I don't think any of this fundamentally beats the main problem.
That being platform control and advertising.
Google advertises chrome with it's services and is the incumbent. It's also preloaded and unremovable on Android.
Microsoft advertises edgium on Windows and makes it unremovable.
Apple only allows webkit and safari clones on their platform.
Firefox even if it's the best browser in the world would have the same problem that Linux has. Namely that Linux may be better and fit the needs, but people aren't going to bother installing it. Just look at Windows 10 and how many people are pissed at various aspects from telemetry, updates, ads and still these same people can't be bothered to flash Linux. Linux has something like 1-2% of the desktop market.
The other issue with (2) is that R&D into Firefox will not return money. Not unless they choose to basically switch to blink and offload the R&D costs onto Google. Heck Microsoft themselves did the same because they realized the R&D costs weren't worth it.
If Mozilla wants to stay alive, it needs to diversify and find a niche not dominated/controlled by Google, Microsoft and Apple.
Chrome didn't dethrone IE and displace FF because google advertised it, it was legitimately the best browser at the time. FF was awful, and so was IE.
I keep trying FF, but I honestly haven't found it sufficiently compelling to go back. I don't mix work hardware and personal business, so I don't need multiple profiles. I prefer chrome's debug tools.
Maybe we will see how manifest v3 plays out with uBlock, that might actually be enough.
Yes enthusiasts care about adblock, manifest v3 and performance. That is a very tiny minority of users.
>Chrome didn't dethrone IE and displace FF because google advertised it.
This I almost heavily disagree with. Surprisingly, marketing and advertising is far, far more effective than product performance. Performance helps retain users, but advertising is what moves users. That is nearly always the case.
Chrome was also bundled with Adobe's Flash installer, which is ironic because Chrome bundles its own Flash plugin. So a Firefox user wanting Flash would download Adobe's Flash installer and (if they didn't watch the installer's default settings carefully) would be switched to Chrome. If a Firefox user wanted to switch to Chrome, they would have downloaded Google's Chrome installer, not Adobe's Flash installer.
Adobe had no incentive to change this relationship because they got paid by Google twice: for bundling Chrome in Flash and bundling Flash in Chrome.
There were definitely enough dark patterns and advertisements around Chrome to increase its market share. Chrome may have been faster, but it was also had more rendering issues early on.
> Chrome didn't dethrone IE and displace FF because google advertised it, it was legitimately the best browser at the time. FF was awful, and so was IE.
It started that way, then it dominated because every google search not using chrome popped up “Better with Chrome” or “Try Chrome.” Same with all of Google’s properties. There’s no way to disable this. That’s billions of free adverts every day. It adds up.
I think similarly back in the 90s that IE4 took off because Netscape4 was horrible and then stagnated, but dominated because Windows bundled and required it. They had bundled and required IE2/3 but those were inferior to NN3.
So being good gets them to critical mass and then anticompetitive forces got them to owning.
Firefox got to 30% by being a good browser. An alternative take on why it is now lower: not because of dark patterns but because Google genuinely built a better product. I'm a Firefox user, but because of stubbornness. In all honesty, I find Chrome easier to use and less cluttered.
yes, back when browsers sucked. Performance is hardly the reason of choosing a browser these days, personal preferences, what you are used to, what is given to you, etc...its a good argument for why Google needs to be broken up.
Yea from the old MacOS sure. However, now that iOS apps are looking to be pushed to desktop, do you really think that is gonna continue in the future?
As soon as universal binaries/iOS apps becomes fully fledged on ARM Mac I can imagine Apple just removing support completely. It's almost inevitable the way Apple is progressing to basically move to the iOS style platform control to OS X.
Even from Mozilla's economics perspective, it doesn't make sense for Mozilla to be spending engineering effort maintaining both the iOS and OS X variants for something like 4% of desktop. If it was up to me, I would have just migrated/maintained the Firefox Wrapper iOS and called it a day.
Yes. I do really think that is gonna continue in the future.
I've said this before and I'll probably say it in increasingly irascible tones, but "next year macOS is gonna become just like iOS" is becoming the new "next year is the year of Linux on the desktop."
Yes, Apple will almost certainly keep making security decisions people (including me) don't like, but there's no compelling business decision for trying to lock the Mac down to only App Store installs. Yes, I know Apple gets 30% of software sales that way. No, that is not enough of a reason for them to take the hit to their hardware profits that would undoubtedly entail. Even if it were just a loss of a few percent of Mac sales -- which I think is extremely optimistic -- it'd be coming out of the sales of the most expensive Macs, and making up one lost Mac sale literally requires hundreds of sales on the App Store to make up for it. Any executive at Apple who suggested that would be beat senseless by their accounting department.
Of course it would be stupid to cut it out suddenly.
The real successful strategy is to do it very slowly and gradually. With each release make it a tiny bit more annoying to install and run non-store apps. Make them slower - "this app is not trusted so it needs to be monitored for your safety which might negatively affect its performance". Users will prefer store apps and will put pressure on app developers to publish on app store.
If they do it well then hardly anybody will even notice they finally killed the non-store apps.
For all the reasons I've elucidated in other replies, I simply don't buy this. Also: this year has seen the move, after nearly two decades, from OS X/macOS 10.x to macOS 11.0, a new UI redesign clearly modeled on iOS, and a change to Apple's own processors derived from the ones they use for iPhones and iPads. There would have been no better year to make such a move than this year. It would have been the absolute perfect cover.
If and when both iOS and macOS are replaced by one unified operating system, this would be back on the table. But personally, I wouldn't bet a whole lot of money on it happening even then.
That's also a great point! Apple has not been doing too well at reading the room on this one for a while now, granted, but in a year they've literally been called before Congress over concerns about their control over the iOS application market, "and now we're going to do the same thing for macOS!" would not go over very well.
There are plenty of compelling business decisions including from the developer houses themselves.
Development houses now have an opportunity to bring their software to a larger market share (iPad, iOS and MacOS) whilst maintaining just one code base.
Development houses would also have much stronger piracy prevention (same kind of benefit that enables console games to function).
Development houses would have much stronger control over the running environment (preventing adblock, preventing VPN region bypass etc...).
Development houses would have much more control over updates.
Surprisingly just like the now defunct Mac Servers, Apple doesn't really care about the high end hardware Mac platforms. They only care for those graphic designers/video editor/MS office crowd and their software is coming in iOS forms.
The developers that I hear from have different opinions than what you're expressing here. Many want direct relationships with their customers, for a start, and if you want that, the App Store is right out. And I can't think of a single developer who would say they "would have much more control over updates" if they delivered them through the App Store. (They'd say "oh, honey, no," after they finally caught their breath after the laughing fit.)
As for "Apple doesn't really care about the high end hardware Mac platforms," well. It's possible that they rolled out the Mac Pro just last year as an elaborate ruse to distract us from how much they don't care about the Mac Pro, but it strikes me as relatively unlikely. (And if you think the "graphic designer/video editor" crowd, either users or developers, is on board with moving everything to the App Store, oh, honey, no.)
It's not that we can't be bothered to flash Linux, but that we can't be bothered to deal with the incompatibility issues we will have after we have flashed it.
Again if you are talking about words like 'incompatability' then you are probably closer to the enthusiast techie type 5% than the 95% majority.
That majority doesn't even know about Linux or what flashing even is. They just bought a box from bestbuy/amazon so they can access the internet and email. They stick to the manufacturer defaults and would be stuck with Chrome, Edgium or Safari.
I was indeed talking about normie stuff like games or simple applications. Those are the reasons why I will happily be staying on Windows for the next few years.
Chrome/Chromium/Edge has more features, does more things. Why would I use Firefox except for being stubborn?
I personally moved to Edge from Chrome after they forked Chromium because of better integration with Windows. I wouldn't have before, because it was lacking. Now with feature parity, the integration with Windows has a value.
Chromium can be configured for all of the privacy things Firefox has. There is no inherent other difference. Normal people will always value utility over privacy.
Mozilla can chose to fork Chromium, and come ahead. Chromium/Blink was a fork of WebKit. They made it better. Mozilla can chose a better starting point with Chromium.
I still remember moving from Internet Explorer to Firefox to Chrome now to Edge.
I was blown away by Chrome when it came out. It was just better. Way better.
That being platform control and advertising.
Google advertises chrome with it's services and is the incumbent. It's also preloaded and unremovable on Android.
Microsoft advertises edgium on Windows and makes it unremovable.
Apple only allows webkit and safari clones on their platform.
Firefox even if it's the best browser in the world would have the same problem that Linux has. Namely that Linux may be better and fit the needs, but people aren't going to bother installing it. Just look at Windows 10 and how many people are pissed at various aspects from telemetry, updates, ads and still these same people can't be bothered to flash Linux. Linux has something like 1-2% of the desktop market.
The other issue with (2) is that R&D into Firefox will not return money. Not unless they choose to basically switch to blink and offload the R&D costs onto Google. Heck Microsoft themselves did the same because they realized the R&D costs weren't worth it.
If Mozilla wants to stay alive, it needs to diversify and find a niche not dominated/controlled by Google, Microsoft and Apple.