Hacker News Reader

Comment by Erunno | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, hopefully this will not go down in history as another too little, too late effort. Firefox still has a sizable market share of about 20%-25% (depending on the source) so Mozilla can still flex some muscle to keep the web open. I dread the day when only cooperate players are left to decide about the future of web technologies.

I wonder how the situation would look today if the MemShrink and Snappy projects had been started in 2009 or 2010 at the latest. My gut feeling tells me that the loss of market share and especially mindshare wouldn't have been as dramatic as it is today. Oh well, I'm happy that Mozilla apparently got their act together and taking the competition more seriously. Right now it's fun looking forward to each next Firefox version. :-)

View on HN

Its hard to say. Bu where Chrome made the most impact is probably not the geeky community, but mr everybody.

And how? => link on google.com telling you have to get Chrome => bundling+force install+defaulting Chrome when updating acrobat reader, flash, etc, even from Firefox or IE.

Both work fine as long as Chrome is a decent browser (and Chrome is a very decent browser that's for sure)

They stopped the later and still do the former (it doesn't necessarily show up in all situations so your mileage will certainly vary), any time you go on Google.com with any browser. At least the former is not morally wrong, but it certainly has a huge impact due to their near monopoly on search, and people believing that Google is the Internet and if Google says something, they should probably do it.

I don't think Mozilla could beat neither of those 2 points, even thus they could have lowered the overall impact by doing things better (especially their switch to 6 weeks release without having silent update/auto addon compat, that one was just plain dumb).

Yeah, there are probably several factors which assisted Chrome's rise to prominence. Obviously Google's huge marketing power and their bundling deals can't be disregarded easily but in the end Chrome is also a great product. It's fast (real and perceived performance), it has a remarkably polished primary UI (though some of the secondary UIs like history are rather suboptimal) and has neat features which only get slowly adopted by the competitors (e.g. ingenious tab closing behavior, built-in translator, built-in PDF reader, etc.). So great product + good marketing = success.

And the importance of geek/early adopter/enthusiast users shouldn't be underestimated because these are the ones who often have wide reach (e.g. journalists, bloggers, etc.) or are responsible for how web technologies are used (e.g. developers). It's a bitter lesson the non-WebKit browsers vendors had to learn after most mobile web developers started to target only WebKit because that's the devices/browsers they are using on a day-to-day basis. And in its early days Mozilla thrived on the free guerrilla marketing provided by enthusiast users, not just in their immediate private space but also in magazines, on websites and other outlets where users and authors were constantly praising Firefox for its security, speed and features compared to IE6. Today that place has been mostly taken over by Chrome.

I still having a hard time wrapping my head around how badly Mozilla handled the appearance of Chrome for years. The threat was so obvious from the very beginning and not just in hindsight. As I said, I have the impression that they are on the right track now but there must be lessons to be learned from the 2008 to 2011 period for Mozilla itself and other organizations in similar situations. I wish Mozilla higher-ups would sit together and publish a retrospective about what they perceive they did right and wrong.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com