Ben Gilbert: observation

Transcript context

…It's an immortal app. It's the universal app. The bigger the screen and the better the input and bandwidth, the more you live in the browser. You don't want to install some—even Slack, we have a lot of our users of Slack. Brave uses the browser to load slack as a web app instead of loading this bloated electron app that Slack has been slowly maintaining. There's a real trade-off there that I think is part of the browser's immortality, but the web content is also sticky and accretive, and that's important too. I'll sum it all up in one sentence. Firefox did really, really well and gained a huge market share. Then when Chrome launched, it's been slowly etched away every year by Chrome now, and it's down around something like 3%. I want to fast forward all the way to the moment where you're starting to think about Brave. Yet, there have been all these attempts to start a new upstart browser that has a different take on things—I'm thinking of Dolphin and RockMelt—that has not worked. RockMelt. The Flock was doing social or web 2.0 and made it the very center of Firefox's growing market. That's not a good growth strategy because you have to get people off Firefox and then somehow beat them on the outer rings of growth. Firefox was already going faster there and you weren't going to get too many defectors from the innermost nerdy hacker Technorati web 2.0 people, so Flock failed. After Chrome came out and was based on the Chrome fork of WebKit, which wasn't its own thing really then, and tried to add social. I haven't talked to Tim Howes about this. I think it was just aimed to try to sell it to Zuck. Well, Zuck doesn't want a browser. He's got a browser. He's very happy with the Facebook web app on the desktop. Then he was, at that point, already aiming at mobile because the iPhone was out and he wanted full native apps on mobile. He was never going to buy RockMelt, so RockMelt failed. Dolphin did well because I think they had this—I forgot her name, she was a great marketer. She got all these distribution and growth hack deals going in various Asian countries. They did an incredible job on making it a good mobile browser as mobile came up through Android. Android double started that G1. What was it called? It was the first Android device.…

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