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Comment by al_borland | Hacker News Reader

The pattern I've seen is that people move to a new browser due to speed and bloat. When IE was king, people started moving to Firefox, because it was fast and lean. Over time, it didn't feel so lean anymore, and then Google launched Chrome with TV ads showing how fast it was. Now everyone makes fun of the system resources Chrome requires, but people probably don't see a viable alternative to move to. Firefox is likely seen as old, Safari is only viable on Apple platforms, and everything else is a coat of paint on either Chrome or Firefox. Maybe Ladybird will take users from Chrome when it's ready for general use.

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It’s hard for me to imagine that most people care about speed. I think it’s more likely that they just don’t know how bad Chrome is (for the internet) and how evil Google is (it’s still the main search engine for most people). I think Chrome is familiar, and Google is good at locking people in, pretending that Chrome does things better (or even making sure other browsers are handicapped on the Google sites, like YouTube being slower on Firefox).

With Firefox, when it grew, most of what I saw was friends installing it on their friend’s computer. It felt very organic and word of mouth. It may have also been an answer to the pop-up hell of the era, but I’m more hazy on that.

> they just don’t know how bad Chrome is (for the internet)

I agree on this. Every time I’ve brought this up on HN I get a lot of push back from people arguing that Chrome is pushing the web forward and the other browsers are holding it back. I think this is a very short-sighted view.

Firefox needs word of mouth to grow. It needs tech people and firefox users to talk positively about it. But all they do is nitpick and spread baseless FUD its no wonder users drop.

I always tell people firefox is amazing because it really is. It has cool features, it looks cool, its fast, the company behind it is awesome.

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