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0 pointspessimizer3y ago0 comments

I think that what dethroned IE is that using your monopoly to maintain a moat of bugs only works for so long. If the browser is going to continue to be developed, eventually you're going to have to fix the bugs. By then, they were competing with Chrome, which was not bug-ridden and also backed by a juggernaut.

The grassroots push that dethroned Microsoft's browser was Google's browser (aided by Firefox's suicide.)

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ethbr03y ago· 4 in thread

The only thing that ever gets mass migration is substantial superiority in features they use.

Originally, it was tabbed browsing, which Opera and Mozilla had ~5 years before IE. Yes, Microsoft sucked that much in those days.

With Chrome, it was an embedded PDF viewer and V8 performance.

So essentially, mostly people don't switch browsers unless there's a very good reason to do so.

Dalewyn3y ago

This comment is perhaps the most accurate take on the fall of IE.

Firefox dethroned IE not because it was "MuH fReE oPeN sOuRcE sOfTwArE" or "MuH nEtScApE", it was because Firefox was superior to IE in performance and feature set. It was better than IE at being practical and enabling users to do things they needed or wanted to do.

Shortly after, Chrome rolled around and it was superior in performance (RAM hogginess aside) and feature set (for Joe Average, not necessarily power users) to Firefox and dethroned the dethroner.

Firefox will not be a dethroner again, because Firefox is not superior to Chrome. In fact, it's inferior to Chrome: It's been a third-rate Chrome ripoff for at least the last 10 years. None of the Chromium forks will dethrone Chrome either, because they are also third-rate Chrome ripoffs by their very nature.

It is conceivable that some browser superior to Chrome will eventually come out and dethrone it, but that's probably still a long ways away and I would argue the challenge of dethroning Chrome is several orders of magnitudes harder than dethroning IE ever was.

account423y ago

Which is probably why Google is pushing for so many web extensions - to make sure that they stay ahead of everyone else and you need billions just to catch up.

Unfortunately it seems Firefox is falling into the trap and is desparately trying to chase Chrome instead of focusing on significant user experience innovations to distinguish themselves from Chrome, especially ones that Google is unwilling to add to Chrome.

Dylan168073y ago

Am I the only one where chrome was never faster than firefox?

Anyway, if google started pushing firefox the way it does and has pushed chrome, I think that number would start moving pretty fast.

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niutech3y ago

One possibility to dethrone Chrome would be to release Safari for Windows and Linux as open source.

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