[darkwater]

Surely not because they weren't pure enough. The browser market was always so big that pure alternatives were never with any advantage: on the contrary, they had more issue because they catered to a loud minority that can always push for a "you are not pure enough" narrative. Because who push for that just doesn't care (rightfully) to be mainstream.

Thinking back at the actual history (and I lived it, having used Netscape Navigator, the Mozilla Suite and Phoenix 0.1), my view is that when Firefox was winning marketshare in Windows-land over IE, the release of Chrome and Google behind it basically killed (slowly) its momentum [1]. Even if the momentum was surely paid for by Google who was the default search engine in Firefox and paid millions to Mozilla for it.

So, to answer your question: Google is the reason it didn't work out.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m...

[hulitu]

Firefox shoot itself in the foot before Google take an aim at it. Mozilla decided to change the engine and the UI. Very smart move, indeed.

[jchw]

> they had more issue because they catered to a loud minority that can always push for a "you are not pure enough" narrative. Because who push for that just doesn't care (rightfully) to be mainstream.

Discussing certain things on HN is like a portal into another dimension full of profoundly out-of-touch people who somehow think being contrarian to the technical nerd crowd is actually what being "in touch" means. How do you reckon Firefox actually gained popularity in the first place?

I don't think Firefox ever lived or died on "purity", but it sure as shit harmed its own image multiple times over the years in ways that have absolutely nothing to do with "catering to a loud minority". Like for example:

- Killing all of the extensions; extensions that once differentiated Firefox as a product became unusable or unavailable, like Vertical Tabs and NoScript. The Web Extension versions of these never worked as well. It killed off one thing that made Firefox "better" than Chrome. Did the vocal minority ask for this?

I fully understand that Web Extensions was done for technical reasons, but of all the paths forward it's hard to imagine this was actually the best one. Today, Firefox hardly offers any extensions Chromium-based browsers do not or can not, mainly because Firefox extensions got worse.

- The various over-reaching sponsorship deals. The Google Search one obviously drew plenty of scrutiny itself, but I think most people understood it as a necessity. The Looking Glass/Mr Robot advertisement controversy and its use of Firefox Studies as a vector for deploying unwanted code, on the other hand, absolutely hurt Firefox's image among power users (and some others, judging by press at the time). Hey maybe they should've consulted that vocal minority.

- The "Terms of Use" update. It is still to this day not clear why this was necessary, but it was bad PR that spread throughout the Internet, especially Twitter and Reddit.

- A lot of updates that made user customization worse or more limited, bringing it much more in-line with Chrome. Mobile Firefox doesn't even let you use about:config anymore, and still only allows whitelisted extensions as far as I know.

- The new AI push. Now when you hold down the mouse button on a link you get a "link preview". Nobody asked if you wanted this feature, it's just there now. The previews are almost unilaterally useless, too, just to add insult to injury.

They may very well have lost a lot of their marketshare for other reasons, but because of a lot of these decisions there is little reason for a user to not choose Chrome.

Can they trust Mozilla more? Well, their track record isn't fantastic, all things considered.

Can Firefox do anything Chrome can't? There's a couple things but Chrome does a lot more things that Firefox can't do than vice versa.

Is Firefox faster or more efficient than Chrome? That one was lost a long time ago.

Is Firefox more secure than Chrome? Given that it still lacks a lot of the sandboxing technologies Chrome has, I'd venture to guess "no".

Mozilla's problem isn't that they weren't "pure" enough, but it absolutely is a problem that they seemed to really lack any principles at all and just blindly chase trends and Chrome to try to keep up. This really has nothing to do with purity and is exactly the opposite of caring about a vocal minority. It's just that chasing Chrome was always a losing strategy from the start.

The vocal minority, of course, is the Firefox evangelists. Upsetting and ignoring the people who evangelize your products isn't usually your best move...

> Thinking back at the actual history (and I lived it, having used Netscape Navigator, the Mozilla Suite and Phoenix 0.1), my view is that when Firefox was winning marketshare in Windows-land over IE, the release of Chrome and Google behind it basically killed (slowly) its momentum [1]. Even if the momentum was surely paid for by Google who was the default search engine in Firefox and paid millions to Mozilla for it.

I also lived through the rise of Firefox, FWIW; the first browser I ever used was Netscape Navigator 4.0.

How did Firefox manage to spread against the pre-installed Internet Explorer browser? Aside from that splashy NYT ad, I would assert much of it came from word-of-mouth.

Chrome probably spread a lot just by virtue of being pre-installed on a lot of computers and phones, but that's also how Internet Explorer spread. At some point, people stopped installing Firefox on their new machines, and it's worth interrogating why.