[badsectoracula]

Wouldn't 20 years ago have less people using Mozilla/Firefox since everyone was still using IE6? I remember around that time i was still encountering several (public, not internal) sites that refused to work with anything that wasn't IE6.

I think at least nowadays people try to pretend they care about web standards.

[kiwijamo]

Sadly I now see sites refusing to work unless you use Chrome even though there is no technical reason whatsoever why it should break under other standards-complaint browsers. I've seen all sort of tricks to detect non-Chrome-usage and the result is anything from a snarky message advising you to use Chrome (sometimes a very specific version and OS is specified as well!) at best or a blank page at worst. And yes every time I've seen this, it's happened on public facing sites -- I'm lucky that at $WORKPLACE we are a Microsoft shop, and Microsoft (ironically) seems to put some effort into ensuring their tools works across all the 3 major browser engines (with the possible exception of Teams but I reluctantly use the Electron app for that). Chrome has become the modern day IE. The mainstream population just haven't realized that yet to be fair, but this will become clear in the years to come and the next generation will wonder how the heck both IE and later Chrome become dominant.

[deaddodo]

> and Microsoft (ironically) seems to put some effort into ensuring their tools works across all the 3 major browser engines

I don't know why that's ironic. The Microsoft web teams have always had a focus on being fairly standards compliant. The Microsoft Browser team themselves definitely went down a route of stagnation with IE6, but a lot of that had to do with W3C's stagnation as much as Microsoft's anticompetitive behavior. They also implemented massively useful technologies that are ubiquitous today, such as XHR.

They get a bad rap, for deserved reasons, but that decade of stagnation and non-Standard ActiveX controls wasn't fully on them.

[pjmlp]

As someone doing Web development during 1999 - 2002, on a dotcom startup, there were enough people using Mozzilla browsers.

[tialaramex]

At the turn of the century, Mozilla are trying to ship a web browser (also to be called Mozilla) based on the work they've got from Netscape. They shipped a series of "M" numbered (ie milestone) releases, which preview what we today think about as normal dynamic HTML but at the time it commonly just crashes the entire browser.

Like, a colleague was working on code that would reach into the DOM and just tweak the CSS for a bunch of items, delete other items, move things around, and maybe 40% of the time it would work as intended, and 60% of the time, boom, dead browser, segmentation fault.

React, where it's just normal for Javascript to rewrite the entire page in response to a keystroke, would have been completely unthinkable, there's no chance you could fill out an entire form before the browser crashed if you do that.

[pjmlp]

React only became possible due to JavaScript JITs being made available, almost a decade later.

We are talking about V8 being released in 2008, Chackra in 2011, and SpiderMonkey in 2009.

With GCs that can handle the amount of stuff that React throws away on each update.

[Lammy]

> They shipped a series of "M" numbered (ie milestone) releases

Relevant: “A Visual Browser History, from Netscape 4 to Mozilla Firefox” https://www.andrewturnbull.net/mozilla/history.html

[mrinfinitiesx]

Yeah. We were all sick of loading a website with Internet Explorer and getting 1930201 hot toolbars, blinking 'desktop buddies' and 32 new system tray icons with programs running.

Phoenix saved us.

[cgh]

Konqueror says hello. I’m only half kidding, it was actually somewhat capable and I used it a lot. For those who don’t know, its legacy was khtml, famously forked into WebKit and Blink.

[pino82]

I cannot remember a moment when Konqueror felt good enough for me as a daily driver, but it was impressive anyways.

From a community perspective, it would have been a great thing to push it forward further, spend resources on it, and have at least one web browser that isn't somewhat wicked.

Admittedly, back then, we all hoped that Firefox would be that 'friendly' browser, and it probably truly was at that time.

Time has changed. Now I'm forced to like a browser that is always just slightly less evil than a one that would even IE look friendly. And with every version we are now waiting when they also will drop the manifest v2 support for dubious reasons. And even if that will never happen, they will continue to find other ways to disappoint me.

Yes, khtml was at least a nice time to remember. :)

PS: My personal feeling is that "impressive but not good enough as a daily driver" was and is true for some more KDE apps. This is why I use Plasma Desktop, but barely any more of their apps than Dolphin and maybe kate to some degree. I know all you're going to say now about free software and how it works and so on, and you're right, but technically, it would be sooo much better if just half of the email client projects (or office suites, IDEs, photo editing, ...; you name it) would exist, but with more developer powers behind it. But I'm digressing......

[isr]

Hey, me too, back in the day. Konqueror's ui was much nicer than the alternatives. Especially the ability to open multiple panes in the same window - made browsing slashdot easier.

Shame it hasn't kept up.

[spookie]

Well, that hegemony happened by the end of the Netscape days, which prompted the infamous United States v. Microsoft Corp. case.

[llm_trw]

We're getting the United States v. Google case so hopefully history doesn't repeat.

[usrnm]

I actually hope that history does repeat itself, and google gets severely punished

[lightedman]

If history does repeat itself, the punishment wont be very large, despite guilty judgment. Microsoft was found to have engaged in monopolistic practices, but was still given a relative slap on the wrist instead of outright broken up.

[rvense]

And Firefox got to where it was at its peak by being better than IE, not because of any pressure from political institutions. I think there are many parallel universes where Microsoft does in fact own the web.

[BirAdam]

Well, it would appear that Google will be forced to stop paying companies to make Google the default search. This is actually kind of a death for Mozilla as that’s where most of their money comes from.

[account42]

A death of Mozilla could be just what is needed for a rebirth of Firefox.

[miohtama]

Microsoft did not get severely punished for bundling the IE.

Google was force feeding Chrome to everyone at google.com.

[Uvix]

There were some sites requiring IE6 but not that many, and the improvements like tabs were enough for people switch to Firefox where they could.

Unfortunately Mozilla’s refusal to implement process-per-tab, combined with Flash’s instability, let Chrome eat their lunch.

[prmoustache]

chrome eat their lunch for only one reason: everytime you were doing a google search, google literally begged people to download their browser while half of the smartphone were coming with google chrome by default.

In the head of people google and chrome slowly became a synonym of internet the same way the ie icon used to be in the previous decade.

[The_Colonel]

Beware of simplistic reasoning.

What you mention was certainly a major reason, but not the only one. Another one was that Chrome was simply a better browser for many years for normal users (mainly because of its performance).

[philistine]

Yeah, a lot of people switched for its performance. For a while, it was the bringing you the efforts of both Apple and Google to improve the rendering. Couldn't be beat.

[kryptiskt]

Also, Google paid a ton of money to bundle the Chrome installer with Flash and Adobe Acrobat downloads.

[Uvix]

They're doing that now (and for the last several years). I don't remember them doing that back when Chrome overtook Firefox in 2012, though...