Hacker News Reader

Comment by notriddle | Hacker News Reader

> Familiarity, inertia and monopolistic competition

Also compatibility, marketing, and being installed out of the box.

In its heyday, Firefox had between 25% and 50% market share, depending on country. Compared to Internet Explorer 6, it was:

* More stable.

* Less buggy.

* More secure.

* More featureful.

* Usually faster than IE6, though it took a bit longer to start.

* Better development tools, which indirectly lead to web pages working better in Firefox than in IE6 even if that's not what management wanted.

* ActiveX, which is clearly the way Microsoft wanted you to make "web apps," had to be hidden behind scare prompts, so public web pages couldn't use it.

Here's Internet Explorer's big selling points, which allowed it to hold onto between 50 and 75% of the market share:

* It shipped with Windows.

Google Chrome only managed to unseat it by paying OEMs, which means that, de facto, Chrome now ships out of the box with Windows, too.

View on HN

Exactly. It's like saying if only Firefox had gotten rid of extensions so the UX was unified they could have taken over IE.

There is only one extension that ever really mattered: Firebug.

A lot of developers wound up using Firefox to develop web apps even when the web app was intended to be used in IE. That's important because it broke the vicious cycle where nobody used Firefox because nobody developed for Firefox and nobody developed for Firefox because nobody used it.

You might use other extensions, as do I, but this is such a deal-breaker that barely anything else matters. The browser that runs your dev tools will be able to run your app, obviously, so being the browser with the good dev tools is a tactic to make sure web pages will actually run in it.

The constant rhetoric around extensions is an irrelevant sideshow. It's the web pages that actually matter. Nobody would have bothered to use Firefox unless the majority of web pages they use work in it, and Firebug is the primary reason why so many web pages did work in it, along with Google strategically choosing to support Firefox as a way to hedge their bets against Microsoft making adversarial changes to IE to cut Google off.

There used to be an idea of "follow the alpha geeks", that while mass market adoption was a goal, a huge amount ofake or break came down to what the very good, very involved users were up to.

The relevance of extensions has somewhat faded, aside from ad blocking, byt back the day extensions were imo quite important for many, made the web a popular & more lively place. I'd have a number of extensuons telling me other related sites people were enjoying. I could annotate the page, chat about the page. I could easily save the page into my various bookmark services. Extensions made the web social, & helped it interconnect. Extensions interwove the web & drove cool at a critical time of adoption.

Whatever the state today, to ignore the historical relevance of how important extensions were for generating an active, enthusiastic user base, for differentiating: these are not to be ignored or casually cynically written off.

The question isn't really whether people use extensions. Obviously they use and enjoy them when they're there.

The question I'm asking is how Firefox manage to take 25% of Microsoft's market share, but Ubuntu didn't? Ubuntu has always been much more customizable than Windows, just like Firefox was much more customizable than IE. LibreOffice allows you to continue using the "classic" UI, just like how everyone on HN complains that Microsoft's Ribbon was a mistake, yet somehow LibreOffice remains at a partly 200 million to Microsoft Office's 1.2 billion. Why were customizable libpurple IM clients never as popular as the official ones?

This is why I think Firebug breaking the compatibility/market-share death spiral and inducing developers to make their webapps work in Firefox irrespective of Firefox's market share is so important. It's the biggest factor I know of that's actually different between Firefox's situation and the situation with so many other FOSS products.

> monopolistic competition, marketing, and being installed out of the box

This I believe, and an integral part of "marketing" is a FUD campaign against free alternatives.

> Familiarity, inertia, compatibility

I used to think they were relevant, but it doesn't seem to match reality. Android phones were neither familiar to users of older phones, nor were they compatible with software made for other phones.

Windows breaks familiarity with each major version for seemingly no reason. (Not compatibility, though.)

Apps and websites constantly get redesigned for no reason. Doesn't seem to drive people away.

At the turn of the millennium, the reason Linux desktops were supposedly not accepted by users was the lack of eye candy. Do phone apps today have "eye candy"? Bland-looking single-color rectangular surfaces, absolutely minimal interfaces, a few straight lines here and there and mostly text unless there's photos or videos to show. Looks like OpenBox.

The only common theme is marketing, marketing and marketing. A free, unencumbered platform will never be mainstream, neither on the desktop nor on the phone. Because that will always be an untapped market that one can get into with lying, manipulative marketing tactics and a free platform will have neither the resources nor the gall to employ the same shady tactics to defend itself, but a proprietary platform will, and then it doesn't matter who wins because the challenger is just the same.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com