REMEMBER FIREFOX: Eversince Google Chrome came out in 2008,
it has dominated the market.
The integration with Google services and extensions has made it the go to browser for most people.
But, there are still some people who use other browsers.
Some of these choices are self explanatory.
For example, the second most popular desktop browser is Safari which is not surprising
given that it comes preinstalled on Mac.
The same thing can be said about Microsoft Edge and Interent Explorer as well.
But, what about Firefox?
Firefox currently controls 7.69% of the market and it doesn’t come preinstalled on Windows,
Mac or any mobile device.
So, people who are using Firefox had to go out of their way to get it and they chose
it over chrome.
And given that billions of people around the world use PCs, Firefox’s userbase works
out to a total of 362 million users.
At first, it might be easy to write off this segment as people who are anti big tech and
anti Google.
But, if you take a closer look, you’ll see that this isn’t just some Google hate club.
In fact, there are entire subreddits that discuss why Firefox is the best browser.
These people aren’t using Firefox because they don’t want to use chrome, they’re
using Firefox because they want to use Firefox.
This story becomes even more interesting when you realize how Firefox is funded.
Firefox is a non profit organization and they don’t runs ads or have any other internet
based services.
So, they’re virtually completed funded by donations and by far their largest donor is
actually Google.
In fact, last year, Mozilla pulled in a total of $500 million out of which $450 million
came from Google.
Before Google got involved, Mozilla was actually slashing their workforce and scaling back
their operations.
So, in a way, Google actually saved Firefox when they could’ve just let them die out
and absorbed their marketshare.
So, here’s why hundreds of millions people still use Firefox and why even Google supports
Firefox.
THE STORY OF FIREFOX: To understand why people still use Firefox,
we’ll have to take a look back at why people started using Firefox in the first place.
Taking a look back, the roots of Firefox actually date back to the early 1990s to a company
called Netscape.
A lot of you watching may not even be familiar with Netscape, but back in the day, they were
by far the most dominant internet browser.
But, all of this would change when Microsoft launched Internet Explorer.
Internet Explorer came bundled with Windows, so when people bought new computers, they
just started using Internet explorer instead.
Microsoft would actually end up facing an antitrust lawsuit for this practice which
almost split up the company, but that’s a wholenother story.
Anyway, as Netscape continued to bleed marketshare against Microsoft, they simply couldn’t
keep up the fight.
Microsoft had an advantage in basically every avenue.
They had more brand recognition, more trust, more developing power, and more marketing
power.
So, in a last ditch effort, Netscape would try to make their browser opensource in 1998.
The idea was that tens of thousands of open source developers could help them take on
Microsoft.
They code named the project Mozilla which was a combination of the words Mosaic and
Godzilla, and they were off to the races, or at least that’s what they hoped for.
In reality, they would run into a bunch of roadblocks.
For one, the browser was rather complex for being an opensource project which heavily
limited the number of developers who could help out.
And secondly, Netscape couldn’t even opensource much of the browser because a lot of the code
was licensed from third parties.
They fumbled around like this for several years, but eventually in June of 2002, they
would make the hard decision of scraping everything and starting from scratch.
Initially, the project was called Mozilla Phoenix, but this got them into trouble with
the BIOS manufacturer Phoenix Technologies.
So, they would switch their name to Mozilla Firebird, but this simply created confusion
with the database software Firebird.
So, eventually, they switched their name to Mozilla Firefox and the first official release
of the browser came in February of 2004.
While Firefox faced quite a few challenges in actually launching, the first few years
after launch were actually rather smooth.
By 2008, Firefox would control 30% of the market, and if it wasn’t for Chrome, Firefox
probably would’ve taken majority control.
And the reasoning for this is quite simple.
Firefox was built off the success and back of Netscape which was at one point the most
popular browser in the world.
Firefox was essentially just a rebranded, revamped, open source, modern reboot of Netscape.
So, choosing to use Firefox over the rapidly aging Internet Explorer was a rather easy
choice.
Not to mention, the public distate for Microsoft was rather high throughout the early 2000s
as they were seen as the evil monopoly that you might associate with Google or Facebook
today.
But, very soon, Firefox would be stopped dead in its tracks with the launch of Chrome.
CHROME TAKEOVER: Google Chrome didn’t launch with anything
ground breaking per se.
It was basically just Firefox but from Google with a few little upgrades here and there.
For example, they introduced the idea of sandboxing which made individual tabs independent of
each other.
This made it so that if one tab crashed, the entire browser wouldn’t crash.
Tweaks like this made Chrome marginally faster and more stable than Firefox, but this wasn’t
anything that Firefox couldn’t catch up to.
Catching up wouldn’t really help Firefox though because the speed and stability weren’t
really the selling factors of Chrome.
While they definitely made the experience better, the real selling factors were the
Google ecosystem and developer support.
Starting off with the Google ecosystem, this is self explanatory.
Chrome beautifully integrated with gmail accounts, Google maps, Google drive, Google’s office
products, and of course Google.com itself.
It’s kind of similar to the whole Apple ecosystem with iCloud, iMessage, and Apple
Music.
As people became more reliant on Google’s various services, they tended switch to chrome.
But, it wasn’t just users who preferred chrome either.
Developers were also big fans of chrome because it was built with developers in mind.
Chrome was built around the standards of HTML5, and it even passed the Acid1 and Acid2 tests
from day one.
If you’re not familiar with these tests, they’re basically just a way of gauging
how well a particular browser can display aspects of HTML.
Anyway, as developers started jumping onto the chrome bandwagon, websites became more
and more optimized for chrome.
And pretty soon, it got to the point that if you wanted the best browser experience,
you used chrome.
Firefox was never that far behind, but for the average person, there was really no reason
to ever choose Firefox over chrome.
This was only made worse by Google’s marketing power.
Google didn’t even need to pay anyone to market chrome.
They could just advertise chrome across all of their existing services for free, and that’s
exactly what they did.
In the meantime, Firefox didn’t do much to differentiate themselves.
So, they basically became an opensource version of Chrome.
We should also mention that many parts of Chrome itself were already opensource, so
that wasn’t a very big advantage of Firefox either.
With all the cards stacked against Firefox, they inevitably started losing marketshare
year after year bringing us to where we are today.
THE STATE OF FIREFOX: If Chrome is so good, why do people still
use Firefox?
Well, there’s actually several legitimate reasons for this starting with computational
requirements.
It may not seem like it but chrome is actually rather computationally intense especially
for being a browser.
Remember how we talked about how Chrome treats each tab separately?
Well, it turns out that this requires a bunch of RAM.
Firefox does this to an extent as well, but they limit the number of processes to 6 at
a time.
So, if you have 20 tabs open on Chrome, you’ll have 20 RAM processes.
But, if you open 20 tabs on Firefox, you’ll only have 6 RAM processes which is much kinder
to lower specced devices.
Aside from offering better support for lower specced devices, Firefox also offers better
support for older operating systems.
For example, Chrome is dropping support for Windows 7 in February of 2023 which doesn’t
make any sense.
While its been 13 years since Windows 7 was launched, it was still the second most popular
operating system in the world as of the end of 2020.
So, you would think that Google would continue pouring some money into Windows 7 support,
but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Now, to be fair, Firefox’s extended support also ends around the same time.
But, if neither of them support your OS, it makes more sense to go with the browser thats
friendlier to older computers with lower specs.
Moving on from performance related benefits, we have privacy benefits.
It’s no secret that Google makes most of their money by collecting your data and serving
relevant ads.
Firefox on the other hand is a nonprofit that doesn’t track your browsing history.
By default, Firefox blocks cookies and they generally have substantially better privacy
features than Google given that they don’t have anything gain from making these policies
loose.
Now, it should be noted that Firefox doesn’t wipe out data collection altogether.
If you go to Google.com on Firefox, Google can still collect a bunch of data.
But, if you use Firefox in combination with something like DuckDuckGo, then you actually
have a chance at protecting your privacy.
But, all of this brings up the question.
If Firefox is a competitor to Google and they’re actively working to reduce how much data companies
like Google can collect, why in the world is Google funding Firefox?
WHY GOOGLE FUNDS FIREFOX: Well, the official answer is so that Google
can be the default search engine on Firefox.
But, this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
First of all, if a significant portion of Firefox users are going out of their way to
use Firefox over Chrome.
I bet that they’re also likely to go out of their way to use a different search engine
over Google.
And secondly, if Google were to stop supporting Firefox, then Firefox would likely just lose
marketshare which Google can absorb.
So, it seems like the play for Google would be to just pull the plug on Firefox and increase
their own marketshare.
So, why don’t they do this?
Well, the answer is to protect their monopoly.
Here’s the thing, regardless of whether Google controls Firefox’ marketshare or
not, Chrome is already a monopoly.
I mean, they control 77% of the market.
So, either way, they’d be a monopoly, but if they eliminated Firefox, they’d be a
monopoly at risk.
Right now, when antitrust regulators question them, they have some plausible deniabliity
with Firefox.
They can talk about how they’re single handedly holding up this opensource project and how
they’re encouraging competition.
If they were to let Firefox die, however, that case wouldn’t be nearly as strong.
At the end of the day, the initial popularity of Firefox can be attributed to its roots
in Netscape and its superiority to Internet Explorer.
But, with the launch of chrome and the growth of the Google ecosystem, people have chosen
chrome over firefox by far.
Nonetheless, a non negligible portion of the population still uses firefox because it often
works better with older computers and operating systems, it’s opensource, and it’s way
more privacy driven.
And for the first time, Firefox is actually starting to lean into its differences like
its privacy features instead of just being an open source Chrome.
And as people become more conscious of data privacy, we may just see another surge in
Firefox popularity, but we’ll just have to wait and see.
What’s your favorite browser and why?
Comment that down below.
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