[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.