Man, as soon as you visit google without chrome you get asked if you want to install Chrome.
It's not even close to a fair game.
Not saying Mozilla doesn't have some faults, but Google is just playing a different game.
It's not even close to a fair game.
Not saying Mozilla doesn't have some faults, but Google is just playing a different game.
Firefox was a superior browser in almost every way to Chrome, the only selling point to Chrome was that you could crash a tab without crashing the entire browser. Firefox conquered massive engineering challenges and aggressively fought its own users for its current position as an also-ran/historical footnote.
edit: and an indication that Firefox doesn't care is that so many Firefox remoaners feel like they can't switch because they rely on Tree-Style Tabs, and Firefox not only doesn't hire the developer and pull the project in-house, they actively sabotage the project through UI intrusions and inflexibility about those intrusions that require the kind of technical confidence to fix that average people don't have (or want.) And they periodically break even that.
I think Tree-Style Tabs will be as seamless as they were on Firefox 5 years ago on Chrome before they will be so on Firefox again.
They don't have to, because there's a whole market beyond Firefox users, that's where I'm getting.
Edge is the default browser for Windows, but when you visit google, you're asked if you want to download Google browser. Google is a known brand, at this point, after years of people talking about chrome, unless you don't know much about the internet you'll default to chrome.
Other instance: Android, default browser is Chrome for the majority of phones.
Google has years of hammering Chrome into people. Even if Firefox because up to your standards, the struggle would be the same.
I have personally set up Internet users who I started out on Firefox, and that I later found out were using Chrome as their primary browser because in their words, "[X Webapp] told them to install it", and then it got set as their default.
In what ways was Firefox clearly so much better?
I know it once had more UI customization (XUL era) but much of that was dropped because of maintenance costs and security concerns (line of death and add-ons conflicting). Today I still use TST and the biggest lingering difference I see is it now has a name block which isn't easily hidden. (Though with userChroms.css it may be possible to do so.)
I regret that I have but one upvote to give. I still use Firefox, but from switching from a secure password-sync system to driving out Brendan Eich to the Mr. Robot fiasco to deprecating the powerful old extensions to almost completely eliminating extensions on Android to constantly changing and damaging the UI (at least on Debian the packagers eliminate a lot of the nonsense), it increasingly feels like either they don't want me to use it — or they simply lack adult supervision.
At this point in time, people wholeheartedly trust Google. Chrome works well enough for the majority of people.
Would Firefox improvements make such a difference in comparison to Chrome? With the current processing power we have on our hands and laptops, I doubt people would care.
As a marketer, the only way to go about this would be "the path of privacy", and maybe try to get traction in the EU market where privacy is being valued to the point of having proper legislation in place.
If Firefox became the standard for privacy, I can see large public organizations start to make the shift, even if it was for compliance reasons. Then maybe people who use those browsers at work will start to use them at home.
Of course I'm pulling this out of my ass, but it's A path I can see as an hypothesis.