They were losing because MS bundled IE with every device. Eventually they MS lost an anti trust case against it and it opened up the market, which is before that graph begins.

Well 30 years later we are back where we started.

Chrome is where it is because it is preloaded on most phones on the planet (the other ecosystem has a different preloaded browser). The other thing is that it was advertised on the most visited page on the internet for 20 years.

Most internet users don't even use desktop/laptops, they use mobile devices and likely have no idea there is any other option than chrome.

Exactly, this is just about the most lucid explanation of the market share graph I've seen on HN. It's baffling to me that the rise of Chrome, distributed via Google, on phones and on Chromebooks, somehow doesn't enter people's explanations of market share change when talking about Mozilla. It probably the biggest single driver of market share change by an order of magnitude.

> They were losing because MS bundled IE with every device.

They weren't losing, they had 10x the market share they have now. MS lost an antitrust case, they weren't forced to do anything even after they lost, and big tech learned (correctly) that there was not ever going to be any serious antitrust enforcement on platforms.

Chrome came out with a heavily marketed browser that some people liked (but was far more marketed than loved.) Firefox then intentionally destroyed its own browser to make it a wonky clone of Chrome, even down to trivial cosmetic features and version numbering. Firefox's strength was its extensions ecosystem, so it took special relish in destroying that, and joy in painting the users that were bothered by this as stochastic terrorists. They claimed that the perpetual complainers just didn't understand the "normal users" of the market while Firefox shrunk from 30% of it to 2.5% of it. Meanwhile, they took to forcing bizarre, unhideable features that should have been extensions, and doing bizarre marketing experiments.

> Most internet users don't even use desktop/laptops, they use mobile devices and likely have no idea there is any other option than chrome.

Firefox gets all of its margin from Google, and is 2.5% of the market. There isn't really another option, no matter what Mehta says. Firefox gets more than all of its margin from Google - Google cash allows it to blow money on goofy money-losing projects that look good on resumes. Meanwhile, Wikipedia has 100x what it needs to run in the bank, entirely from donations, still keeps dishonestly begging, and still keeps collecting.

But Firefox claims that's impossible. It has to be fully dependent on Google because reasons, and those reasons are that it chooses its direction based on Google's desires.

edit: the craziest part of this common argument about Google bundling is that Google doesn't have anything like the monopoly that Microsoft had, Microsoft bound its browser to everything it could figure out how to, and Microsoft was still losing a huge section of the market to Firefox. The idea that Google is some special impossible challenge when Microsoft owned every computer is insane. It's impossible to beat Google when they pay your salary.

It's worth noting that Chrome was just legitimately a good product in a space where the competition wasn't blowing any minds. The people that switched over saw how much better a browser can be and spread the word.

Allowing the user to pull tabs into its own windows and merge them back was magic back then, as was including search and url in a minimalistic bar, when other browsers had 3-row bars at times. Such a simple and elegant product.

How the mighty have fallen.

For sure.

For a couple years Chrome was noticeably faster than IE/FF which is what caused tech oriented people to switch.

FF and even IE closed the gap for a little bit but once Chromes dominance took old I imagine the fact that no one tests things on FF any more has probably caused it to slip performance wise.

It wasn’t challenging the market leader that made them successful. It’s because Firefox was precisely a better browser at the time, and their marketing/activism around open web standards was great. There were lots of “challenging” going back then.

But simply challenging isn’t enough. People like to tell this tale where just being an underdog gets you some benefit. But it doesn’t. Firefox was way leaner, opened faster, had extensions, so on.