Ask HN: Why is evryone making Chrome extensions without a Firfox counterpart?

Is it a lot easier to develop for Chrome?

The last I checked, the market shares are basically equivalent, but maybe Chrome users are more likely to download extensions?

I see this as a problem for Firefox in the future, and if they have a plan to curb this trend.

4 comments

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kyllo 12y ago ↗

Because NaCl. It's basically Google's version of ActiveX, not supported by other browsers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Native_Client

bananaoomarang 12y ago ↗

I wouldn't say NaCl is the main reason. Devs just develop for chrome because they use chrome themselves...

chc 12y ago ↗

Most likely because they're scratching an itch and don't happen to use Firefox.

This is similar to why a lot of projects on Github don't support Windows despite the market share of Windows being much bigger than that of both Linux and OS X put together. Among the demographic Joe Randomdeveloper cares about — himself — Chrome on OS X has 100% market share.

itengelhardt 12y ago ↗

I think the major reason is that the marketshare has changed. Chrome is now at about 2x the marketshare of Firefox.

Source: 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Sum... 2. a German computer magazine called "c't" - latest edition