Re:On Our Abusive Relationship with Mozilla’s Firefox
by redbergy on Friday October 23, 2020 @12:05PM
(#24870933)
> “If you stop using Firefox,”, Mozilla advocates will tell you, “Chrome will become the only real web browser”.
> Yes, but isn’t it a bit too late to worry about that? And what change do individual choices make here?
I don't think it's too late. Firefox exists because the same situation was happening in the late 90s/early 2000s - replace Chrome with Internet Explorer and I could believe this was written in 2002.
It's a different landscape today[1], but I maintain it wasn't too late then and it isn't now - the fact that we're talking about FF almost 20 years after its first release is a testament to that.
I'm not a daily FF user, but I am part of the install base. I think that diversity in the browser ecosystem is extremely important and I'm not a "Mozilla advocate".
[1] I'm guessing part of the early success of FF was its support for OSX/Linux where IE had no reach and it gained them a lot of early traction/users so it isn't an apples to apples comparison with Chrome today. But, I remember the times, and many (even non-techie) people would adamantly install and switch to FF as the first action when they got a new PC/fresh Windows install - those individual choices added up to a very large user base.
> Yes, but isn’t it a bit too late to worry about that? And what change do individual choices make here?
I don't think it's too late. Firefox exists because the same situation was happening in the late 90s/early 2000s - replace Chrome with Internet Explorer and I could believe this was written in 2002.
It's a different landscape today[1], but I maintain it wasn't too late then and it isn't now - the fact that we're talking about FF almost 20 years after its first release is a testament to that.
I'm not a daily FF user, but I am part of the install base. I think that diversity in the browser ecosystem is extremely important and I'm not a "Mozilla advocate".
[1] I'm guessing part of the early success of FF was its support for OSX/Linux where IE had no reach and it gained them a lot of early traction/users so it isn't an apples to apples comparison with Chrome today. But, I remember the times, and many (even non-techie) people would adamantly install and switch to FF as the first action when they got a new PC/fresh Windows install - those individual choices added up to a very large user base.