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Comment by dagaci | Hacker News Reader

OS bundling is way overrated, historically. People choose the bundled item when they are literally forced to by the vendor, in the way Apple does.

Netscape won the original Browser wars because it was better and faster and smarter. Over time it became slow and bloated as Netscape literally tried to bundle an OS into its browser.

The original IE was faster and smarter than Netscape Navigator, people literally made conspiracy theories about why it was faster.

Microsoft stopped developing IE effectively, then Open-Sourced Firefox came along to challenge, but it was inherited from the same Netscape codebase and made minimal market progress at the time.

Google suddenly came out with Chrome, it was faster, smarter, and cleaner than IE and others. And worked best with google.

Microsoft controlled the OS, but it did not control the web, and in various ways the web said use "Chrome" because Chrome was better.

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Microsoft stopped developing IE because they were under intense anti-trust scrutiny having been found guilty of anti-trust violations and bound by a tough consent decree that made them timid for the first time ever.

That minimal Firefox market progress was about a quarter of the entire Web, and enough to see the content of the Web so dramatically transformed over a decade (that even Safari claimed to be Gecko) to a standards based platform with minimal reverse engineering all the IE-isms and documenting those for others to follow, and in so doing opening the playing field for standards compliant browsers.

Your summary, presented as fact, is quite poor and I'm gonna assume you have no particular expertise here and were instead sharing some opinions you picked up rather than sharing any actual history from experience, right?

I was there, a part of almost all of this for 25 years now, so there's my authority. What's yours?

You might have been part of the same crowd generating conspiracy theories! I don't know. But those ideas were a very important part of developing the conviction based communities which promoted it (not a criticism). Firefox usage peaked at 32% apparently 2010 market share against the IE which only had minimal development since early 2000s. Chrome proper>2010 effectively defeated Firefox in two years of issue and became dominant after 3 years. Why so quick? for the conviction based community, Chrome won because of advertising, bundling, and variations of force not because it was fundamentally a nicer experience for end users.

>>OS bundling is way overrated >>the web said use "Chrome" because Chrome was better I think you may be ignoring that google bundled chrome on android and "bundled" it with every web platform they owned. Youtube/gmail/maps etc. have suffered firefox incompatabilities and shown large pop ups suggesting users move to chrome.

If bundling is overrated why do you think google created chrome in the first place? and continued to fund it and push it on their platforms for years?

> then Open-Sourced Firefox came along to challenge, but it was inherited from the same Netscape codebase and made minimal market progress at the time

No, this is not correct: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/worldwid...

Firefox very much made market progress. Chrome didn't catch Firefox until 2011: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/worldwid...

Android was already on version 4 by that time, so of course they were catching up as they were becoming dominant in that space, and Chrome was the default browser installed on every device.

> Google suddenly came out with Chrome, it was faster, smarter, and cleaner than IE and others. And worked best with google.

... and it got bundled by default with the installers of many free software

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