Much of that effort has also gone into Firefox for Android.

Which I might say, it has been the only Android browser supporting extensions and quite a nice browser overall ;-)

Does Microsoft make a browser for Android? Does Apple?

Indeed, I'm pretty sure the phone efforts helped with memory usage and performance.

Around 2012 when they started Android still sucked, so IMO it was a reasonable choice. They also killed it off fairly quickly so no big deal.

It's also still considered one of the main-reasons for Chrome eating up all market share, that they now have the leading mobile OS under their control. You can invest a lot of money trying to remedy that, before it's actually a waste of money.

And a lot of technologies and standards that were developed as part of Firefox OS still are very much around today.

In terms of standards, they did a lot of work for camera and microphone integration, which they now needed again anyways with Google having pushed WebRTC to a web standard.

In terms of technology, the biggest thing is probably Asynchronous Panning and Zooming (APZ). Basically offloading scrolling, zooming and window resizing on the desktop to a separate thread.

If you remember how horribly laggy scrolling on Android Firefox was prior to Firefox 46, APZ is what fixed that.

And it's one of the main-reasons why desktop Firefox with multiprocess immediately felt so much better. (Released in Firefox 48, but extensions needed to be updated to be compatible with multiprocess, so most people here probably didn't experience multiprocess and APZ on the desktop until around Firefox 51.)

"It's also still considered one of the main-reasons for Chrome eating up all market share,"

I remember one reason Chrome gobbled up a lot of marketshare - it was the browser to install because it had Flash built in. Google definitely leveraged that, and then slowly roped people into the Googlesphere from there once they had the browser as your new default.

For a while, wasn't it quite difficult to install Flash without it also installing Chrome and setting it as your default browser? I seem to recall you had to find a fairly well-hidden link to a different Flash installer from the one the site tried to direct you to.

I use firefox on linux but when I need flash (maybe once a year) then I use chrome. I wouldn't be suprised if normal users that regularly depend on flash just want a browser that always works instead of switching between two browsers.

Not to mention how they constantly bug you on the Google homepage to switch to Chrome.

Yeah further proof for google that being sneaky Gets Shit Done.

We collectively need to factor this into our product choices and stop encouraging the sneakiest of them all.

I understand that it's quite trendy to shit on Google's parade these days.

But how exactly is bundling Flash player sneaky?

Or are you alluding to some sort of bait and switch that was executed to suck people into the Google sphere? If so, please explain! Chrome was never marketed as a privacy-minded browser, was it?

Chrome bundles the Flash Pepper plugin, but Adobe's Flash NPAPI plugin installer also bundled Chrome as an opt-out "make Chrome my default browser" setting. So a Firefox user downloading the Flash NPAPI plugin (for their Firefox) would, by default, end up downloading the Flash NPAPI plugin, Chrome, and Chrome's Flash Pepper plugin. If the user really wanted Chrome, they would have downloaded it instead of downloading Flash NPAPI plugin that works in Firefox and not in Chrome.

I didn't see it as shitting on Google because there are newer, "hungrier" companies that I think will do sneakier things and cross lines Google wouldn't cross. I think it was valid as a general talking point. We do need to be careful about who we support.

For example, there is apparently a $40B rural Internet access bill that Dems are pushing. I love greater access to the internet but I'm more than a little skeptical.

I thought the reasons that they lost market share was that they started cloning the chrome interface stripping out usable features (i.e. status bar) at the expense of fixing memory and performance issues. I stopped using Firefox when they removed the status bar and made it an extension and then went and bundled in a read later service extension.

The main reason is google used its piles of cash to push their browser.

The side reason is firefox made counterproductive and unnecessary changes: removing the status bar, australis UI, removing the ability to disable script, dropping alsa support and many other useful features removed proving that user have no freedom of choice and no say. While adding unwanted things (DRM, pocket, hello, etc.) and not fixing broken things.

Some power users and long supporter would have sticked with firefox despite google's marketing, had it not piled bad move after bad move and not listening to its users.

To my knowledge, it was actually Google cloning the Australis interface, they just happened to release it earlier.

And no, these UI changes were not made at the expense of fixing memory and performance issues.

The reason why they didn't fix those memory and performance issues, is because it would have required introducing the (now introduced) multiprocess architecture.

That would have required breaking all extensions (which is now being done with Firefox 57, along with breaking them to switch to a new extension API). So, that would have pissed off power users even more.

And also just in general, you have to understand that power users are not that important for market share. They make up maybe 1%. If they bring their friends and family all along, then maybe 15%.

There's a big number of users that are able to choose their own browser, but are not power users by any means. For example, around 40% of Firefox users don't have any extensions installed [1].

[1] The figure is from Sep 2015, but I don't think things have changed much since then. And if anything, the trend has so far been for this number to increase. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1229949

The main reason for chrome eating up market is google pocket depth and heavy marekting push through all mean avialable.

Now more than ever, I would actually prefer to be running a Mozilla OS phone. The reasons why it was important are even more relevant today with vendor lock-in and the continued flow of out-of-support devices.

Google has had quite a few failed projects too, although admittedly their phone OS has been more successful.

True story.