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> The decline of Firefox is because of one thing only - the enormous marketing and engineering clout of Google and their utterly ruthless, relentless, anti-competitive pushing of Chrome across Android and all their web properties and even through ads all over the world.

That probably had an effect, but I don't agree that its the single biggest factor. Before Chrome arrived, my experience in general was that Firefox had gotten slow and buggy, and when one tab crashed the whole browser went down with it. It was a once great product that had stagnated.

Compared to that, Chrome was a breath of fresh air, so me and many people I know migrated and then recommended it to friends and family. That had nothing to do with the Android version; at the time I didn't even have a smartphone, and many other tech people that migrated had iPhones. The desktop browser was simply a better product; and since at the time Google wasn't considered evil, and its Chromium base was open-source software, there was no reason not to use it.

I eventually migrated back to Firefox myself, and am currently very happy with its performance, stability, and exploration of privacy features like Container Tabs. However, it wasn't before e10s I felt I could really recommend Firefox over Chromium to anyone else.

I worked in a non-tech office where people used Firefox. At one point firefox was taking 30 seconds to load. I’d experienced this too and it seemed to be a bug in the profile manager. Nonetheless my colleagues were unimpressed.

This was before Chrome was released. And when Chrome was released it was frankly better for most users, even without extensions at the start. Yes it was heavily advertised, but it also felt faster and gave a better experience.

Now Firefox after the quantum reactor, and getting rid of XUL, upsetting plugin users, has caught up with Chrome—but they did this from what was once a leading position, and getting back those users lost seems less likely.

> I’d experienced this too and it seemed to be a bug in the profile manager.

I'd experienced this as well, and the most common fix was indeed to create a new profile and import your bookmarks/etc - but at least for me, it was totally unnecessary: All I had to do was delete history older than 6 months, and it was back to being snappy as new.

So let me get this straight:

You're saying that Google is so amazing at marketing, that they beat Apple, Microsoft and Firefox at marketing that browser, although Chrome wasn't even the default preinstalled browser on most devices? Chrome isn't the default on Windows, it's not the default on macOS, it's not the default on Linux, it's not the default even on most Android devices (Samsung Browser is, since Samsung is still handling the majority of Android market, followed by Chinese manufacturers who don't bundle Chrome at all).

That for all the efforts of Apple to push Safari as default, Microsoft to push Edge as default... Chrome had no other merits than just ONLY Google marketing which has somehow managed to beat out the default preinstalled well marketed browsers without any special additional technical merits?

You reasoning is missing something fundamental. Is it possible, and entertain the thought for a bit, that Chrome was just the better browser for a long time? Maybe?

> You're saying that Google is so amazing at marketing, that they beat Apple, Microsoft and Firefox at marketing that browser.

Google literally had a banner on their homepage prompting users to try Chrome.

E: Of course, I don't mean to say Chrome was a bad browser and won entirely through marketing. But its current market position has as much to do with Google's explosive marketing (they had billboard ads for Chrome! For a free browser!) as much as with Chrome's technical qualities.

Google spent money to market Firefox as well. Back in 2005, they'd pay $1 commission per successful install of Firefox with the Google Toolbar included. I don't recall when they cancelled that offer, but it ran for years.

For comparison, I've read estimates (I don't know whether they're correct) that the marketing budget just for launching Chrome was equivalent to two billion dollars, if you include the ad space that Google was providing for free.

That's just for the launch.

I may be forgetting things but I don't remember ever seeing launches for a free product that were so heavily marketed.

I don't know about the money they spent, but I believe thinking about it as a free product isn't the right approach. It delivers data & insights and gives them (some) control over the platform that powers their core business, much like Android gives them (some) control over the mobile platform. That's probably well worth whatever they spend on it.

With Firefox and Chrome (and Chrome forks that aren't independently developed, but mostly kept close to the source with some added functionality), they're offering all the options on the market (except Safari, but it's not an option on the global market, only on Apple), if you want a Browser, you'll use something Google-controlled, one way or another.

Yoric wasn't referring to actual money that traded hands; the 2 billion USD figure included the estimated value of being featured on google.com.

And I'm certain that Google determined that whatever they paid for it (in cash or opportunity cost or whatever) was worthwhile to them! (And today, it very much looks like they were right.)

And the competitors literally put their browsers on your device, with prominent icon and set to open every web page without having to download anything. Yet people still chose to get Chrome.

Without recognizing good things Chrome does, there cannot be a viable competitor.

How often do you see a browser icon on your desktop? Yep, it's always there in the task bar or the dock, but it's not your focus.

Now, how many times do you search for things on web? Every search page and search results page had a call to action to install Chrome. It's the only product Google advertised on their home page for years. The download was tiny (it downloaded the rest of the app in background), it did not require admin rights to install and hijacked the default browser setting.

Plus Google put aggressive ads on YouTube, in Gmail, Maps and Docs at the time. One click on a banner, you browser showed a dialog - and bam! You got Chrome.

Plus, there were bundles with Flash player, Skype, all popular antivirus freeware, etc. In 2010-2014 it was almost impossible not to have Chrome on one's computer on accident.

And many banner ads in major cities around the world. London underground was flooded with Chrome banners - something no other browser had done before or since.

And in those very early days, Chrome would put itself on your computer uninvited: Installers included it as extra recommended software, at which point it would set itself as default.

Chrome gets most of its numbers from mobile.

My friends and I stopped using Firefox after they broke our favourite XUL extensions. So did my parents. So did many, many developers I knew.

Everyone moved to using Chrome and never went back. Breaking XUL dropped Firefox adoption considerably. But folks who did this don't want to accept it.

XUL extensions gave Firefox unique power which it lost and never regained back. Firefox chopped off its powerful , special tentacles and grew flimsy, poor hands back. Firefox defanged itself.

Your favorite XUL extension broke so you "solved" that by migrating to a completely different browser which also doesn't provide the desired functionality.

Something doesn't add up.

At the time, Chrome had Chrome Apps. If you recall, several XUL extension authors quit in disgust and started developing chrome apps. Google wasn't considered 'evil' at the time...

Firefox had a unique, special power which differentiated it and Mozilla chose to kill it. No wonder its browser share dropped like a stone.

Chrome Apps were in no way replacement for XUL. They could not change the behavior of the Chrome itself, they just opened their own window and did their thing there. Not really an extension, more of a separate app.

To talk on more specific terms, which XUL extension did you replace with Chrome App?

I finally ended up using alternate tools since even the replacement Chrome Apps were pale imitations of what Firefox offered. The good ones needed to use Nacl just to do basic stuff and still couldn't reach what XUL extensions natively supported.

But I changed my browser to Chrome since Firefox lost its value proposition. It had a differentiating factor of superior experience and features that it chose to deliberately abandon.

The removal of XUL extensions triggered a large outcry among developers and power users, but I don't think it was all that relevant if you look at the graph of Firefox's declining market share. That was driven far more by Chrome's increasing share.

Why do you think it doesn't add up? Before the removal you have

"usefulness of firefox" + "usefulness of extensions" > "usefulness of chrome"

after removal

"usefulness of firefox" < "usefulness of chrome"

And that's not counting disappointment/animosity towards firefox for breaking the implicit contract.

I am not arguing that this was the main issue that have caused firefox usage to drop, as according to stats on AMO, extensions never had very large usage. But i personally have stopped using firefox after this, and stopped installing it on computers of friends and coworkers, so there must have been some small effect.

> "usefulness of firefox" < "usefulness of chrome"

This was the missing hidden variable not explained in the narrative.

Firefox was previously significantly behind Chrome in the technical design, now it's getting better but there is still some lag.

And as explained in the article, this lag has been historically to a large degree caused by the extension model (need to keep backwards compatibility on a huge API surface, impossibility to introduce multi process architecture, need to always negotiate with extension devs on what can be changed and what not...).

There were two options:

1) specialize on power users with XUL extension but lag even more behind Chrome - leads quite certainly to drop of users, slide to irrelevancy and the eventual death

2) try to catch up with Chrome in technical design, but drop historical baggage, including XUL based addons - does not guarantee success but still provides at least hope

> ... and stopped installing it on computers of friends and coworkers, so there must have been some small effect.

It's sad to see people supporting monopoly this way ...

> It's sad to see people supporting monopoly this way...

The realistic way to avoid monopolies and retain free-ish markets is to actively enforce anti-trust legislation. (And in the case of social media companies: force all players of a certain size to provide federation APIs, so people can leave the service and still talk to their friends and family.)

There will always be some people that try to avoid monopolies for ideological reasons; but 90% of the population won't care, they just want things to work and move on with their lives, and capturing that segment still makes you a monopoly.

> but 90% of the population won't care, they just want things to work and move on with their lives

Yes, I meant it more specifically that people here on HN who should know and should care are actively propagating and helping a monopoly. (these people often also have disproportionate influence)

What do we get from supporting Firefox against the "monopoly" though? Chromium is as open source as Firefox, and users have as much influence on features Firefox implements as on features Chrome implements, which is zero. I would wholeheartedly support federation apis, as parent comment suggests, standardization of browser sync api, etc. But i don't see what does Firefox accomplish now about which i should care.

This is mainly about web platform standards.

When google controls the only remaining browser engine, it effectively controls web standards (or in other words, independent standard documents lose meaning since Blink is the standard).

Google is then free to push the web technologies in the direction which benefits mainly Google (think AMP) and which further tightens their grip on the web.

> specialize on power users with XUL extension but lag even more behind Chrome - leads quite certainly to drop of users, slide to irrelevancy and the eventual death

Ah yes, if you're reduced to power users your death is inevitable. Which is why Linux, of course, is a myth and does not exist.

Comparing incomparable.

Linux (as a kernel) is alive and thriving because of the server market not because of power users tweaking their bash powerlines.

It is a combination of factors, it always is. At the time of XUL removal Firefox didn't have much else going for it in terms of performance and stability, such improvements came later on around the time Quantum released, at least in my experience with it. I would very often use XUL extentions for their unmatched capabilities, one of which I fondly remember was Norwell, unparalleled anywhere else. Once XULs were gone, to me, there was nothing noteworthy about Firefox compared to other alternatives, except perhaps allegedly being more "privacy friendly". I just kept going with it as I did for more than a decade by inertia, and can see why someone would drop it for else.

> At the time of XUL removal Firefox didn't have much else going for it in terms of performance and stability, such improvements came later on around the time Quantum released

It was exactly Quantum release which took away XUL extensions.

Ah, my memory is terribly hazy then, awful mistake that also shows my bias. Anyhow, I think it is a shame capabilities, performance and security cannot coexist yet in browsers. Wish WebExtensions would get more attention to extend their APIs, surely more powerful extentions are still a significant strong point in choosing a browser.

Quantum was the big break, but XUL extensions were getting broken with greater and greater frequency leading up to it. So your memory is probably fine!

I agree that the number and power of WebExtension hooks is critical.

this makes sense, but not from a technical point of view.

our brain is hard wired to respond to negative actions much stronger than positive ones. this comes from the not conscious part of the brain and it happens because it was much important in our early history to respond to threats, than it was to respond to good things.

consider this: how often have you stopped using a bank/restaurant/whatever else because they did something bad to you? how often have you switched just because somewhere was better, but not way better? a positive action has to be much much stronger in order to compete with a negative action.

(post author) Your remark is correct. However, as I attempt to explain in my blog entry, we didn't have a choice.

You did, though. You can just add a WE permission that gives them access to |Components|, like Mozilla's own WEs can already get when they need it.

You're choosing not to do that.

Context for readers who may not know: Components = XPCOM.

Technically, there were two choices:

- killing this off; or

- continuing to burn out add-on developers for the sake of add-ons that would progressively become impossible to port.

Since you say "we" elsewhere in this thread:

I can understand moving to web extensions, but why has nobody made a programmable way to move the toolbar around?

I mean, it cannot be completely impossible to do in a safe way: it exist in Vivaldi?

> I can understand moving to web extensions, but why has nobody made a programmable way to move the toolbar around?

That should of course be tab bar. :-/

There are many things that WebExtensions could do, if only we found the time to add the necessary APIs.

Sadly, Firefox has to race against Chromium with about 1/4 of the developers (I don't remember where I got that estimate from), so we have to focus our efforts. As you can imagine, Mozilla's comparative lack of resources (hence the recent layoffs) won't improve that.

"Components" may have been the wrong term. I meant to say that you can give WEs access to something that lets them access the same things that JS running in the browser can. My understanding is that this is currently most easily done via XPCOM interfaces accessible from |Components|, but I wasn't trying to suggest that it needed to be done via XPCOM. Do it using whatever technology the browser itself is using.

This is what happens with WebExtensions experiments. Of course, it breaks all the time.

One other thing that is missing here is that Firefox was trying (and still is) too much to be an "app store" and "sandbox" for extensions. This is not what we should be expecting of a browser, and again goes back to another point someone else made in this discussion is that Firefox is chasing "huge" marketshare instead of focusing on its core and growing organically from there.

What that metric-chasing meant is having their extension store spammed with useless extensions. I think that extension-count was a mistaken metric to chase, and no wonder they felt overwhelmed with trying to support spam-level amounts of extensions.

At it's core, I think this entire debate boils down to "who is responsible if an extension breaks the browser or some other extension". A relatively small set of "complex" or "tightly integrated" extensions that enhance and extend Firefox's behavior is a good spot to be in. Rather than what we have now where all the "interesting" browser extension points are not available to the extensions to modify and we have a metric tonne of copy-paste-similar extensions that are hard to discover.

I've never seen Mozilla promoting the number of available extensions, and I've never heard that it's a significant metric they track internally. The addons site highlights a relatively small number of popular extensions, with some categories (e.g. password managers).

The blog post describes how Firefox tried to focus on its 'core' - assuming you mean people heavily invested in XUL add-ons - for years before they eventually decided it was a road to nowhere.

I would recommend readers to skim the Wikipedia article on tying, or a similar article on the subject:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)

A shorter article:

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/tying.asp

Microsoft was convicted by the US for tying Windows and IE in the 90's, and Google was more recently convicted by the EU for tying Android and Chrome. US regulators have declined so far to do the same for the latter, although the political winds seem to be changing.

> The decline of Firefox is because of one thing only

Personally I would use Firefox if it was not slower than Chrome. I like most things about it more, but it is noticeably slower in some cases, it randomly becomes unresponsive in some cases and it consumes more system resources.

And actually when they dropped XUL I started using Firefox a lot less than before because now the extensions that kept me using Firefox were no longer available.

Maybe it is just me, but I really do think there is plenty Firefox is doing that hurts them. I really really want to like Firefox, and I really don't like chrome. But for what they are, browsers, Chrome is better than Firefox in my experience.

> More specifically, it is their bundling of Chrome as the default, preset browser on the world most popular mobile operating system that really swung the tide decisively in their favour. Once ordinary users got used to Chrome on Android, they would naturally seek out the same browser on their laptops and desktops, to minimise interoperability issues and maximise familiarity.

Most android phones I've had have shipped with a stripped down "web" browser as the default.

I use primarily Chrome on my Android phones because performance is consistent. I keep Firefox (with an add blocker) installed and use it for sites where that's needed, but it just doesn't do a good enough job to me fore regular browsing on mobile. This is the same reason I used to stick with Chrome on the desktop too, though since Firefox Quantum I've been able to cope with Firefox for regular use on the desktop.

Citation needed.

Chrome had already beat Firefox' in market share before it was even released on Android. Unless they included time-travel in that release, there's no way that influenced them overtaking Firefox before it happening.

When they released on Android, Chrome already was the biggest on Windows, having surpassed Internet Explorer as well.

Sorry, but you're either intentionally misleading people or you haven't actually looked at the timelines.

And they did aggressively market it to get to that point.

If you visited Google on Firefox or IE you would get a banner suggesting you to try Chrome.

It was bundled with all sorts of software, including Flash which would install it by default unless you found the right checkbox. (Many non-technical people I know ended up unintentionally installing it this way)

They even had offline (real-world) advertising for it.

I'm sure word of mouth had an effect, but it was only a small part of why it succeeded. Remember that Firefox only ever achieved a fraction of Chrome's (current) market share, and relied mostly on word of mouth (though they did have the occasional real-world ad campaign), despite its superiority to IE.

Sure, and as I mentioned elsewhere: before they had Chrome, they aggressively marketed Firefox, paying referral commissions for every Firefox install that included their toolbar. That was in 2005/2006 and ran for years, and was a large part why Firefox became successful: websites got paid to recommend it to their users.

Marketing is a large part of everything, I agree. But the argument I replied to was that it was the monopoly & bundling that made it successful. That's obviously completely false and pure propaganda, trying to absolve Firefox of anything and everything, essentially saying "none of those things matter, it was only Google's evil behavior".

> I'm sure word of mouth had an effect, but it was only a small part of why it succeeded.

I'm not so sure. Internet Explorer as "the perfect tool to download Chrome" wasn't a meme because people watched ads, but because Chrome (on Windows) was easy to download & install and fast & stable. Firefox wasn't any of that in comparison, that's why lots of people I know switched to Chrome back then.

And once you've gotten used to something, you really need a reason to switch back - something that Firefox never provided. Privacy might become that, but Chrome with plugins isn't terrible either, and Firefox sent data to Google for analytics "out of the box" as well (and probably still does?).

I understand that it's nice to have a boogeyman that can be blamed, but I don't think that's accurate. Firefox lost because of Mozilla, not because of Google.

> If you visited Google on Firefox or IE you would get a banner suggesting you to try Chrome.

Let’s not understate this, as I remember it clearly.

As a Firefox user, using any Google-product on the web, I was constantly badgered to “upgrade” my browser.

That’s right: Google lied and told Firefox-users that they were downloading upgrades to their Firefox installations.

Completely inexcusable, fraudulent behaviour. Combined with the bu sling and drive-by-installers Google paid for, me and lots of my technical friends still consider Chrome genuine malware for this reason.

I was with you for the first 5 lines - it's not because of any of those reasons.

But listen to the Firefox developer in the article - Chrome was making a better product because they weren't tied down with backwards compatibility issues. It was genuinely faster, more secure and they were shipping features quicker. Meanwhile Firefox wasted years attempting and failing to become multiprocess because they were tied down with the legacy of XUL.

But you have to give Chrome credit for making a good product. No doubt marketing helped, bundling with Android helped. But for a solid 5-7 years, it was clearly the best. And I say that as someone who has used Firefox for a decade.

There was definitely a time we're Firefox had performance issue.

I don't speak of those benchmark milliseconds things.The entire browsers was so slow scrolling was a problem and more and more time the entire OS (Mac os) freezes for 10 seconds or so.

That's where I left and years later why coming back if it doesn't have any more interesting features than chrome.

Phoenix user from day 1 here, then Firefox. Had never the need to abandon it due to slow performance.

> I don't speak of those benchmark milliseconds things.The entire browsers was so slow scrolling was a problem and more and more time the entire OS (Mac os) freezes for 10 seconds or so.

Could it have been every 15 seconds?

I think I was part of the team that fixed that bug :)

Hmm. In the beginning on Andorid, there was nothing called chrome. Only a primative, webkit based browser usually called "internet" that OEMs would customize. Other browsers have always worked fine on Android - from Dolphin to yes... Firefox. I'd say that Firefox on Android wasn't suitable for daily use until sometime in 2019... and there's still a lot of work to do.

Chrome on Android is a miserable experience right now because someone at Google thinks that hiding URLS and making it difficult to edit them is a feature.

New Firefox on Android is bad as well. It takes me more time to open new web page.

I also hate the bottom focused layout.

The user experience of Chrome is just better for non-geek users. This makes a big difference although geeks have a hard time accepting that this should matter.

> The decline of Firefox is because of one thing only - the enormous marketing and engineering clout of Google and their utterly ruthless, relentless, anti-competitive pushing of Chrome across Android and all their web properties and even through ads all over the world.

OK, so your answer is that world is super simple and comes down to a single variable explaining everything? Sorry but that does not sound very convincing to say the least.

There was a time where Firefox needed to be installed manually on Windows where IE was provided by default and it become the leading browser. Ask yourself why it's not the case anymore.

Internet Explorer was an absolutely awful browser, in a time where word of mouth was enough to get people to change.

Google plastered Chrome ads everywhere to get on everyone's mind, and was good enough that you didn't need changing.

You forgot the tiny, not so important fact that Google Chrome was overall better than Firefox in responsiveness, speed and rendering for YEARS.

Tabs. IE6 did not have tabs, Firefox did. It really is that simple. Opera had tabs but it also had ads. No other browser was from a trusted source.

Chrome is good enough and from a trusted source.

IE7 also had tabs, yet Firefox still managed to gain marketshare.

>The decline of Firefox is because of one thing only - the enormous marketing and engineering clout of Google and their utterly ruthless, relentless, anti-competitive pushing of Chrome across Android and all their web properties and even through ads all over the world.

The other factors contributed though.

While you are correct that the Google's marketing power is a leading factor in the decline of market share by firefox

The other items on your list, when you proclaim not to be a factor, were and are a factor as well. A significant facto in my opinion.

While google has a marketing and monetary edge, FireFox can not stop shooting itself in the foot either.

I went so Safari as my default browser when Firefox (which I was using from Phoenix 0.3 irrc) became slow and bloated. Chrome and Google marketing had nothing to do with it.

You're certainly right but it also didn't help that Firefox for Andorid was _really_ bad for a long time. Fenix is a glimpse of hope but it came to late.

Is it?

I had Huawei and Xiaomi phones and until 3 years ago they didn't even come with Google apps by default.

What browser did they ship with?

At least the Xiaomi device came with "Mi Browser"

Me and everyone I know stopped using when they removed XUL extensions, that may not be representative of the general populace but losing the mindshare of power users could not have helped them. For a decade when non technical users asked me what browser to use I told them Firefox, that stopped then they abandoned powerful extensions.

Amen.

Google's anti-competitiveness is easily the biggest reason Firefox doesn't have a majority market share. I would argue, however, that several of those things are the reasons Firefox can't hold onto a minority share either. Sure XUL, themes, tabs on bottom, etc were never going to keep Firefox on top but they might have been enough to hold onto 10%.

Google is evil so I still use Firefox, but it just feels like Chrome without Google. The evangelizing passion I had for it ever since version 1.5 is dead and Mozilla killed it.