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Comment by Quarrelsome | Hacker News Reader

Firefox was over reliant on plug-ins, gave plug-ins too much power and the plug-in as well as firefox update mechanisms were messy. Chrome did more out of the box than firefox reducing the need for plug-ins, sandboxed plug-ins from destroying general browser performance and most importantly realised that updating was not a user concern and performed updates silently. There were also other innovations that Chrome did first that put them ahead of the field (I particularly remember their genius tab closing behaviour).

_That's_ why they "won" not because of fucking adverts.

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Of course they "won" (or their "win" achieved its current magnitude) because of adverts. It's naive to say otherwise. The technical innovations put them ahead of the curve for a brief period of time. Firefox reacted quite quickly (and was accused of blindly copying Chrome for it), and today there really is little to differentiate the two browsers in terms of performance. That's been the case for a while now. The difference is in google leveraging both its own platform as well as buying billboards and TV ad space for Chrome. That's unprecedented. If you don't think that's having an effect you're essentially saying the people who decided to finance that ad push are idiots.

Despite that, Firefox still leads in market share in Germany (though with current trends that will change this year).

The flaw with this notion, is that neither Firefox nor Opera beat IE.

Chrome did.

Most of the people who argue things like this seem to agree that Firefox and Opera were superior browsers to IE. If that was the case, why hadn't they eaten IE's market share long before Chrome was ever produced?

Could it be that Chrome being widely advertised on the most visited site on the internet helped?

Stats give FF at 45% market share, before Chrome got heavily advertised and took over.

Chrome didn't beat IE. Firefox fought an all-out war and was not going anywhere either. What beat IE is an antitrust lawsuit actually.

I've never seen stats placing Firefox much above 30%, where are you getting 45% from?

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/

For reference, most of the surveys listed by Wikipedia[0] (not including that one, for some reason), list Firefox at about 30% in that period. I assume that the stats in your link comes from visitors to their own site, which given the focus (web development) seems like it could easily be biased towards more technical users (and thus over-represent Firefox compared to wider surveys).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

Regardless of the peak value, your data tends to confirm that IE was on its decline before the introduction of chrome.

It is true, however, that chrome came at about the right time to capture a large share of its users (as well as a good share of FF users).

FF was the better alternative to IE (windows-people we're actually just learning that there even _was_ an alternative) before Chrome was even created.

You seem to have messed up the timeline, or disregard the importance of being the first alternative to IE spread by word of mouth in the public.

The point I'm making is that despite FF being a better alternative for years, it didn't actually crush IE's market share. Chrome did, and I'd put that down to marketing more than quality (as evidenced by quality not being enough for Firefox or Opera).

> _That's_ why they "won" not because of fucking adverts.

Given that Opera was basically "Chrome without Google marketing" I heavily doubt that. (The first version of Chrome was such a blatant Opera clone, it was just funny)

that's a fair point, I more wish to counter the idea that Firefox was a better or even equal product at the time. Chrome was a clearly superior product to Firefox.

Fully accepted. Firefox got comfortable in its position when IE was 'defeated', same as IE before. They had "won", so no reason to innovate anymore. Maybe Chrome was a much needed "kick in the ass". I checked Firefox again a few days ago and it seems to be faster than I remember it, which gives me at least hope that they haven't given up yet.

When chrome arrived opera had tons of features that were never present on chrome, to call it a copy is ignoring the main point of chrome early success. It was fast and simple, no extensions, no tons of features that no one cared about. It was wicked fast and simple. Thats it. Compare them for yourself: https://veeven.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/opera-96-te.png http://blogoscoped.com/files/google-chrome-browsing/home-lar...

I actually use firefox at home, but for watching twitch streams I have to open chrome because firefox just fucking crawls if I've got a stream in another tab.

No idea why. Chrome seems to cope fine so I just use it for that. Since I want my stream in a separate window on my other screen anyway it works out pretty well.

Might be that it falls back to software rendering on your system and therefore stresses out the CPU. Try updating your graphics card driver, if it's not up-to-date.

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