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Comment by greenhouse_gas | Hacker News Reader

No, because people don't switch to the best product, that switch away from the worst.

People went to Firefox because it was head and shoulders better than IE6 for regular use - popup blocking and tabbed browsing were the most obvious examples, but even then (and being advertised on Google's front page), it only for about 35% of the market.

Now let's say it'll be a bit faster than Chrome. Let's say it'll be twice faster than Chrome, with better deep extensions coming back, it won't make a difference. Chrome is too usable.

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I switched to the new Firefox and removed chrome because I tried it and liked it better, not because Chrome is the worst. Also I'm curious how people went from Firefox to Chrome in the first place using your "move away from the worst" logic. Certainly something else happened there or FF was much worst than I remember.

But most people aren't even going to try Firefox. Unless Google do something seriously stupid with Chrome, the average user has no incentive to move. Chrome is good enough.

I don't know, I feel like many people started using Chrome because technical-minded folk recommended it to them (certainly, I told many family members to switch to it). So, maybe the same thing will happen with Firefox (I have just switched from Chrome to Firefox and am prepared to recommend it as someone's default browser).

Looking towards technical minded relatives and friends definitely helped, but what really pushed Chrome over the top IMO was Google.com, Gmail, Youtube, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Hangouts, etc. all insisting you must use Chrome.

To explain why I think this, the Quality delta between Firefox and IE when Firefox reached about 20-30% marketshare was orders of magnitude greater than the delta between Chrome and Firefox over the period Chrome managed to push to 60-70% marketshare.

I wonder why they did - FF was always safer in so many ways, helping you instead of the advertisers, having a separate certificate store made it safe against nasty BIOS level viruses, etc etc

> having a separate certificate store made it safe against nasty BIOS level viruses

Sorry but that’s just wishful thinking. In this regard Firefox is less of a target than Chrome/Internet Explorer because it isn’t the dominant monoculture, similar to how Mac OS is less of a target than Windows. That doesn’t mean its safe.

Firefox cannot be a dominant monoculture like windows can. It is not an operating system.

I think google did a «good job» (not as in «good guy» but as in «effectively») pushing chrome by shoving it down your throat on the google search page. They will keep doing it. Therefore, it’ll be the first alternative after booting into windows the first time. As people switch computers, more and more users drift over to chrome. Most people stop bothering at that point, they set up their computers once and consider themselves done.

A organization the size of Mozilla is at a huge disadvantage compared to Microsoft, Google and Apple who can afford to buy marketshare.

Internet Explorer was just bad enough that they lost about 20% (from 90%) to Firefox. Don't expect that to happen with Chrome.

Firefox installations quickly got slow and bad. Profiles became corrupt. Third party software installed toolbars that were difficult (or impossible, in some cases) to remove. It wasn't until fairly recently that Mozilla stopped third parties from sideloading crapware extensions. Firefox dev tools got slow to the point of unusability and lacked critical features (e.g., almost anything related to websockets). Standards support lagged far behind.

When Gary Kovacs shifted the focus to Firefox OS, the desktop browser lost pretty much any advantage it once had.

I moved away from Firefox because they removed the Ctrl+E to quick search many years ago. I know Ctrl+E is back on Firefox now but back then there was no way to set my own key commands so I tried Chrome (which kept Ctrl+E) and never turned back.

I moved away from Firefox because it was literally unable to scroll without dropping frames.

I switched back to Firefox from Chrome, because Firefox is now finally a better browser in every aspect.

In terms of privacy and openness...someone is the worst.

Which is not Chrome.

What is worst?

I stay away from chrome for privacy reasons. Switched away from Google to DuckDuckGo, stopped FB, Twitter and to a large extent reddit.

I also endured firefox for the past 2 years, cursing through all the crashes and buggy behavior.

Donated 5$ to the Mozilla foundation after the FF 57 came out.

I may be an outlier, but I always suggest FF to everyone. The world deserves some optimism.

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