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Comment by bitpush | Hacker News Reader

> It might be hard to believe for my younger readers, but Mozilla took on Internet Explorer that was just as entrenched as Chrome is now, and they kicked proverbial posterior! They did because they offered a better browser that respected the people who used it, and gave them agency in their browsing experience.

That is revisionist history. Firefox succeeded because MS was sitting on their hands with IE, and it was stagnating. Firefox didnt do the opposite of what IE - you could argue Mozilla was doing what MS should have been.

It wasnt about "respecting users", or "agency" but simply implemented standards properly.

And that's going to be a hard problem with Chrome because you're up against a browser that is moving very, very, fast.

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Firefox was seriously a better browser, not just "implements standards better". It ran faster, it had tabs (wow!) and at one point it got Firebug which let you have a console INSIDE the browser that showed information you could print with `console.log`, I kid you not.

It was a better browser through and through, maybe because MS slept on IE or maybe not, but in the end it isn't revisionist to say they beat MS's proverbial posterior because the browser was better.

Firebug was a big reason for webdevs to adopt firefox in the first place. Part of what made chrome succeed is it came out with a pretty robust set of webdev tools right from the get-go.

But also, google spent a mountain of money advertising chrome.

Chrome borrowed their webdev tools from Webkit, who borrowed them from KHTML. Chrome launched with dev tools, but they didn't develop their own distinct version of them for many years after launching the browser.

> Chrome borrowed their webdev tools from Webkit, who borrowed them from KHTML.

Neither KDE nor OS X ever shipped their built-in Web Inspector prior to the appearance of Firebug in 2006, and by that point WebKit and Safari were already in full swing. The very first iteration[1] of Web Inspector appeared around the same time as Firebug and was an original contribution by Apple; it wasn't borrowed from KHTML.

1. <https://web.archive.org/web/20070621162114/https://webkit.or...>

> Part of what made chrome succeed is it came out with a pretty robust set of webdev tools right from the get-go.

I think this factor isn't given enough weight in the shift to Firefox.

At that time, the largest pain point in web development was (by a long shot) browser compatibility.

When developers fell in love with Firefox, they started pushing business requirements away from IE and towards the browser that didn't feel like it was their enemy. Alongside with this there was also massive shift to start taking web standards seriously, which is another area where IE dropped the ball spectacularly

It took a few years, but eventually pointy haired managers got sick of our whining and gave in.

We, no joke, ultimately were able to drop our support for IE6->8 because of the youtube "we are dropping support for IE" banner. We spun it to our bosses as "If google is doing this, we should be able to."

Some time ago there was a post here about it. The guy claimed he and a few other fed up devs made that banner on their own initiative. The whole thing was a huge bluff because at the time google had no such plan but it gained so much momentum that they went ahead with it eventually.

That's awesome.

Having lived through the browser wars, this is my new favorite fact about the whole thing.

It really was a very different time, and you couldn't have convinced me back then that I would miss it one day.

Which, if you haven't read it before, the story of how they did that is worth the read.

https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6

Chrome has the advantage that they inherited webkits inspector. The chrome team made improvements, yes, but it originated in Safari

It's hard to state just how much of a game changer Firebug was for web development. Before that your only option was "alert()"ing or outputting directly to the page.

Once Chrome came along with their devtools, improvements quickly escalated between the 2 before Google eventually won out.

I can't recall the exact point in time when my use of Firefox fell off, but it was probably due to the account integrations with Chrome.

Around 2006 or 2007, I was working on the Sage Notebook. I did a little JavaScript injection, and managed to make the notebook execute JavaScript instead of sending Python code to the server and printing the result. Lo and behold, I could interact with my JavaScript environment on any browser we supported (ie, ff, safari and Opera). I don't recall if firefox had its JavaScript console yet but it was a game changer on those other browsers.

> But also, google spent a mountain of money advertising chrome.

Not to mention preferential treatment like the Youtube anti-IE campaign [1]

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/4/18529381/google-youtube-in...

To be fair to Google, they also kicked ass on implementation at the beginning too.

Chrome was a lot faster and a lot lighter (in the beginning)

> But also, google spent a mountain of money advertising chrome.

That money was also used to increase the user base via drive-by installations, e. g. while installing Adobe Reader you had to deselect the Chrome installation, otherwise you'd find yourself with a new standard browser afterwards.

One big feature at the time was Firefox had a built in popup blocker, IE did not. Popup ads were rife towards the backend of the 90's and the internet felt borderline unusable without a blocker.

> beat MS's proverbial posterior because the browser was better

not via marketshare. The fact is, only developers (and adjacent) were using firefox. IE, during those days (pre-chrome) was still such a dominant browser that you had to check for IE compatibility.

But today, developers are not checking for firefox compatibility. So, firefox today (and during the firefox heyday) were never truly "beating" IE from a marketshare perspective.

not via marketshare

That's not an entirely fair measure though, considering Microsoft lost an antitrust case that was brought because they were unfairly leveraging their monopoly in operating systems to give them an advantage in browser adoption. The DOJ threatened to break up Microsoft over it, and eventually only stopped when Microsoft added an option for users to pick a difference default browser over IE.

By that time IE's dominance was beyond Mozilla's reach and it was only when Google leveraged their monopoly in online advertising that a real alternative option for users became viable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

There was never a browser choice mandate in the US.

There was a period of time when our university help desk was installing and recommending Firefox for students and faculty to use over ie6.

I remember friends of same age to also actually switch browsers by themselves, suddenly finding that their computer now used Firefox instead because it was simply faster. Same reason everyone switched to Chrome at a later point.

You could have a similar console on IE already back then, naturally it only worked on Windows, and MS being MS, the expectation was that either Office Tools or VS would be installed, as it was provided via them in a way similar to Firebug.

There was also the integration with Dreamweaver, Frontpage.

The console already existed... since Netscape I believe. Basically printf-level debugging.

The big thing about firebug was that you could see/edit the DOM, CSS, and at some point Network requests, etc.

I'd also point out that IE won the title from Netscape in the first place, which was the basis for the Mozilla software set (that later spun off into firefox).

Mozilla didn't "take on" IE. Mozilla reclaimed their lost browser position. IE kicked the proverbial posterior of Netscape which both Netscape and Mozilla struggled to reclaim right up until the release of Firefox.

Didn't Mozilla reclaim its title after Microsoft stopped its s monopolistic and anti-competitive activities? Or do I have the timing wrong?

lol, please tell me at what point in time Microsoft stopped its monopolistic and anti-competitive activities.

They never did stop, but there was a time when they had to slow down right after being found guilty in a pretty big anti trust case in 2001.

The case was specifically about IE integration in Windows, so it definitely had an impact.

I think this is probably what the comment was thinking about.

And in the US, there was never a time that Microsoft was forced to ship an operating system without a browser

That was maybe a factor in the EU. In the US, MS never really stopped their anti-competitive activities. IE has been distributed as the default browser for windows in the US since forever.

MS presented the choice for a browser from 2009->2011.

IDK that MS has ever actually fixed the situation since their last fine in 2013.

IIRC, firefox really started taking off around Firefox 3, which was first released in 2006. Looks like they officially beat IE in 2010. That does seem to line up with MS's implementation of the browser choice screen.

  It wasnt about "respecting users", or "agency" but simply implemented standards properly.

That's the story of how Netscape succeeded against MSIE. Only they didn't. Firefox did.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape:

  In November 2007, IE had 77.4% of the browser market, Firefox 16.0%, and Netscape 0.6%

From the same Wikipedia page:

"On July 15, 2003, Time Warner (formerly AOL Time Warner) disbanded Netscape. Most of the programmers were laid off, and the Netscape logo was removed from the building."

Peak Netscape was 1996. By 2003, they had already handed development off to Mozilla, and Netscape the browser was just a thin veneer over Mozilla's browser.

By 2007, it was just Mozilla with AOL branding and almost all of it's users were people still using AOL in 2007.

Yes, that's the point.

Back in the naughties, testing a web page with Netscape seemed miraculous because if it rendered correctly with a PC, chances are it would with a Mac, and with Linux.

Microsoft didn't care about standards. If a page rendered incorrectly in other browsers than Windows MSIE they didn't care (even if it was Mac MSIE).

But that difference wasn't enough to save Netscape because, as a web browser, Netscape was a bloated mess.

When Firefox came along, it was popular with web designers, for the same reasons as Netscape was - but its streamlined design catered to regular users.

*noughties

Not just moving very fast. Mobile is bigger than desktop, Google owns the platform, defaults probably matter more, and control is tighter.

Firefox succeeded because it had tabs and supported extensions. Literally the only reasons IMO.

And it was fast, and small. Back in those days, download size mattered.

No, it was larger than many of the other browsers (like Opera), and size wasn't different enough to matter. Back then, download time was entirely quantized by "one night", because the only thing that mattered was that it finished by morning so someone picking up the phone wouldn't sever the dialup connection. A substation piece of software, like a browser, was happening during sleep time, regardless of size, and rare, so two night would also be fine (resuming was trivial with ftp, where these were sourced, usually from university mirrors).

Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox first made was in the 2002-2004 era where a substantial portion of the internet-trendsetting audience that adopted it in the US had broadband.

20% of adult Americans had broadband at home by early 2004 - https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2006/05/28/part-1-broad... - which is not a majority but had heavy overlap with the group that wasn't just settling for IE6. Similar with Facebook - it was driven by the mostly-young tech-forward early-adopter crowd that either had broadband at home or was at university with fast internet.

Yes, 90% in 2002 and 80% in 2004 had dialup.

No, having broadband had nothing to do with desire back then. It was entirely based on availability and how quickly your local telecom/cable monopoly deployed it, being so bad that the government had to step in many times to motivate them. Everyone I knew purchased broadband (some cloning cable modem to get it for free) the day it was available. For broadband users, the difference in browser size was entirely negligible.

Facebook required that you were at a universities to register. Its not a reasonable thing to compare to web browser use.

Firefox grew in popularity due to widespread spyware issues at the time. Much of that spyware specifically targeted Internet Explorer’s ActiveX technology, making Firefox the safest alternative browser. I had everyone I know installing it and they all liked it.

This just reminded me of the time I thought Firefox was cooked when tabs were finally added in IE7. The idea that IE was ever suddenly going to have a huge resurgence is amusing in hindsight, but it really felt like we were stuck with it for a while there.

builds on your point but from what I remember actually having tabs was a really big deal too

I started using Firefox with version 1.5, as did many of my friends, and we were doing it because it was flat out better. We did not care about 'stagnating' or standards.

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