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Comment by philipallstar | Hacker News Reader

> Mozilla was born to change this, and Firefox succeeded beyond what most people thought possible — dropping Internet Explorer’s market share to 55% in just a few years and ushering in the Web 2.0 era.

Is this true? I can see from here[0] that its peak was 32%, as IE was really on the back burner but before Chrome had fully risen to dominance, but I wouldn't claim that it was responsible for IE's market share drop.

[0] https://mspoweruser.com/firefox-statistics

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When do you think the "web 2.0 era" was?

Web 2.0 is around 2003 or so and chrome would not even exist for another few years. Giving Firefox/phoenix/Netscape the majority credit for the first fall of IE seems accurate.

The rise of chrome happened afterwards and by then IE also fell much deeper than 55%.

Yeah, my anecdotal memories aren't worth much, but in that era it was all IE or Firefox. Even once Chrome came along it still took quite some time before I noticed it popping up on normie people's systems.

Opera was also essential at this point, not in terms of market share, but of innovation in the browser space with features that would eventually spread to everything else.

That shouldn't be forgotten. There was a time when the 1% or so of users that ran Opera were getting a much better experience than any other browser. It was far superior for several years, until all of its innovations were copied by other vendors.

You’re right on the numbers....Firefox never had majority share. The stronger claim is causal influence, not dominance. I recently read somewhere that the Firefox (and later Chrome) forced standards compliance and broke IE’s de-facto monopoly mindset. IE’s decline was gradual and multi-factor, but Firefox clearly shifted developer and user expectations.

No one is claiming, here or in the article, that Firefox ever had a majority share.

I don’t know if the 55% number for IE is 100% correct but it sounds like the right ballpark to me. The browser market was a lot more fragmented 15+ years ago, so saying that IE had 55% market share and Firefox had 32%, leaving 13% for other browsers, sounds completely right to me.

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