Currently you can't really compete with Google's/Alphabet's market and marketing power. If you get too close, product-wise, they can just throw more money at their own product in your field. It needs political market intervention to make a dent that would count enough for others even getting a theoretical chance of getting one step ahead again.
While that might be true in little web standard pieces here and there for Firefox compared to Chrome (and it certainly is vice-versa), the much smaller teams will always play catch up.
Re:Firefox lost 50M users since 2019
by TheRealPomax on Tuesday August 03, 2021 @08:01PM
(#28055772)
Sorry, have you looked at what you need to implement in order to even be a browser that's shit, but at least supports the modern web? Because everyone's answer is "that would be Chromium" right now. There are so many web APIs, no one person, and not even a small team, could "just" make a good, competitive browser.
There is no "just". There is so very much no "just" anywhere near this topic.
Yes, I actually have ;) I am a founder of a browser company. Our team is building a browser from scracth, minus the rendering engine for which we have chosen WebKit. Many of our beta testers have already indicated that our browser (Orion) is same or better than Safari, Chrome or Firefox. Hence, I believe it can be done and we'd welcome more formidable competition from Firefox in order to take on Chrom(e/ium
) clones that took over the web.
How about actually just making a good, competitive browser instead? Firefox is not failing because of Google's monopoly; it is failing because as a product it is unable to compete and beat Chrome where it matters. If not Mozilla, I am pretty sure somebody else will make such browser (and search engine, and email... ) eventually.