Firefox had an opportunity to become what Chrome for Android eventually became; the better 3rd party browser. But they made 2 critical mistakes (as an outside observer):

1. They didn't take mobile (and specifically Android) very seriously at first. Fennec felt like a side-project at best. 2. XUL didn't work very well on Android, and it took them a long time to make the switch to native.

I believe things could have turned out very differently had they done the right thing from the beginning.

1) Most people experience most of the "web" on their phones via a non-browser. This may be by clicking on a shared link within the FB/Twitter/WhatEver app and seeing it inside an integrated WebView, or it may simply be viewing content normally available via the web through the lens of an app presenting the "same" content "natively". Either way, the point here is that browsers have had less of a role.

2) For a comparatively new OS (Android is ~10 years old, modern Desktop OSes being 30+) people browsing the web directly are going to stick to the default. They're going to downloads apps for things their phone doesn't already do; for webpages, it already has an app for that. Android Browser is the "Blue e" here.

The above may not be the case for the typical HN crowd, but it's quite naïve to think the majority want and act the same as we.

I am hopeful that this trend is changing - that slowly dedicated mobile web browsers are becoming a more viable option - but certainly this was not the case when Fennec was launched. The best we could hope for was for Chrome/Safari to gain ground over "apps". Mozilla's offerings never stood any real chance of being super successful in this early climate and tbh FirefoxOS, ill fated as it was, was probably the least worst chance they had to do so.

I really want uBlock and uMatrix like on the desktop. When I tried from within FF on my phone neither were supported.

Yes, as well as many other extensions. I'm using Self-Destructing Cookies, Desktop by Default, Smarter Scrolling and Android Text Reflow in addition to uBlock, thus tweaking my mobile browsing experience to something much better than the stock browser.

We seem to be heading towards a browser engine monoculture, and i am not sure i like that even if said engine is open source.

- UBlock Origin

- NoScript

- HTTPS Everywhere

- Self-Destructing Cookies

- Better Privacy (remove Flash cookies and delete Local Storage)

- Canvas Blocker

I've found most plugins that work on desktop Firefox work on Android Firefox.

They should have pursued commercial strategies like becoming the default browser for Samsung and others. That would have got them around the "default" problem. Sell the "differentiation", build a kick-ass browser for Android; that would have given them a chance. They didn't even try it.

And yet Firefox, for a period of time, had trumped IE on Windows. And of course, Chrome trumps IE on Windows today.

Besides, the "age of the OS" doesn't matter -- the age of the users does, and younger users tend to be even more savvy and favorable of third party browsers.

Android's browser was never in a position quite that bad.

I disagree, which is why I cited Chrome for Android as an example. It was not the default for a while (a couple of years at least?) but was still fairly popular. I remember doing webdev at the time and getting bug reports for Chrome. I also have received bug reports for Chrome for iOS.

I agree that it's hard to beat a good default, but the original Android Browser was so bad that it opened the door for competition.

Firefox is at a similar position here because on mobile nobody cares about a browser with slightly more functionalities than the builtin one.

Meanwhile, the online ad dollars never paid for the remaining staff/product left behind to maintain web sites, so slowly those online entities have been shrinking to skeleton crews, too, or deploying beyond panicky revenue models that no user wants to endure, making matters even worse.

So, for 20 years now, it's been a constant zigzagging journey for publishers. Page impressions, lead generation, rich media (e.g video), 'viewable' ads...

And in 2 years it will be "the next big thing", all the while more and more pubs shutter their doors and content continues to be narrowly focused, delivered by social.

Hell, not just the publishers fading out... I'm seriously worried about how this content evolution is affecting our personal biases and cognitive abilities.

I believe they succeeded thanks to their huge resources, their popularity and their good insight, but which of these factors was the main one?

Rule of law or better ideas? Meet billions of dollars. We all know who wins ... justice delayed long enough is justice denied.

I would chalk it up to the massive amount of experience among the early team members. Chrome was started by ex-Firefox people. The initial tech lead for Chrome, Ben Goodger, was the former tech lead for Firefox. Chrome Extensions were developed by the guy who invented GreaseMonkey. V8 was designed & led by Lars Bak, a veteran of Beta, Self, StrongTalk, and eventually tech lead of Java HotSpot. Google literally hired all of the world experts in the technologies involved and had them put together a new browser.

Rather than Chrome being the story of huge resources, I see Chrome as an example of what a small team of highly-skilled, highly-motivated experts can do.

Edit: I found a full list of team members and description of their background from a blog post at launch:

https://s.niallkennedy.com/blog/2008/09/google-chrome-team.h...

https://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2008/09/google-chrome.html

It really was about 20 people, and they all have extensive resumes working on products like Firefox, HotSpot, GMail, Google Gears, or other Google products.

> Rather than Chrome being the story of huge resources, I see Chrome as an example of what a small team of highly-skilled, highly-motivated experts can do.

I think this is a false dichotomy; the huge resources are what allowed them to hire all of those experts.

It appears it was management and/or politics that stopped other companies from doing what Google did.

I'd actually switched over to Chrome before joining Google, and told all my family to switch, and it was apparent at launch that it was just a better browser. Once you're at the point where your users tell their friends to switch to your product, there's basically nothing your competition can do to stop you other than massively improve their own product, because you're getting large and exponentially-growing amounts of free advertising.

How could Mozilla compete against Google (or even Apple) to pull this talent?

Again: Big money wins (exception being those organizations that are both big and inept).

"The process involved coming up with an idea, presenting it and getting approval to run with it. You would then repeat this approval process at various stages during development. It was, however, very hard to get approval for enough resources (both time and people) to finesse an idea long enough to make it obviously a good or bad idea. That aside, I found it very demoralising to not have the opportunity to write code that people could use."

The early Chrome people indicated a similar frustration with upper management once Firefox got popular.

Expense approval is less clear, because it's not obvious which things your immediate manager can approve and which need to be kicked higher up the chain. But in my experience asking your manager works pretty well. It's possibly I've been lucky with managers.

And for a number of years now, Chrome has had both a huge team _and_ huge marketing spend.

Note that excludes the V8 team, which I believe was a decent number itself.

Thanks to the Web applications, POSIX became irrelevant for desktops, ability to run a web browser is enough regardless of the kernel.

Google can switch the kernel in ChromeOS for whatever they feel like and no one will notice.

The web also nurtured the GNU/Linux server. Apache on Linux slaughtered IIS on Windows and itself got killed by Nginx on Linux in turn. The web giveth, the web taketh away...

The majority of web stacks, regardless of language, run on Linux.

All the programming languages I care and use for web applications have zero dependencies on OS specific APIs, some of which I can even run bare metal or on an unikernel, with zero code changes.

The cloud concept, Web APIs and serverless executions, the OS of server running my web application is irrelevant, thanks to rich runtimes.

As for Apache and IIS, they are pretty much alive outside HN bubble.

https://news.netcraft.com/archives/category/web-server-surve...