Firefox had 30% market share in 2010, I would hardly call that "niche", especially for a browser that didn't come bundled with your operating system or have the marketing power of the world's default search engine.
It also had an outsized impact on the web because it was a popular with developers for doing web development.
> Firefox had 30% market share in 2010, I would hardly call that "niche", especially for a browser that didn't come bundled with your operating system or have the marketing power of the world's default search engine.
In 2010 Firefox 3.5 had a estimated global market share of 15-20%. BTW nobody thought any of the stats were accurate at the time as they were easily skewed. Some counters would report 30%, but it was an estimate and not a reliable one.
On the sites I was building, which were mostly travel sites, e-commerce and later gambling. Firefox was maybe 5-10%. I am also no in the US. I just didn't see anything like what was reported in site stats for the things I was working on.
Later on it was IE and Chrome and Firefox was still at maybe 10%. I really cared about compatibility and web standards at the time and made every effort to make sure that the sites work. So I knew it wasn't a "the site doesn't work in this browser".
> It also had an outsized impact on the web because it was a popular with developers for doing web development.
So people that used the net heavily used Firefox and people that didn't tended to use IE. So on some sites Firefox usage would be far higher than it would otherwise be.
e.g. People using IE might only use the internet for online shopping, checking mails, so visiting an online shop, booking a flight etc. Whereas many Firefox users would be using Social media, Blogs, Forums or YouTube more heavily. So you will see two completely different pictures depending on what your site's audience would be.
I was in perf engineering at the time. we would switch between a handful of string concatenation methods every browser release. it wasn't much about real performance, but just shifting trade-offs in the jit. but google PR team was very good at running in front of the changes and pointing their overly optimized way to magazines. so they would run an array concat test that was much faster while being much slower in plus sign concat, but they often left that out. anyway, everyone drank the coolaid. 100% of the v8 performance over spider monkey was not attaching debuggers and dev tools. and sadly, mozilla had to follow. nowadays we are mostly back to square one (still some niceties from dalvik missing).
true performance improvement came much later than that.
No I am not. I remember this clearly and all my friends were complaining about it before chrome was released. I just checked the dates. Firefox 3 was released a whole year before Chrome.
I really don't appreciate it when people tell me that I have been swayed by some big company, when my friends and I were complaining about it before we even knew that Google had a browser.
Firefox used to just completely lock up. Wouldn't load a tab. Chrome didn't with the same number of tabs. I am not talking about JS perf speed or anything like that, I am talking about the browser just not locking up when using more than few tabs.
that's my point. you're comparing a very capable debugger that used all your 4gb at the time. then came chrome with a very limited dev tool which used slightly less than your full 4gb of ram and you liked it, but never considered having ff without all the js debugging niceties that ate the extra ram.
When browsing Firefox 3.0 would randomly not load a site when say about 10 tabs were in the window and hang for about 30 seconds. It was annoying. There was an obvious issue with how it handled the tab isolation (it didn't really that was the issue). IE 8 and Opera didn't do this.
It has nothing to do with my impression of Google Chrome because Google Chrome didn't exist at the time.
I've used Firefox since version 1.5. I don't remember it being bad around version 3.0.
There's a long time during which Firefox was somewhat slow, and I remember the spidermokey team releasinf the famous Are we fast yet website that was saying no during this period.
It was horrendously bad. If you had more than 10 tabs open it was painful. I was using it at the time on a relatively high spec machine for the time (Core 2 Quad) and 8GB of ram.
I was so happy when Chrome came out. Over the years I've tried going back to Firefox and I've gone back to either Chrome, Ungoogled Chromium or Brave.
This happened enough that I think it was partially fixed in 3.5.
At the time 3.0 came out I was still in University and every other student I spoke to had the same experience. People also experienced in my first place of work in 2009.
This problem was ultimately fixed with 4.0 when they did something different with how multi-tab worked.
Chrome when it came out was much faster than Firefox. It was lighter and worked better.
Also macs had moved to Intel chips a few years before and were actually pretty decent so a lot of people were moving to them.
Also of this chipped away at XP and the few people running XP machines were diehard xp fans or corps that were dragging their heels upgrading.