[angrygoat]

When Firefox decimated Internet Explorer in the 2000s, it was just... better. And I think Chrome had some fairly obvious gains over Firefox and IE which led it to gain market share. I was an early adopter of Chrome, but that was in the days before Google seemed so sinister...

I use Firefox now because I care about privacy, and I'd rather use a browser developed by a non-profit that cares about that as well. But I suspect that's a bit too abstract for most people to care about, at least at this point.

Chrome's advantage seems fairly baked in; people aren't going to shift unless there's a decent reason to. I wonder what that reason could be. Can privacy concerns become a sufficient motivator for people to shift browser; or even, thinking a bit bigger, to change the fundamental architecture of the web?

[jrochkind1]

Chrome also has a persistent advantage in being able to advertise Chrome on google search results.

Which they do, if you access them using a non-Chrome browser, or at least used to... I confess I'm not sure because I still use Chrome. I agree with you about the advantage of "if you're already using it, something has to be a LOT better to get you to switch".

[littlestymaar]

> Chrome also has a persistent advantage in being able to advertise Chrome on google search results.

And also on gmail, googlemaps and YouTube… They even paid for ads in the subway here in Paris! They also bundled it with software like Adobe Flash, which made it available on virtually every computer circa 2010…

And they ship it as their default browser on Android…

[gregknicholson]

There's a rule of thumb that says any film advertised on the side of a bus is probably not a very good film.

This is probably just me, but whenever I see an advert for a web service on TV or on a billboard (especially for stalwarts like Google or Ebay), I always apply the same logic: their product must be crap if they're having to advertise it the old-fashioned way — it feels desperate and demeaning to the product.

[jonathankoren]

AMP pages that suggest opening an app (eg Reddit) show an “open in browser” that’s Chrome.

GSuite pages constant suggest downloading Chrome.

2019 Google has a lot of ads for Google.

[littlestymaar]

Oh, I never realized that the new reddit for mobile was an AMP app. It's the second slowest website I browse regularilyony my phone: so much for the «accelerated» part of AMP …

[izacus]

> And they ship it as their default browser on Android…

It's not the default browser on most Android phones sold. Samsung Internet is.

[littlestymaar]

Samsung sells a lot of phones but far from the majority of them, they have around 25% of the android market, which means 75% has Chrome installed by default.

[izacus]

Um, I think you misread something - they have ~25% of global smartphone market. They're closer to 50% of Android market.

[littlestymaar]

What? Do you really believe iOS has 50% market share?

Android has more than 80% of the smartphone market and Samsung has around 20% of the whole market, which makes 25% of the android market.

[feanaro]

Chrome also had a very posh reputation in those days, for some reason. I remember many of my very non-technical friends who never cared or even understood the notion of a browser suddenly get very enthusiastic about Chrome. Whatever the marketing trick for that was, it was very successful.

[Vinnl]

Firefox was a lot better than IE, but decimated is not the right word. I think it had about 25% market share at its peak?

Chrome might be better than Firefox for some use cases, but the difference is definitely not as big as it used to be between Firefox and IE. Yet its market share is way higher.

Which leads me to think it's not (just) about being better. I'd guess lock-in/cross-product marketing is another major factor.

[jsgo]

during Chrome's climb, Firefox was a fairly slow mess and in some ways caused by users having tons of addons enabled at any given time. Firefox was a lot better than IE when Firefox came out (and remained that way even during its slow period), but Chrome was a lot better during its initial rise than both of them too.

Firefox is way better from a performance standpoint than it was during Chrome's climb, but Chrome gobbled up all of the "not built into my OS" market share and unless someone is severely for privacy, does it have enough to differentiate to get people to switch? To me, they seem to be very much peers of equal value.

[jimmaswell]

At this point I honestly wish chrome never happened.

[gregknicholson]

This sort of thing always seems to happen. A shiny new thing comes along that's a little bit faster or cleverer, and all the geeks say “Yeah, well it may be controlled by a single company, but they're probably not evil, and anyway it'll never get big enough to be a monopoly, so it's harmless fun, and I'll use it and advocate it to my non-techy friends!”

And then we end up with Chrome, and Facebook, and Slack, and Twitter, and WhatsApp, and GitHub, and LinkedIn, and nobody ever seems to learn that if you don't insist on an open ecosystem, even if it's “just for now”, then eventually we all lose that option altogether.

[jsgo]

I agree with you on most of those, but the problem with a Facebook or Twitter is how do you handle the open ecosystem analog? Is there anything more simple than Facebook/Twitter (Facebook example here mostly) in usage that random friends from way back when that aren't the most computer proficient are going to be able to easily setup on their own? And with social networks, the interest in them is pretty proportional with the availability of the people you want to interact with being on there.

[gregknicholson]

I've never used Facebook, so I don't know how well Diaspora can compete, but it seems like a possibility. For Twitter, there's Mastodon (and way-back-when there was identi.ca, its forerunner).

> And with social networks, the interest in them is pretty proportional with the availability of the people you want to interact with being on there.

That's kind of my point. If we geeks stop jumping on the closed thing, and instead support the alternative open federated/decentralised network, then the open network has a chance of gaining the bigger/better pool of users.

As any tool becomes common, it becomes easier to figure out, because mainstream websites run “howto” articles: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=howto+instagram

We understand the network effect. We should apply it for great good!

[jsgo]

I wish they hadn't maintained dominance as much as they have, but at the same time, IE being a non-standards compliant actor and Chrome at times including non-standard web features have brought out the best in Firefox: with IE, it forced Firefox to become a thing. With Chrome, it forced Firefox to streamline the cruft and become better.

Now at least, users have choice of what they deem the "best browser" to be and I honestly don't think they're inherently wrong for feeling that way. If someone uses Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Edge (though with that last one, I feel for them because it doesn't have the best tab recovery when Edge closes unexpectedly), or some derivative of any of the above, I think they're going to be reasonably okay.

[gregknicholson]

They'll have a passably-functioning tool, which is a pretty low bar that I think we still set so low because we remember IE6.

But the sort of people who use whatever's put in front of them because they don't know or care are exactly the sort of people who need a browser that isn't actively hostile to their privacy and autonomy.

Greedy businesses are preying on vulnerable technophobes, and we who grok should make sure those vulnerable people have their best interests looked after by organisations whose motives genuinely align — not by big tech firms behaving like ambulance-chasing quack doctors, who'll sell you any number of appendectomies.

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

>but decimated is not the right word.

I think decimated is the right word, as it seems it took somewhere around 10% of IE's market share.

[Vinnl]

Hmm OK, there might be some misunderstanding there because I'm not a native speaker, but in my mind it's a small step below "obliterated". If it also refers to just taking a small bite out of its market share, then my apologies for the misunderstanding.

[sfink]

No, you were right in the first place, RcouF1uZ4gsC was being pedantic.

Originally, decimated came from when the Roman army would conquer another group, and would assert dominance (and instill fear) by killing off 1 in every 10 soldiers. So it literally meant removing a tenth.

English has mutated the meaning to mean "nearly wipe out", which is very different from the original meaning. But that's common in language. Confusing.

[Vinnl]

Interesting, thanks for teaching me something today :)

[feanaro]

Let's not forget Firefox is also better than Chrome in many use cases. For instance: fingerprinting resistance and containers.

[kbutler]

decimate: kill, destroy, or remove a large percentage or part of.

[Vinnl]

Kill, destroyed and taking a large percentage are all not representative of what Firefox did to IE, so it all comes down to how small the "part of" can be, I guess. I'm not a native speaker, so it might be that I sized it incorrectly.

[waterhouse]

The origin is pretty interesting.

> Decimation (Latin: decimatio; decem = "ten") was a form of Roman military discipline in which every tenth man in a group was executed by his cohorts.

[modzu]

its so obvious that native ad blocking could be that feature. when a non-tech user opens up a browser with ad blocking it blows their mind. they go to youtube and put on a song, and wait! they don't have to reach for the mute first to silence some loud ad? they don't have to wait to click "skip" on the ad? it just works?? the user just wants the content and we can give it to them.

imo this would be the step from chrome, which will never implement it because they depend on it. but the web is not ads. the web can survive without ads.

[sciurus]

Firefox has tracking protection enabled by default. Given the current state of the ad ecosystem, this has the side effect of blocking most ads.

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/06/04/firefox-now-availab...

[floatingatoll]

Enabled for new users by default. Existing users currently need to go to Preferences and set the cookie setting to “Block tracking” rather than one of the other options to get these benefits.

[modzu]

tracking protection != ad blocking. the side effect is more like it blocks some 'targeted' ads, but it seems disingenuous to say it blocks 'most ads'.

[sciurus]

I'm not trying to be disingenuous. I don't have an ad blocker installed, and except for when I turn tracking protection off because it broke some site's functionality I can't remember the last time I saw an ad.

[pbhjpbhj]

The web can survive without ads, will corporations let it though?