Microsoft wasn't trying to control the web; they were trying to hobble it so that everyone kept on developing for win32. In retrospect, not a great strategy, but many companies try to kick the can down the road, and it often works, so I can't fault them too much.
Of course large companies are always a bit schizophrenic with different departments moving in different directions, but I think fundamentally 1995-2000's Microsoft was trying to improve the web, and get people to use it. Just as Google does now they tried to blur the line between desktop and web, just that where Google is trying to move all desktop functionality to the web interface, Microsoft was trying to make all web functionality accessible in a desktop interface.
Explorer and Internet Explorer were deeply married, with the ability to set web pages as desktop background, the Explorer of Windows 98 having a "sidebar" that was an HTML page, the ubiquitous help format being compressed HTML pages with index and search, ActiveX giving webpages desktop-application-like powers, JScript being a powerful javascript-compatible automation language for Windows. Windows was full of web technologies in the dot-com era, many bringing web and desktop closer together. This stopped an reversed course in the early 2000s. You could now say that's classic embrace-extend-extinguish, but the collapse of the dot-com bubble explains explains the sudden lack of investment and increasing distance between desktop and web just as well.
Eh-- I think that 2-3 years of breathing room they bought-- and killing Netscape's "the browser is the operating system" dreams-- was probably worthwhile from their point of view.
4% of global browser usage can be described in many ways (defeated, miserable, collapse compared to the past etc) but it definitely is not dead and is one of few developed browsers.
Maybe if they replaced top Mozilla leadership. Apple had to reinvent itself back into relevance. Mozilla refuses to, and just keeps stagnating in a cesspool of rot and nostalgia. They're less a browser maker these days and more an ineffective think tank. I think Google keeps them around just as a "useful fool" so they can look less like a monopoly...
Probably better for a different org with different leadership to start over. I wouldn't count on Mozilla to miraculously reinvent itself.
There's no plan, no growth, they don't have a mobile OS, and users will use whatever browser (aka, "the internet") comes with their device. On Windows, Edge is being heavily "promoted". Most of the technical people I know gave up, unfortunately.
Corporate + institutional mass installs on Windows and Linux — e.g. university computer labs — are still mostly Firefox. It's easier to lock down something that's not part of the OS; and it's easier to create a local-network roaming-user-profile experience that's seamless between the machines that must run Windows (regular labs) and the machines that must run Linux (CompSci labs.)
If we're arguing about whether 4% global usage constitutes dead, then yes, it's truly dead and Mozilla is completely irrelevant. Even Microsoft is more important these days (again).
The difference between 0% and 5% is that at 0%, if you want an alternative, you have to write it yourself, but at 5%, the alternative exists. Mozilla is not dead.
If you don’t like what Google is doing, don’t pretend that Firefox does not exist. Do something instead. File bug reports, send patches, donate to those who are working on Firefox and countering Google.
Even if you don't trust Mozilla, they cannot do what Google is already doing. Mozilla doesn't have nearly enough market power to force something like WEI down our throats.
>If we're arguing about whether 4% global usage constitutes dead, then yes, it's truly dead and Mozilla is completely irrelevant. Even Microsoft is more important these days (again).
According to these folks[0], Firefox has a 3.29% market share globally. They also claim there are 4.66 billion browser users globally.
If those numbers are correct, Firefox has a bit more than 150,000,000 users worldwide.
If my software had 150,000,000 users, I'd consider that wildly successful.
Other folks have different ideas/takes on that, I suppose. But it's food for thought nonetheless.
Linux market share on the desktop was 3.08% on June (source:0). I don't see it dying anytime soon because of that. Firefox isn't pushed by Google, hence the much smaller adoption; it's not about quality but rather which one is being advertised the most.
Pretty sure download statistics don’t reflect usage. And are we even sure those are unique downloads?
At any rate, 100M downloads across the lifetime of the app isn’t much to write home about when considering the billions (plural) that use Google products. Furthermore, there’s an entire class of people that think Chrome IS the internet. It’s wildly more common than the average HN would think.
It's only alive in the same sense that a zombie is... constantly moaning and groaning while begging for brains, shambling aimlessly along waiting to be put out of its misery
Mozilla is far from healthy but calling it dead is overstating things.