[capitainenemo]

I mean, they did a lot of improvements over time. ASM.js which became WASM, with fast bindings, Webrender, new JS engine, the memshrink project are ones that jump out at me. From the wpt.fyi interop stats year over yearit's pretty clear they are constantly working on implementing new specs.

But IMO everyone is chasing Chrome or just using their engine now. Their engineering team is apparently 10x that of Mozilla.

And, back when Chrome was rolling out they used their dominant position online very aggressively. Google sites worked best in Chrome, period. Chrome was pushed on google. Google tech demos, similar to Microsoft ones, worked best in or only in Chrome. Android was a big Chrome advantage too. Chrome was heavily advertised, pushed as an install bundle in things like Adobe.. I'm not disagreeing Mozilla made some poor decisions but I don't think they had much of a chance regardless.

[leidenfrost]

At that time, Google was seen as "the good guys" when it went against Microsoft, pushing for open web standards against the monopoly of IE6. Both Chrome (initially) adhering to open standards and open source protocols like Google Talk. It looked like the David vs Goliath biblical tale.

People thought Google was gonna maintain that position forever. It turned out that the "cool nerds doing open source and making money meanwhile" stance was just a sham, and Google abruptly became another faceless corporation.

A lot of people fell for it. Even the Mozilla developers. When Firefox started having compatibility issues with Gmail, they considered it as bugs in the Gmail software, and Google developers were all like "oh haha sorry I'll fix that in no time", but over time the compatibility issues piled up and the anti competitive stance slowly unveiled by itself.