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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

For the longest time Firefox was the only easy option in town.

Opera has always been a bit fringe like linux (while still being good). IE.. well enough said. Safari was a decent choice on mac for a couple years before Chrome.

Thats where my comparison to windows resides. It was the only decent option. It took OSX a big part of the 00s to reach mainstream dominance over Windows XP.

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But Firefox never had a monopoly like Windows did. It always had lower market share than IE.

Also OS X has never reached mainstream dominance over Windows.

Perhaps Firefox never had a monopoly, but they did reach a point where they likely felt overly secure and could do whatever they wanted because they would always be the open source browser gave users a warm and fuzzy feeling when they install it.

OSX dominance over windows? Sorry, but what were you trying to say?

I would guess he meant:

demographic = 'the HN crowd'

mainstream_OSes = ['windows', 'mac']

sorted = sort_by_popularity_within_demographic(mainstream_OSes, demographic)

dominant = sorted[0]

I'd be really interested to see what proportion of the hn crowd is running Linux as their primary os.

The difference is MS stopped having people work on IE once Netscape was out of the picture. It's not like Firefox would just stop being developed. It's an open source project, after all.

>The difference is MS stopped having people work on IE once Netscape was out of the picture.

IE's rendering engine and JS/CSS, to be more precise. (Look at the IE6 in Longhorn pre-releases and IE6 in XP SP2)

The funny thing is that nowadays IE is more secure than Firefox and has many features similar to Chrome, such as multi-process!

Would you care to tell us why IE is more secure?

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