Hacker News Reader

Comment by tambourine_man | Hacker News Reader

It’s both, however, developers have a disproportional amount of power to tip the balance.

Yep. The only reason why Firefox, Safari, and eventually Chrome were able topple IE is because devs started writing predominantly for those browsers. Without that push IE would’ve lived on, because users don’t switch that kind of thing unless they really have to.

Devs often also have disproportionate sway over the technical choices of friends and family, which is where Firefox got much of its footing earlier on.

That’s because Firefox was better then IE. It felt better to use. It was faster.

Firefox has no compelling reason to exist for the average user unless privacy is a really high priority for you.

That's not really how I remember it. I remember everyone switching to Mozilla and Firefox because they had great features around bookmarks, themes, and extensions. Then I remember everyone switching to Chrome because it was so fast to launch.

Meanwhile, devs were still targeting IE because it was where the users were. It was totally preferable to develop for Chrome or Firefox, but I recall spending countless hours still getting that stuff to IE, because that's what customers were using.

Sure, developers helped speed along adoption, but I think the new browsers ultimately succeeded because they're better products for the customer.

Firefox was a better product because it was faster, had tabs, etc and it generally rendered pages as expected.

That, in a large part, was on web developers, making sure the user who took the leap had a good time on arrival.

We can see a common sentiment by developers on this thread that they mostly test on Chrome, because that's where users are. I don't think it's likely many developers put in the effort for making the experience of using Firefox better when Firefox had such few users.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com