[relistan]

You have to think about how Google abandoned Firefox, which at the time was quite good, in order to build their own browser. It was always about control and owning the data. They fund their business with advertising spread all over the internet. Manifest v2 allowed their browser to run extensions that block the ads that pay for Chrome to exist.

[rafram]

Firefox was OK. I think people forget how much better it’s become since Chrome came out. V8 was so much faster than SpiderMonkey at first.

(I would argue that Chrome was targeted primarily at IE, though.)

[relistan]

I used both at the time. I think you are overstating the difference. There wasn't as much full-on JS on the web and for all the things people normally did, FF did not struggle at all.

If Chrome had been aimed primarily at IE, they could have continued to fund Firefox, or could have worked with Mozilla to do whatever improvements they wanted. For example, if the objective had been speed, Google had so much clout with Mozilla at the time that I feel pretty certain they could have contributed to building something like v8 into Firefox.

But it wasn't about any of that. It was about owning the browser because they decided it was in their strategic interest. And that's because their business was by that point entirely funded by people's eyeballs in a browser, looking at ads.

[rafram]

They did continue to fund Firefox. $555 million in 2023!