Do you really think the web developpers that use advanced dev tools can make a real difference in their market share? (real question)

It happens because applications will stop working on chrome if developers never test on it. The recommendation when a user hits a bug will be to check it in Firefox and slowly Firefox will become the reliable/advanced/working option.

It’s happened with IE, Chrome before and will swing back away from Chrome eventually.

IE was stagnant and shit, Chrome isn't.

I may not like the Chrome monoculture happening at the moment but that doesn't mean Chrome is the same dumpster fire that was IE. And Google are hardly going to let Chrome stagnate when Chrome is the perfect vehicle to local users into Google's non-free ecosystem (I say "non-free" because you pay with your privacy)

You don't just pay with your privacy. It's not a one-way street. Google's knowledge about you feeds back to you, as they attempt to manipulate you in the way that best increases the money they receive from their advertisers.

But if we want people to stop being locked into Chrome, the best way is to cease to support it. If stuff works in Chrome, that'll be because Chrome supports web standards properly, and not because there's some proprietary random Google standard-they-just-came-up-with that it relies on. (I'm looking at you, <portal>.)

Don't contribute code to Chromium; instead, contribute it to a popular fork (like ungoogled-chromium), or a different browser altogether. Until Chromium is a less-centralised project, you're pretty much just giving a competitive edge to Chrome, and hence Google's near-monopoly on the web, without Google having to put in the resources to do it themselves. You're working for Google for nothing.

They might, indirectly. If web developers use chrome as their main browser, they test their sites on chrome more, and in the end websites just work better in chrome. And this is what can make a difference in their market share.

Not necessary but they are the ones which develop websites. I use Firefox daily for my job and that ensures that whatever I build will have a 100% Firefox compatibility.

Developers in general are very influential.

Not only among our family and friends, but also because our choices create a lock-in effect due to the nature of our work.

When you use Chrome day in and out, your work is going to be optimized for Chrome and will work best on Chrome. This led to a Chrome-optimized web and while Google isn't necessarily to blame, we're back to the days of "works best in IExplorer 6".

Companies and products that attract developers will eventually attract regular people as well. You could say that this is a chicken and egg problem, developers following the users, but with few exceptions (like the iPhone) in my experience thus far it's usually the developers that come first.

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It's worth mentioning that Chrome isn't popular only because of its technical excellence, but also because of Google's incessant marketing and bundling. But if we remember Microsoft and their declining browser market share, marketing and shoving your products down people's throats isn't enough. The product, especially if it's a platform, has to not suck and to be used by developers as well.

So yes, if other browsers like Firefox want to stay relevant and grow, a major requirement is to provide excellent developer tools.

Kudos to Mozilla for understanding that.

Developers and computer geeks have been overestimating their influence for over a decade. If geeks were influential, the “year of the Linux desktop” would have been years ago, no one would be on Facebook, and people wouldn’t buy into Apple’s wall garden and people would care about “freedom”. Definitely no one would have bought the iPod since it “had less space than the Nomad and no wireless”. (https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...)

The consumerization of technology happened a long time ago.

You can't talk about Chrome's market share without mentioning that it was (maybe still is? I don't know) prominently advertised on the google.com homepage.

Everyone who went to search Google saw the ad. It said something like "Try a faster browser"

The fact that Chrome was advertised on the most popular page in the world, and especially that it was the only ad on that page, definitely made a difference in adoption.

The quality of the dev tools has nothing to do with it.

Source? I don't remember such an ad.

Speaking as a dev, the dev tools had a ton to do with it.

The ad is still there, now it pushes the google app: https://twitter.com/ridiculous_fish/status/11810479664228556...

There’s also a popover div ad in gmail: https://twitter.com/ridiculous_fish/status/10810743891336806...

Here's a video that shows old Google homepages, the ad seemed to first appear sometime around 2013: https://youtu.be/LZ46uE267Nc?t=93

Disclaimer: I am the creator of the video

> Source? I don't remember such an ad.

I too remember seeing this ad every time on Google's search page, but it's hard to search for articles mentioning it now, because any search on keywords "google chrome ads" return completely unrelated results.

There are these old questions:

* https://support.google.com/chrome/forum/AAAAP1KN0B0FrX8mjNQu...

* https://support.google.com/websearch/forum/AAAAgtjJeM41xpRdM...

* https://support.google.com/chrome/forum/AAAAP1KN0B08liXq3dy9...

* https://www.quora.com/Why-am-I-being-shown-ads-for-Google-Ch...

Also this news piece: https://www.techspot.com/news/79940-how-youtube-employees-ki... While the article is about Google advertising three different browser in that particular banner, you can see on the screenshot there is another ad, that is just for Google Chrome. That's the ad that was shown all the time on Google Search and Youtube.

Thanks! I guess the Chrome ads on Google/Youtube show the influence devs can have after all =)

Not sure what you mean, but as an anecdote I quit using desktop Linux years ago and whenever I go to developer conferences, the majority are on MacOS and I think I see more people on Windows 10 than on Linux.

That people wouldn't buy into Apple stuff is a big assumption, because we did do just that, for better or worse. Speaking of which, I see many more successful commercial desktop apps for MacOS than for Windows or Linux combined, even if Windows still has a much bigger market share. And this happened since before Apple's App Store for MacOS became a thing.

I was also one of Facebook's early adopters, many of my programmer friends were too. Being from Romania, let me tell you, the early adopters here were all software developers ;-)

There might be some bias in there.

" see many more successful commercial desktop apps for MacOS than for Windows or Linux combined"

Office profits by itself would crush all MacOS application sales.

Maybe it is easier for the single developer to create something profitable on MacOS but that's because the bigger players have marketshare over windows in the profitable niches.

Office has always been available for the Mac. How many indy developers and small shops outside of games really have been successful making software?

You can trivially pick out the macs visually how are you picking out who is running Linux?

> If geeks were influential, the “year of the Linux desktop” I don't see how that's relevant, if I set up or recommend Firefox on my parents computer with ad block they're going to trust me and use it over chrome/safari/edge. If I set up Linux instead of windows they're going to be extremely confused, annoyed and won't let me touch their computer again..

Geeks are extremely influential to their non technical friends but why would you ever impose Linux on them? I don't see how it would benefit them and you'd have to deal with the endless fallout and questions that arise.

Dell once sold a “Developer Edition” laptop, so there is definitely a sizable market and developers do have some influence.

https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/dell-laptops-and-notebo...

They still do: https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/cty/pdp/spd/xps-13-7390...

Damn, that's kind of a nice laptop. Pretty tempting actually, though I'd probably install Windows on it personally.

I was curious what specs made it "developer"-mode, and it looks like it's just a really big battery, very bright screen with good viewing angles, and easy to open with one hand (and a stable screen when you're moving around with it). Seems like it's specifically aimed at devs that work remote jobs and might be working outside from time to time?

Still, neat idea.

They still sell a Linux variant of the XPS series, which works mostly fine. It's not a patch on the X1 Carbon, but it's functional.

All geeks don't hate FB and Apple. Your vantage point may be too far. Chrome's dev tools did have a lot to do with its rise in use among devs.

I think you're overestimating how unpopular those things are with devs/geeks. As a current (comp sci) college student, I can say that while less popular than in the general public - Windows, Facebook, and Apple's ecosystem are still used by a large number of my peers.

Over a decade? Try 3, and that is in the conservative side.

> Developers and computer geeks have been overestimating their influence for over a decade. I

It's a lot easier to get people to switch browsers than OSs.

One is a click or two. The other feels like you are breaking this expensive machine.

When someone buys a computer that works after turning it on switching oses seems risky.

> This led to a Chrome-optimized web and while Google isn't necessarily to blame--

Uh that seems to imply that Google has not been striving to accomplish exactly that. Because they surely haven't been working to prevent a browser engine mono culture. Which is kind of your only option, if your browser engine holds an absolute majority of usage and you don't want to be "to blame" for the browser engine mono culture.

Seriously it puzzles me, how is this not Google's doing.

I mean it's understandable they would do it. They're doing it. Who else would be doing it, the informed preference of millions of users? That would be a first ...

I don't understand your point.

When you build a product, the purpose is to get customers / users, as many as possible. And when you win a majority market share, then that will make your product a de facto standard.

Google could have introduced a lot of proprietary, non-standard extensions to Chrome (not Chromium, but Chrome itself, aka the proprietary version), screwing everybody else in the process. Think Microsoft's ActiveX or XAML.

And while there are some glaring exceptions — like Chrome being responsible for the standardization of DRM, which is now keeping smaller open source Chromium forks out of the market, Google has been playing nice with web standards organizations, being major contributors, alongside Mozilla. And sure, they are in a position to impose pretty much anything they want, but they are fairly conservative in picking their battles, PNaCL versus WebAssembly comes to mind.

Google might be guilty of anti-competitive practices, but in my opinion it is the software developers themselves that are to blame for a Chrome-optimized web. This is because they (we?) continue to use Chrome for optimizing and testing web interfaces, while neglecting Firefox and Safari.

There are still a lot of QoL features that Firefox DevTools misses. For example autocomplete for CSS classes, a tab for handling Service Workers, commands to perform actions (like disabling JavaScript), etc.

I find myself switching between browsers just to take advantage of the different features each one provides which is slighly annoying. I would sincerely love some kind of unified DevTools.

Yeah, and vice versa as well, of course - for example, I don't think the Chrome DevTools tell you why certain CSS declarations do not apply.

That said, the Firefox DevTools have been progressing really fast since the rewrite to React was completed, so I'm hopeful that it'll practically be the unified DevTools soon.

One reason that I use Firefox DevTools mostly is because in the inspector it shows you what events are attached to a DOM element. It's really helpful for debugging legacy applications. Sure, Chrome has something similar but it's a bit more hidden.

Firefox sure has CSS auto-complete (at least in the inspector).