[glenstein]

Before Chrome, Firefox had a market share of something like 30%, because it was light years better than IE. And its ability to support extensions was mind blowing. It didn't crash, which was important, it was fast, also important at the time, and was innovative and customizable in ways we take for granted now.

Firefox was dominant and Chrome was the little brother, but then the turns tabled.

[seec]

I know but that was quite a while ago. And it illustrates exactly what I mean. They had 4-5 years lead on Chrome and they still fucked it up. They lost the browser war way before Google got so many dominant web properties. When Chrome got out, Youtube wasn't nearly as big and important, Google Docs was still pretty basic, slow and missing a lot of functionality. Nobody would have switched to Chrome just to use the Google stuff; but people did switch to chrome because it was better. That's it. I was a Mac only person at the time of Firefox release and it wasn't that much better than Internet Explorer for Mac. But Safari was pretty good, in fact at that time Apple was actually making Safari for Windows as well. I preferred it to Firefox, like most people I knew who tried both... Then Chrome forked the Safari open-source code base and improved it.

Firefox lost because it was technically not as good and because of poor leadership. I believe they waste too much ressource on political bullshit, non-working consensus and whatnot.

But most of the defenders are ideological zealots. Which is why I got downvoted because they cannot handle the truth.

Nobody needed to sabotage Firefox, it wasn't very good in the first place.