this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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That's a bit revisionist.
Mozilla and Thunderbird existed as decent alternatives, but they had a tiny market share of generally tech minded people, which was a much smaller subset of the population than it is now.
Chrome and Gmail came in and completely demolished the market. They came in with a strong brand name, and a huge suite of features that worked well, and really ignited the Cloud app paradigm.
I have mained Firefox on desktop throughout the decades. But give credit where credit is due.
You asserted that it was really Mozilla that set up IE's downfall, and that's what my dissent is about.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
Mozilla/Netscape hovered around 20-30% throughout the 2000s. I.E. was the clear winner without any danger of losing its throne until Chrome came along.
Being a steady competitor != destroy. Chrome and the Google suite is what upended the lopsided browser war.
You're 100% right. For years Firefox was really the only game in town that was competitive with IE. Even Mac OS had a "IE for Mac OS" because otherwise the Internet (mostly) wouldn't work on a Mac.
By the time Chrome was released, Google basically had to explain why they were creating their own browser given that IE, Firefox, Safari, and other browsers (WebKit was a fork of KHTML from KDE) were already available. At the time, they justified it with performance enhancements and a different process model for Chrome. There was a good case to be made and Chrome was indeed faster when it was launched.
It's pretty obvious at this point that the only business model available for Google and most of the other big tech companies is to hoover up your data and use it for the presentation of ads. If I were a more of a conspiracy believer (or even thought that Google had some foresight), I would think that the only reason Google launched Chrome was to eventually do away with ad blockers.
Why is everyone forgetting Opera?
Because it was paid or ad supported until 2005. In 2008 chrome was released, so it had only 3 years as a free (as in free beer) browser without google as a competition
Firefox replaced IE everywhere around me before Chrome ceased to be some funny curiosity.
I personally used Opera, though.