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Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

And yet, today Firefox has single-digit-percent market share, and the dominant player is in some ways worse than Microsoft was. MS seemed to want to make the web stagnate, while Google wants to turn the web into (more of) a privacy-free, advertising machine, and has been steering web standards in that direction.

Google allows Firefox to exist (by funding Mozilla via Firefox's default search engine) only so they can point to the fact that there are alternatives, with alternative rendering engines.

It is unclear if Mastodon will actually replace Twitter. I'm skeptical. I think Twitter would have to actually fail (as in, go bankrupt, or at least have such severe technical uptime/stability issues) before the platform would be abandoned enough to definitively say Mastodon won.

ExpertsExchange -> SO mainly happened because all the decent answers on EE were hidden behind a paywall.

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> And yet, today Firefox has single-digit-percent market share, and the dominant player is in some ways worse than Microsoft was. MS seemed to want to make the web stagnate, while Google wants to turn the web into (more of) a privacy-free, advertising machine, and has been steering web standards in that direction.

I think that reinforces GP point that consumers aren't driven by privacy. Firefox didn't take off due to privacy, it took off because IE6 was a miserable experience. The killer features that drew people to firefox were pop-up blocking, tabbed browsing and less crashes.

And even then, Firefox's decline makes the same point; Chrome didn't win because it was more private, it won because it was fast, stable (when Chrome first launched, its process isolation features were unmatched - suddenly, one tab crashing didn't mean crashing the whole browser!), and of course because Google abused its search monopoly and bundling deals to cram it down people's throats. But for all that they cheated, they could have just won fair and square because they gave people features that people actually cared about; privacy was never relevant, and security was secondary.

The IE 6 to Firefox migration started about 20 years ago. The world of browsers today is _very_ different.

You may not like Google's influence, but they don't hold back technical innovation in the way that Microsoft did with IE 6. Many web designers, me included, spent hours on each project hacking around its CSS bugs and JS drawbacks. I've not had to do that with Chrome, which makes it miles better.

Honestly, I'd rather be stuck again with the restrictions IE put on us than the social destruction Google is waging on the internet.

>You may not like Google's influence, but they don't hold back technical innovation in the way that Microsoft did with IE 6.

No, the problem with Google's huge market share is that they can use their huge market share to push the web in ways that aren't standardized or in most people's best interest. They end up breaking the web.

Example: https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/04/chrome_breaks_web/

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