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0 pointscogman103mo ago0 comments

Firebug was a big reason for webdevs to adopt firefox in the first place. Part of what made chrome succeed is it came out with a pretty robust set of webdev tools right from the get-go.

But also, google spent a mountain of money advertising chrome.

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ghurtado3mo ago

> Part of what made chrome succeed is it came out with a pretty robust set of webdev tools right from the get-go.

I think this factor isn't given enough weight in the shift to Firefox.

At that time, the largest pain point in web development was (by a long shot) browser compatibility.

When developers fell in love with Firefox, they started pushing business requirements away from IE and towards the browser that didn't feel like it was their enemy. Alongside with this there was also massive shift to start taking web standards seriously, which is another area where IE dropped the ball spectacularly

It took a few years, but eventually pointy haired managers got sick of our whining and gave in.

cogman10OP3mo ago

We, no joke, ultimately were able to drop our support for IE6->8 because of the youtube "we are dropping support for IE" banner. We spun it to our bosses as "If google is doing this, we should be able to."

FridayoLeary3mo ago

Some time ago there was a post here about it. The guy claimed he and a few other fed up devs made that banner on their own initiative. The whole thing was a huge bluff because at the time google had no such plan but it gained so much momentum that they went ahead with it eventually.

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fragmede3mo ago

Which, if you haven't read it before, the story of how they did that is worth the read.

https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6

hi_hi3mo ago

It's hard to state just how much of a game changer Firebug was for web development. Before that your only option was "alert()"ing or outputting directly to the page.

Once Chrome came along with their devtools, improvements quickly escalated between the 2 before Google eventually won out.

I can't recall the exact point in time when my use of Firefox fell off, but it was probably due to the account integrations with Chrome.

boothby3mo ago

Around 2006 or 2007, I was working on the Sage Notebook. I did a little JavaScript injection, and managed to make the notebook execute JavaScript instead of sending Python code to the server and printing the result. Lo and behold, I could interact with my JavaScript environment on any browser we supported (ie, ff, safari and Opera). I don't recall if firefox had its JavaScript console yet but it was a game changer on those other browsers.

paradox4603mo ago

Chrome has the advantage that they inherited webkits inspector. The chrome team made improvements, yes, but it originated in Safari

throwup2383mo ago

> But also, google spent a mountain of money advertising chrome.

Not to mention preferential treatment like the Youtube anti-IE campaign [1]

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/4/18529381/google-youtube-in...

outside12343mo ago

To be fair to Google, they also kicked ass on implementation at the beginning too.

Chrome was a lot faster and a lot lighter (in the beginning)

MaKey3mo ago

> But also, google spent a mountain of money advertising chrome.

That money was also used to increase the user base via drive-by installations, e. g. while installing Adobe Reader you had to deselect the Chrome installation, otherwise you'd find yourself with a new standard browser afterwards.

evilduck3mo ago

Chrome borrowed their webdev tools from Webkit, who borrowed them from KHTML. Chrome launched with dev tools, but they didn't develop their own distinct version of them for many years after launching the browser.

cxr3mo ago

> Chrome borrowed their webdev tools from Webkit, who borrowed them from KHTML.

Neither KDE nor OS X ever shipped their built-in Web Inspector prior to the appearance of Firebug in 2006, and by that point WebKit and Safari were already in full swing. The very first iteration[1] of Web Inspector appeared around the same time as Firebug and was an original contribution by Apple; it wasn't borrowed from KHTML.

1. <https://web.archive.org/web/20070621162114/https://webkit.or...>

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