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For MySQL and JS I’d say they got big off just being the only thing that was there. Browser? JS, no choice. Shared hosting? MySQL, usually no choice.

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JavaScript had competition in the form of activx, java, shockwave / flash / actionscript, and for a very brief moment silverlight.

It was really the iPhone that killed everything else off- flash / flex was still in heavy use right up until it seemed smartphones were here to stay and iPhones wouldnt support any plugins

Chicken and egg issue here: why did shared hosting providers choose MySql? (I guess because of tight integration with PHP, but then same question with PHP.)

I think cost drove MySQL adoption. Remember it arrived when most companies were using Oracle / IBM / MS databases.

Also while they've converged somewhat in the years since, when you were comparing MySQL 4 to whatever Postgres version was in the 00s, MySQL's tradeoff of performance over correctness vs Postgres tradeoff of correctness over performance would have been very appealing to shared providers looking to bundle the most customers on the least hardware

But that's the things.. There's always a reason to compromise correctness over something else.

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