Google strikes off a right balance between annoying and convenient. It's kicking off all Privacy concerned people, Ad Block people, overopiniated people off it's platform indirectly.
Websites get less money from Firefox users per user then Chrome users. If Firefox users make less money, going to future, devs will not optimize for it.
If the only remaining Firefox users block Ads and block analytics, I do not think google or some other search engine will pay to them to keep their default. There is literally no benefit of having such people on your platform.
I have been a FF user since.. well, Netscape. Yet, FireFox-specific bugs have always been a lower priority.
Because, it's "a bug effecting 100 users" vs "a bug effecting 900 users"
When you consider FF users are harder to monetise (admit it, we generally are), you can start saying "a bug effecting ~50 potential customers, vs ~800".
*(fortunately, now that IE/Edge is out of the picture, those types of issues are rare)
We might be harder to monetize with ads but are we harder to monetize beyond that? I'm a Firefox user and you'll have to pry ublock from my cold, dead hands but I do pay for a bunch of online services.
I think the main problem with Firefox is the tiny user share, not the composition of said share. We need to make Firefox more mainstream and the problem will solve itself. Unfortunately it's an uphill battle, Firefox is not cool anymore.
That was not what I was suggesting. Fact of the matter is that it is easier to get it right the first time in the browser you work in than the browser you don’t. A growing backlog of Chrome bugs and a shrinking backlog of Firefox/whatever else browser front end developers switch to with product teams pushing feature development over bug fixing and then suddenly Chrome is the “unreliable” one.
ActiveX wasn't really used outside of enterprises. It was also used for creating wave-effects on an image, cool stuff.
The desktop was never threatened, most people were on dialup. Javascript was about changing link colors, not creating "software".
Since IE was so much better than the competition it didn't really matter that it got monopoly. Until it stagnated. Same as today, since Chrome was so superior it didn't really matter that all other browsers faded into niches. Until google started abusing it.
Maybe we should start prioritizing open software rather than waiting for a monopoly to be formed?
The reason for why Fusion 360 is "free" isn't because autodesk are nice guys, it's because that's an effective way to ensure that they won't have to deal with competition in the future.