[raincole]

> Users can switch to Firefox/Safari (Mac default)/Edge (Windows default); they don't because Chrome is better. Forcing Google to give up one of its best products is effectively eminent domain by the government to a private company.

Yeah. People on HN just don't use Windows, at least not a freshly installed one. Windows does nudge you to use Edge [0]. On PC, Chrome is not just competing fairly: it's competing at a disadvantage! Yet it just keeps winning.

[0]: https://x.com/frantzfries/status/1628178202395873286

[sumedh]

> they don't because Chrome is better.

That was because of marketing not because Chrome was better.

The Google.com homepage telling you to use Chrome is one of the best marketing campaign in the world.

[shadowgovt]

No doubt that Google using their mainpage as a megaphone for the first time in the company's history made a difference.

... but that only got people in the door. What kept them in the door was this image: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg...

... or, rather, the word-changing technology underpinning that image: the ability to sandbox individual page rendering instances into subprocesses so that a failure on one page didn't crash the entire browser. I think people sometimes forget how fundamentally unstable browsers were in 2008, and how easy it was to trip over one bad page that would bring down your bank tab, your email tab, your document tab, the three tabs of source code you had open, the seven tabs of unread blogposts... Hugely disruptive. Just didn't happen in Chrome.

Firefox popularized tabs, Chrome let us have a hundred of them open.

[OvbiousError]

The regularly flood youtube with advertisments for chrome, I've yet to see my first youtube ad for firefox.

[shmeeed]

That's an interesting observation. If they don't even use it for advertising, what _IS_ Mozilla doing with all those Google millions?

JK, we all know what they're doing with them...

[deruta]

I'm honestly out of the loop, what are they doing?

[maxfurman]

Paying their executives exorbitant salaries

[shmeeed]

$6.9M to the CEO, to be precise, which is roughly the same amount as the total of all private donations, grants and government funding they receive. It's bizarre.

Meanwhile they're cutting down on devs, killing products like Pocket and Fakespot, ignoring user feedback, driving strange and off-putting community engagement, and introducing eye candy BS nobody asked for.

In short, they appear to be doing anything but advancing the brand and actually, you know, competing in the browser market. Note that I'm not shitting on the poor devs, I still think they are delivering a great core product despite it all. But market shares and even absolute user counts keep dwindling. What is management doing about that?

And all this would seem like a case of simple mismanagement, if one weren't to reflect the fact that the overwhelming majority of their income comes from Google. The way they're behaving is suspiciously convenient to the entity that is their main revenue source. One could resonably suspect they serve primarily as an antitrust litigation sponge.

[cvhc]

I have quite opposite experience. I've never seen ads for Chrome but frequently see Apple (including Safari). And when I search for "chrome" or "browser" in Play Store, Firefox/DDG/Opera come before the true Google Chrome: https://imgur.com/a/LJiUX4m

I just don't think Mozilla have spare money to film a nice commercial...