Firefox is overall a fine browser. Still has 2% marketshare.
There's also the fact that websites themselves need to be mindful of multiple browser engines existing because of Safari. Once users are able to install Chrome on iPhones, developers will just abandon every other engine wholesale.
Google has been bombarding Firefox users with "Upgrade to Chrome" notices on their properties. Google kept having "oopses" that blocked browsers based on User-Agent strings, rather than capabilities.
Google also plays "fire and motion" with Web standards. They have a tendency to use non-standard(-yet) features on their websites. This gives them a perfect excuse to make other browsers look technically inferior (when the features are missing or the browser is blocked) or slow (when the features are implemented using inefficient polyfills). The unfairness is the one-sided choice of using whatever cutting-edge or Google-specific feature Chrome has, while they'd never do this in other direction. If Firefox implemented a new feature first, Google would never tell Chrome users that Chrome sucks and they need to upgrade to Firefox.
> Once users are able to install Chrome on iPhones, developers will just abandon every other engine wholesale.
This is the thing that is most concerning. We’ve seen this happen before. We ended up with an Internet Explorer monoculture that paralysed front-end development for over a decade. Huge numbers of developers were happily writing Internet Explorer-only websites and didn’t care about any other browser at all. There’s a real danger that this ends the open web and turns it into a Chrome platform controlled by Google.
> Firefox is overall a fine browser. Still has 2% marketshare
Firefox used to have a 25-30% share before Mozilla shat the bed by neglecting it while treating Firefox like a money-piñata to fund a series of dead-end, copy-cat projects in their big-tech cosplay era.
Blaming Chrome for Firefox and Safari being shit (as reflected by the percentage of users who voluntarily use the respective browsers) removes their culpability. Chrome had to grow their share from 0%.
Chrome did that three ways: 1) performing better and crashing less than mainstream alternatives (just IE and Firefox, then) on non-Mac platforms (so, most desktop computers) for a good long while; 2) aggressive advertising to trick people who don't actually give a shit what browser they're running (or even know) into downloading it because "google said it would make my gmail work better" or "I dunno, google just told me to download this so I did"; and, later in the race, by 3) being the default on most Android installations.
One of three major factors involved actually being good, and I'd bet the other two factors overwhelm that one.
Many people have memory-holed Chrome's malware-grade tactics like including an installer in unrelated sourceforge downloads and now think that Chrome won strictly on its merits.
People have similar misconceptions about Google search.
The reality is that both had significant advantages over their competition when launched, but the company also used anticompetitive tactics to ensure dominance once those gaps closed.
I forgot how often individual webpages could take down your entire browser! On Chrome, it'd just crash the perpetrator tab. Chrome was also fast - really, really fast. Even if one was "tricked" into using it, you wouldn't want to go back to using other browsers - they put in the work.
> One of three major factors involved actually being good, and I'd bet the other two factors overwhelm that one
Counterpoint: Microsoft Edge on Windows has the same 2 factors going for it, but failing to replicate Chrome's ascendancy. Edge and Windows pleading with you to not install Chrome is kinda sad.
Edge (and basically every other browser besides Safari and Firefox) is a chromium fork though, so even though it only has like a 5% market share, it's still bumping up the engine's overall market share.
My point was that Chrome didn't win on marketing alone (as disproved by Edge dismal numbers). That said: browser marketshare metrics breakout the "brand" and not just the engine: for a long time, Chrome's rendering engine was downstream of Safari's WebKit before being forked outright as Blink.
That Microsoft abandoned Trident for a Chromium fork speaks volumes on the amount of innovation and engineering effort Google poured into Chrome/Chromium - I don't understand how it can be controversial to suggest that Chromium wins on its merits. The gaggle of browsers opted to fork Chromium rather than WebKit or Gecko because Chromium is best-in-class.
I agree that Chrome won mostly on merit, but I think it stays winning on inertia and marketing. There's just not that big of a difference now to the end user when using Safari or Firefox vs Chrome based browsers in my opinion. Safari's performance is fine. Let's not forget that Google retired their public benchmark suite because V8 wasn't beating JSC.
I can't say the same about the Trident based Edge though, it just wasn't as nice to use.
> The gaggle of browsers opted to fork Chromium rather than WebKit or Gecko because Chromium is best-in-class.
If I was making the decision to make browser, and finances were on the line, I'd pick Chromium just because other people have already done it. If I was doing it for fun, I'd rather just contribute to Ladybird.
There's also the fact that websites themselves need to be mindful of multiple browser engines existing because of Safari. Once users are able to install Chrome on iPhones, developers will just abandon every other engine wholesale.