| ultimately if there value , word of mouth works pretty well . Firefox does not have a brand visibility problem , no amount of marketing will convince users if the browser is not significantly better. If the value is marginal convenience trumps. Firefox did not gain market share orginally because they did better marketing than IE. They became big because they built a better product. Chrome became because of the same reason too. They did a lot of early innovations with per tab process isolation headless or v8 decoupling and myriad to new features giving performance boost and making it possible for projects like electron to exist. Firefox got a major usage boost post quantum. If they could rebuild the full stack on rust there will be a massive usage boost. Mozilla is in a unique position they don't have revenue targets or shareholders to please. They have users, and a single customer who is also their only competitor. It is no brainier to say largest chunk of investment should have gone there. P.S. yes google has a unfair advantage, they implement web standards well before it is accepted then force their version by sheer force the market dominance. This is not new IE did it to netscape . However google also owns a lot of the pages people visit. They will optimize their sites for their browser. This is why youtube will always be faster in chrome than firefox. |
And of course Chrome became dominant the same way.
Word of google.com main page > word of mouth :(