this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
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Chrome and all the various Chromium spinoffs got popular partially through anti-competitive tying, but not entirely. Safari, IE, and Edge were also anti-competitively tied and yet they did not see meteoric rises in the same way.
The reality is that a large part of the reason that Chrome got popular is because they wrote the best JavaScript engine, by orders of magnitude, right at the time that web apps were taking off. Google wrote a better JavaScript engine because they were a web app company, but it benefited every single page that used any Javascript.
While Firefox devs were still debating whether or not a web page should just be a static document, the web browser became the most successful ever cross platform development framework in history, vastly out stripping the likes of Java and Q++, and yet, it's 10 years later and Firefox still does not have proper PWA support.
I recently had to learn about that, targeting PWA. :(
When I read "you can install an extension for it" I thought that would be simple enough. But that extension then requires an additional Firefox installation which causes it's own share of problems. (Comparatively complicated setup process despite simple walkthrough wizard with installer integration, program shortcuts being added, Firefox onboarding being triggered in the PWA.)