So here we are. A website choke-full of people who constantly post about modulariy, protocols and advanced type systems, yet sheepishly accept that a browser with its zillion unrelated features is a giant, tightly coupled blob that cannot be tackled by anyone except an ubercorp like Google.
Firefox is also ahead in a few areas too: containerisation & privacy. It's also now the default browser on a few oses.
To me this does not indicate struggling at all.
Chrome: 65.54%
Firefox: 4.58%
Perhaps your sample size of people around you is too small?
Even if you are a firefox user who doesn't use third party plugins, firefox itself will block statcounter if you have enhanced tracking protection turned on. I couldn't find a similar setting in Chrome.
Your browser doesn't make a request to the analytics server if you're blocking it, so while the content server might know the user agent, the analytics server generally doesn't.
It isn't as though there is actually a mass defection from Chrome to Firefox outside of a very small number of people.
I keep testing it, because it has been my favourite browser all the way back to Netscape days.
Even though the major browsers are open source, the significant developments in the web platform and the code changes necessary for them are practically impossible to implement by an average developer. They're decided on outside the general OSS community. You simply have to have a large team to be able to keep up. It feels way different than just contributing to less significant projects on GitHub with fewer maintainers. OSS doesn't imply the people maintaining things mostly move forward with things between themselves and have goals set by larger organizations outside the general community, but with browsers it can happen.
I don't think there's any real solution to this. The alternative was to deliberately limit the browser featureset while it was still small, but now all those features will never go away. And many of them provide enough benefit to both developers and users. It's not at all that adding them was a net negative if it really meant only corporations can implement them successfully. The complexity is probably an unintentional and unavoidable byproduct due to the sheer number of features.
I'm starting to view browsers as complicated operating systems in themselves, like the Linux kernel, which has its own significant developer culture and massive codebase. How much can you simplify such a thing while providing all the features people want? It's a tough question.
Imagine downloading dozens of different unsandboxed apps every single day on a classic operating system. You'd get so many viruses (and just broken software that breaks or slows down your system) doing that. But now we can do that safely in browsers with (web) apps. That's amazing.
All that applies to operating systems and has been like that for decades.
> You'd get so many viruses (and just broken software that breaks or slows down your system) doing that.
That is simply false, and if you can prove it, there is recognition/money waiting for you.
> But now we can do that safely in browsers with (web) apps.
No, bugs are still a thing the same way they are for operating systems.
Windows has had "great security sandboxing" for "decades"? Are you sure about that?
Anyway, Windows has had a proper kernel since Windows NT, 20 years ago.
If you told an arbitrary Windows user to try a game/app you made, and you link them an EXE file, then at a surely 99%+ chance, if they run it, they're going to do it in the default unsandboxed way that exposes their files on the computer to the executable, and gives your executable the chance to hook itself in persistently on their system. It may be technically possible to safely sandbox arbitrary applications from accessing all your user files in Windows by using special tools or by creating a user account per app, but the operating system does not guide users to do that, there's a ton of gotchas, and basically no one does that. I feel pretty confident labelling that as not "great security sandboxing by default".
>>But with great security sandboxing by default, with multiple interoperable open-source implementations, built on open standards, and cross-platform and not bound to any specific machine architecture.
>All that applies to operating systems and has been like that for decades.
Android is the only OS I can think of that almost ticks all of those boxes, but it still falls short. There aren't multiple separate popular/well-supported implementations of it. Its code is open, but by "open standards" I was referring to the whole decentralized standards process the web has; in Android, Google adds, deprecates, and discontinues APIs without any outside input. In the web, browsers generally only introduce browser-specific APIs in the short term and work towards unifying their APIs with other browsers. It's super rare for anything that makes it through the standards process to ever be removed; browsers prize backwards compatibility of standardized features far more than any comparable platform. Android apps generally aren't usable on non-Android devices; if you point an arbitrary Windows user or an iPhone user at an Android app, they won't be able to run it, at least not without some special expertise.
It was never a design goal of operating systems to assume a binary that you yourself ask to run is malicious. That makes no sense at all. And that is still the case nowadays.
It is the "Web" that brought us the "amazing", truly wonderful idea of running non-signed code on the fly. And, in Web's wisdom, instead of properly implementing sandboxing and using the operating system facilities for that, browser vendors decided to do a half-assed job. Then they realized how a bad idea that was (shocking!), and they have been patching holes of all kinds since then (and reimplement everything that was already there in operating systems, too). The last bits are the WebAssembly and WebGPU wonders.
And no, I was not talking Android. At all. If you study computing history, you will realize "decentralized standards" and "several implementations" are not something that first appeared with the "Web". We are talking the 80s here. Even earlier for some stuff.
So, please, if you have not studied the past, then do not claim what you know is the beginning of everything.
Since I've been using the web it has been: Mosaic, then Netscape Navigator then still netscape for me but a lot of the web shifted to IE, then Mozilla or ie depending on platform, then Chrome
...there hasn't failed to be competition (ie people have tried) but they have failed to get traction.
Meanwhile the complexity of the web and its underlying protocols has increased a lot, user expectations have shifted from static page viewing to running all manner of apps in the browser, and necessarily browsers have become more and more complex.
Today only Blink and Gecko remain. And for some reason web developers want Gecko to dissapear.
That moment was never a stable equilibrium. Too few participants in the market. Too much money in it indirectly, so Google gives it away for free. This of course absolutely makes it impossible for a real market to emerge where someone pays for the browser tech itself directly.
In what way is Firefox struggling? And you didn't mention Apple, who seem very capable of maintaining Safari.
The "strange coincidence" phrasing makes it sound you're saying Google engaged in some kind of clandestine conspiracy. I think it's pretty clear that they wanted to make the web a more capable platform and I'm personally glad they did. Imagine if everyone was required to create a native app on Windows, Mac, iOS and Android to reach all their customers. It would be a nightmare. Google Docs alone is enough demonstration that this is something people want.