Sure, and as I mentioned elsewhere: before they had Chrome, they aggressively marketed Firefox, paying referral commissions for every Firefox install that included their toolbar. That was in 2005/2006 and ran for years, and was a large part why Firefox became successful: websites got paid to recommend it to their users.
Marketing is a large part of everything, I agree. But the argument I replied to was that it was the monopoly & bundling that made it successful. That's obviously completely false and pure propaganda, trying to absolve Firefox of anything and everything, essentially saying "none of those things matter, it was only Google's evil behavior".
> I'm sure word of mouth had an effect, but it was only a small part of why it succeeded.
I'm not so sure. Internet Explorer as "the perfect tool to download Chrome" wasn't a meme because people watched ads, but because Chrome (on Windows) was easy to download & install and fast & stable. Firefox wasn't any of that in comparison, that's why lots of people I know switched to Chrome back then.
And once you've gotten used to something, you really need a reason to switch back - something that Firefox never provided. Privacy might become that, but Chrome with plugins isn't terrible either, and Firefox sent data to Google for analytics "out of the box" as well (and probably still does?).
I understand that it's nice to have a boogeyman that can be blamed, but I don't think that's accurate. Firefox lost because of Mozilla, not because of Google.
Marketing is a large part of everything, I agree. But the argument I replied to was that it was the monopoly & bundling that made it successful. That's obviously completely false and pure propaganda, trying to absolve Firefox of anything and everything, essentially saying "none of those things matter, it was only Google's evil behavior".
> I'm sure word of mouth had an effect, but it was only a small part of why it succeeded.
I'm not so sure. Internet Explorer as "the perfect tool to download Chrome" wasn't a meme because people watched ads, but because Chrome (on Windows) was easy to download & install and fast & stable. Firefox wasn't any of that in comparison, that's why lots of people I know switched to Chrome back then.
And once you've gotten used to something, you really need a reason to switch back - something that Firefox never provided. Privacy might become that, but Chrome with plugins isn't terrible either, and Firefox sent data to Google for analytics "out of the box" as well (and probably still does?).
I understand that it's nice to have a boogeyman that can be blamed, but I don't think that's accurate. Firefox lost because of Mozilla, not because of Google.