Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by yayana 2869 days ago
FF has clearer financing and better aligned projects to the browser through the entities being truly separate between Mozilla and alphabet than chrome has through being a cost center for alphabet. Chrome gets almost no portion of the profits its search bars bring in. Success for a chrome project manager is in supporting alphabet's other projects more than its own market share.

Staying focused on developer tools, being an improved clone of chrome, using rust to achieve better security/speed/clarity, and beating chrome to implementing standards will make them the browser developers do alpha testing on instead of the second platform. That eventually means the most popular browser.

Google's needs push chrome into the wrong place and the wrong priorities just like every vendor provided browser before chrome. I.e. C++ sucks but Alphabet politically has no replacement because their real needs are either server side services (go) or 3rd party developer languages (dart? Something to replace java?) that can't be the foundation of a decent browser.

Chrome is only as successful as it is since Mozilla has a cycle of destroying a fast and debuggable system by trying to bring in the kitchen sink. The very existence of FF is from a group that forced Mozilla to back away from a suite of everything every fringe user wanted that was becoming the worst experience imaginable.