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Comment by stkdump | Hacker News Reader

Firefox was quality wise on a higher level than IE 4, and it didn't loose any of that. IE got better over the years, made a massive step forward with Edge and now again with Chromium based Edge. And finally MS is approaching Firefox in terms of quality. What kind of funding does MS have, compared to Firefox? And still they are outsourcing the hardest part of browser development, while Mozilla is still doing it on their own, as a much smaller company. Chrome gained on Firefox, not because FF got worse. It did, because it is a real competitor, made by a company with an unfair competetive advantage (an even larger competetive advantage than MS has).

What about Opera? Did FF decline quality wise against that? Or Safari? No, of course not. FF didn't decline, it now has a real formidable competitor.

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I'm not quite sure how this addresses what I wrote. Three things:

Firefox got popular when they listened to users and made a product people wanted.

They did this despite fierce competition from a huge monopolistic company with quite a locked in and anticompetitive platform.

And today they make something crazy like a half billion dollars a year from firefox, they have enough resources to make a competitive browser.

What exactly did they do that is most accurately described as listen to their users? Maybe I don't know everything that happened. But from my understand they made the best browser they could given the resources and succeeded massively, because the competition was so much worse at the time.

Also, they still make a competetive browser, as I laid out. Just the fact that some of the competition has improved massively (but by no means all of it) doesn't change that.

Provided useful features and functionality that people wanted. Tabs and plugins are a couple of big ones off the top of my head that people loved. It was also adopting open standards and new technologies though, which was an uphill battle because Microsoft was fighting them with incompatibilities and closed extensions, but people actually did like those things. Good support for developer features as far as I know went a long way to getting around that and having content providers take up and support firefox as well although I'm not a web developer so I'm a bit less sure of that aspect of it.

Competition has improved but so has firefox. Why should the expectation be that they stood still while everybody else went ahead? And it absolutely has declined. You also did say that they don't have features you want and seemed to imply that was part of the realities of not having enough resources or struggling to compete with google. Just doesn't seem like the reason holds water.

I think you misunderstood me. How did they decide what to implement? Reacting to the outrage of individuals from their user base? I don't think so. Instead they innovated and did what nobody really asked for, because they knew it was good and had the capabilities to do it.

I don't know how their process worked exactly but if you're going to just claim they didn't listen to their users and therefore you win the argument that's pretty cheap.

They certainly listened to their users and potential users.

It's not cheap. I gave reasons why the world changed. You reasons (they used to listen, now they don't) don't hold water, because you can't point to anything concrete.

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