The Firefox foundation is the one who ceded power through poor decisions. Devs don't get to decide what users browse on. All users use chrome today and that's it.
Firefox had no choice in the matter of Chrome's dominance. Google controls the biggest web properties and has the most money to spend advertising and bundling it. Anti-trust has had no teeth in decades. The web was theirs for the taking.
Sometimes "customers" don't really hold that much power. For example, I have to use my YubiKey with AzureAD at work. This is broken on Firefox on Linux, but works on Chrome. I can't just not log on to my work email and such. I would have chosen something else than AzureAD, but here we are.
I hate having to use multiple browsers, but I still want to support Firefox and only use chrome whenever I depend on AzureAD and make it a point to complain about it. What good did that do? MS sure doesn't care about it. "Just use windows". Right.
I'd argue many "customers" could possibly be convinced to drop Chrome in favor of Firefox, I don't think they care as much as HN posters do about this subject. They just want a thing that works. But if half the sites don't work, for whatever reason, they won't be wrangling two browsers like me. They'll just use Chrome and call it a day.
So whose fault is it that sites don't support Firefox? 90% of my colleagues couldn't code to save their lives (it's not their job, granted). And the other 10% will just go for what's quicker / easiest to implement. "Everyone uses chrome? Testing on chrome, it is.".
Yep. The only reason why Firefox, Safari, and eventually Chrome were able topple IE is because devs started writing predominantly for those browsers. Without that push IE would’ve lived on, because users don’t switch that kind of thing unless they really have to.
Devs often also have disproportionate sway over the technical choices of friends and family, which is where Firefox got much of its footing earlier on.
That's not really how I remember it. I remember everyone switching to Mozilla and Firefox because they had great features around bookmarks, themes, and extensions. Then I remember everyone switching to Chrome because it was so fast to launch.
Meanwhile, devs were still targeting IE because it was where the users were. It was totally preferable to develop for Chrome or Firefox, but I recall spending countless hours still getting that stuff to IE, because that's what customers were using.
Sure, developers helped speed along adoption, but I think the new browsers ultimately succeeded because they're better products for the customer.
We can see a common sentiment by developers on this thread that they mostly test on Chrome, because that's where users are. I don't think it's likely many developers put in the effort for making the experience of using Firefox better when Firefox had such few users.
Depends, many devs are too keen in using only Chrome and shipping desktop applications packaged in a Chrome shell, because "writing portable code is soooo hard.".
Many of whom only care about Safari, because contrary to Firefox, Apple gets to say Chrome doesn't own their platforms.