Hacker News Reader

Firefox's fall has more to do with expiring browser ballot regulation and Google's increasingly aggressive advertising of Chrome than leadership at Mozilla. No one can compete against the billions Google pumped into Chrome development and marketing. Google is a gatekeeper to the modern web. Even Apple struggles to stay relevant.

View on HN

These are very important factors, of course. But Mozilla could’ve at least mitigated the disaster. Even amongst engineers Firefox was a hard sell for many years. It took me a long time but even I jumped ship eventually, despite being a die-hard fan with a couple of contributions to Firefox. For a veeeeery long time Firefox was just atrocious to use. And once you’ve moved browsers, there’s not a lot of incentive to go back.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com