Comment by bitpush

> 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.

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.

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

> 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...

> 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.

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)

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.

There was a period of time when our university help desk was installing and recommending Firefox for students and faculty to use over ie6.

not via marketshare

That's not an entirely fair measure though, considering Microsoft lost an antitrust case that was brought because they were unfairly leveraging their monopoly in operating systems to give them an advantage in browser adoption. The DOJ threatened to break up Microsoft over it, and eventually only stopped when Microsoft added an option for users to pick a difference default browser over IE.

By that time IE's dominance was beyond Mozilla's reach and it was only when Google leveraged their monopoly in online advertising that a real alternative option for users became viable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

That was maybe a factor in the EU. In the US, MS never really stopped their anti-competitive activities. IE has been distributed as the default browser for windows in the US since forever.

MS presented the choice for a browser from 2009->2011.

IDK that MS has ever actually fixed the situation since their last fine in 2013.

IIRC, firefox really started taking off around Firefox 3, which was first released in 2006. Looks like they officially beat IE in 2010. That does seem to line up with MS's implementation of the browser choice screen.

lol, please tell me at what point in time Microsoft stopped its monopolistic and anti-competitive activities.

Yes, that's the point.

Back in the naughties, testing a web page with Netscape seemed miraculous because if it rendered correctly with a PC, chances are it would with a Mac, and with Linux.

Microsoft didn't care about standards. If a page rendered incorrectly in other browsers than Windows MSIE they didn't care (even if it was Mac MSIE).

But that difference wasn't enough to save Netscape because, as a web browser, Netscape was a bloated mess.

When Firefox came along, it was popular with web designers, for the same reasons as Netscape was - but its streamlined design catered to regular users.

No, it was larger than many of the other browsers (like Opera), and size wasn't different enough to matter. Back then, download time was entirely quantized by "one night", because the only thing that mattered was that it finished by morning so someone picking up the phone wouldn't sever the dialup connection. A substation piece of software, like a browser, was happening during sleep time, regardless of size, and rare, so two night would also be fine (resuming was trivial with ftp, where these were sourced, usually from university mirrors).