Honest question... who did they lose to? Google Chrome?
For me personally, Firefox has been better than Chrome for several years now. The only reason I still load up Chrome is when I want to stream to my Chromecast.
The majority of people are not digitally literate enough to care about what they're using. How do people preserve social justice if they're not aware that it is being violated in the first place? Who would deliberately step sideways and do something that requires effort when they have no incentive to? Most people just do what is convenient, without bothering to think twice about it.
Google used a lot of its gigantic resources and ad spaces to advertise Chrome everywhere. It's been installed and enabled by default on most mobile devices for years. Google paid software publishers to have Chrome distributed through other software installs (it also bundled it with its own software like Picasa and Google Earth). It also paid my local (state-owned) public transport operator to display gigantic banners in my train station. It organized events in my work community to promote its software and services, including Chrome of course. For years, its search engine told me to install Chrome every time I access google.com from another browser. Google stills serves old and ugly results page when I do search from Firefox (e.g no chart shown when searching from Firefox, although every other financial websites is able to perfectly display their stock charts in non-Chrome browsers). They've even been fined billions(!) of EUR for illegal practices involving the distribution of Chrome)[0].
People may have made different decisions to chose their browser for good reasons, but Google also built a monopoly for very good reasons, too. Users were and are still constantly pushed and incentivized to use Chrome, because of extensive, multi-year PR campaign, digital and outdoor ads, but also technical tricks.
Which sadly includes me these days, since it's such a pain to run multiple versions of Firefox and there are legacy extensions I can't do without for some things.
I interpreted the comment to mean, they run old FF (with extensions) alongside chrome (incompatible), because they don't want to run two versions of FF. I don't quite understand this either, but it makes more sense than the other interpretation, I think.
Bingo. DownThemAll is something I would describe as "mission-critical". I had trouble getting two different versions of Firefox to not interfere with one another in odd ways such as everything running fine until I open a file with Firefox as the associated program and one version would open but have all the settings from the other version and Portable Firefox refusing to save settings or extensions at all. Using Chrome for casual browsing was just less of a headache.
>I had trouble getting two different versions of Firefox to not interfere with one another
This shouldn't be an issue if you run your secondary instance with -no-remote -profile="your separate profile".
>Using Chrome for casual browsing was just less of a headache.
That still doesn't answer the original question though. Why choose chrome over firefox, when it has no legacy firefox extensions? Does chrome have those legacy extensions' features built in? Was chrome better than firefox, and the only thing keeping you on was the legacy extensions?
Mostly to themselves. First they lost track when they became successful. Then they lost track again when they started their FfOS. And now they lost track again, being more like a political organization than a software company.
- that started the race later slowing the to put certain "new" tech in it from the get to go instead of trying to retrofit it later
- Google had far more money for engineers and marketing.
- Google has a kinda unfair advantage through Android and Google Search.
Especially starting later after some technological shifts happend allowed them to get a technological advantage over Firefox for some time, combined with the much better image they had in the past and Android/Google search it was pretty hard for them not to become the dominant browser.
The question is why thinks didn't shift noticably in recent years?
This brings the problem that the futures doesn't look too good given the power Google now has to just push through theire stuff and given that there has been a bunch of cases where certain Google program _seem_ to have been intentionally "optimized" to be fast on chrome but _only_ on chrome and no other browser...
There's s link to a video by DataIsBeautiful which, if you think of OS market share (notably switch to mobile big time at the detriment of x86 in the early 2010s), is as clear as it gets. Mainstream users in their vast majority do not even think of using a different browser — there's one out-of-the-box, right?.. more pressing concern is getting on with one's life.
Yep. Google and Google Chrome. I remember years back when Flash was still all over the place, the big reason (at least among users I dealt with) for installing Chrome was its sandboxed Flash plugin.
The only reason I use Chrome now is for that pesky site that still hasn't gotten away from Flash. Unfortunately this is the case with some online training modules we are required to finish. At least now I can throw away Google Chrome and use Microsoft Edge. A tiny political victory, perhaps.
They won the first one, breaking IE's monopoly. Then they lost the second one to Chrome, which as of 2015 attained >50% browser market share and only keeps going up. Just being good isn't good enough, it's needs to be so much better that trying Firefox and then going back to Chrome makes it painfully obvious that Chrome is not just "not as good" but outright "bad".
And that's a really, really hard thing to pull off.
That line jarred with me too. It might be a metaphor that makes sense where commercial entities are competing for a winner takes all outcome, but it doesn't fit here.
I recall when Mozilla made it a central goal to adhere strictly to web standards, at a time when it was really tedious to get cross-browser compatibility, and other browsers followed them.
Netscape lost. Original Opera lost. IE lost. Edge lost. As in killed off by creators and no new work is done on it.
Mozilla Firefox at this point is going strong and growing. It is a better browser than Chrome for me.