. Just being good isn't good enough, it's needs to be so much better that trying Firefox and then going back to Chrome makes it painfully obvious that Chrome is not just "not as good" but outright "bad".

And that's a really, really hard thing to pull off.

I prefer Chrome due to it's developer tools and because its DataView implementation is a whooping 40x faster than Firefox's. I use DataView a lot.

That line jarred with me too. It might be a metaphor that makes sense where commercial entities are competing for a winner takes all outcome, but it doesn't fit here.

I recall when Mozilla made it a central goal to adhere strictly to web standards, at a time when it was really tedious to get cross-browser compatibility, and other browsers followed them.

To me, that alone is a big win.

>Honest question... who did they lose to? Google Chrome?

Arguably you could say they lost some market share to Chrome and Safari, but realistically they never won much in the first place.

And that is from someone who followed Firefox development before it was even called Firefox.

I think Firefox market share peaked in 2010 at around 30% before slowly declining as chrome rose in popularity. At least according to StatCounter: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#...

If Mozilla can manage to add Chromecast support (even as an official addon), I can finally fully detach myself from Chrome.

I tried fx_cast but it didn't work with Plex.

Yes, they lost most of their leverage w.r.t. influencing web standards, because most people use other browsers, most notably Chrome.

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