Also everyone: oh, this rust thing is nice.
Hm. Not every toy you make is a winner, but I think it’s fair to say that while maybe it wasn’t a commercial success, we all ought to say thank you for supporting rust and servo while it was growing up.
Ask them if they have tried this fantastic alternative called Firefox and you'll get silence.
When it comes to quasi-monopolies like this, the "problem" are the passive consumers that will just use whatever comes pre-installed and pre-configure (and when it comes to browsers isn't associated to Microsoft). Coincidentally, that behavior is also what keeps Firefox/Mozilla alive by being able to charge for the default search engine configuration.
Chrome for work.
I do not sense, in any way, any difference between the two in day-to-day and even during development.
However, FF on Android has extensions and my mobile browsing experience is more or less ad-free with not much extra effort from me.
I know for a fact one of the things I hated was that I was hoping to get vertical tabs working, but the vertical tab extension I tried at the time felt clunky and only duplicated the tabs in both horizontal and vertical. To disable the horizontal I'd have to edit a custom css file. This all felt very amateur hour. And I think I even went through the effort of doing so and it broke something else in the process (possibly my fault).
Admittedly I don't have a good solution for this even now in my daily driver (Ungoogled Chromium), so it's not a firm "They need to fix this." I think I was just turned off that a solution boiled down to "create a custom config file".
I'm not sure if Chrome is as customizable, but I don't believe so.
It's not night and day, but with your comment visible side by side in both they're clearly different _somehow_.
I certainly don't personally care about declining market share, that's not my problem. Mozilla makes a good product. Chrome has become the default browser thanks to Google's muscle (and also making a good product), and I dunno what grand strategy is supposed to compete with that.
Agree 100%.
In its current state I find Firefox simply _better_ than Chrome - mostly due to how well integrated Multi-Account Containers are. Like you I am puzzled by exactly what is Firefox missing that it is a deal breaker for people. Is it just the occasional hiccup when using a Google/MS service? Some people mention 4K videos not playing properly - that sounds like an acceptable reason. But surely that still isn't a good reason for not being able to have Firefox as one's daily driver.
I have the same suspicion as you, Chrome's marketshare is simply because Google services are so popular and they direct you to Chrome, and that the most popular mobile OS (Android) runs Chrome by default.
Google seems to be a much more competent company for example. They have Go. How have they been able to find financial success with it?
That would have made money.
Companies who want to embed a browser engine into their product use WebKit, which is free, and maintained by multiple other companies, and has been around long enough that it should be compatible with pretty much any website that exists.
If Mozilla could produce an engine that is easier/as easy as to slot in, it's maybe faster or lighter in a few areas, and basically guarantees no exploits and crashes, there would be a massive market. Browser views power more and more appliances and applications, for which the current options are "the lesser evil" - cue the complaints about massive Electron apps. There is a big space for competition there, for someone whose main business is building browsers.
It is hard to see but software has real tangible value.