=================
 Firefox decline
=================

There are recent news about Mozilla laying off much of its staff,
while FF usage share declines. I've read news on the same topic a
couple of weeks ago, and it actually made me to chuckle when I've
imagined Chrome being the only widely used (and required for online
banking, government services, etc) web browser, abusing the monopoly,
with casual users calling web browsers, WWW, and Internet just
"Google". Not a particularly nice thing to laugh at, perhaps rather
similar to laughing at people falling, just all the Internet users at
once instead of a single person.

Then it made me to wonder whether activities I'd normally rather avoid
(e.g., development of clunky/heavy/laggy/buggy SPAs, out of popular
ones) would seem more acceptable in such a world: if Google eats WWW,
such an activity wouldn't be harming a (conceptually) nice and
distributed system that is/was WWW, but only Google. Or not even quite
"harming", since commercial companies tend to have different
priorities than non-commercial systems, and user expectations from
those differ. It reminded me of a similar sentiment I've heard a while
ago, from a person working on a sleazy website full of ads and
copyright infringement: "the web is a mess already, this wouldn't make
it much worse". Which, in turn, reminds of the broken windows theory.

It is pleasant to imagine that the JS-infested bits of WWW would be
left for Google to chew on, while the surviving parts would be nice
and simple, but it doesn't seem plausible. Likely it'll be something
boring and non-catastrophic though: for instance, FF switching to
Blink and V8, but major web browser vendors developing them together
and preventing an absolute Google monopoly anyway. Or Mozilla
splitting and continuing development, just as Netscape did. Or things
just staying the way they are now for a bit longer.


----

:Date: 2020-09-23