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Comment by wguaa | Hacker News Reader

>Chrome wouldn't have gotten anywhere if it wasn't a very good browser. It is good.

It is not only good. When it came out it wiped the floor with the alternatives. Firefox 3, from that time, was absolutely pathetic in terms of performance. I remember sticking to 2 for a while. Even today Chrome is still the best, even if the margin has narrowed. Other browsers are having to adopt Blink to catch up.

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Idk about wiped the floor, but it gets subjective.

Immediately before chrome launched, FF was slowly eating into IE's market share. Chrome was good, but so was FF.

I don't think chrome ever had a lead in FF anything like the lead FF had over IE. Mozilla always had to play with a disadvantage. Still do.

Was it Chrome that came up with tabs? i cant seem to remember if FF had it. If FF didnt have tabs, that is enough for me to say Chrome wiped out the competition.

Firefox had tabs before Chrome existed.

If memory serves Opera was the first browser that had tabs but they were also in Firefox by the time Chrome released.

yes, I remember Opera being first with tabs too. It was one of the main reasons people chose Opera IIRC

From Wikipedia (I first saw it using Galeon. I'm probably messing up history here but I think Epiphany was also early with tabs):

The tabbed interface approach was then followed by the Internet Explorer shell NetCaptor in 1997. These were followed by a number of others like IBrowse in 1999, and Opera in 2000 (with the release of version 4 - although a MDI interface was supported before then), MultiViews October 2000, which changed its name into MultiZilla on 1 April 2001 (an extension for the Mozilla Application Suite[8]), Galeon in early 2001, Mozilla 0.9.5 in October 2001, Phoenix 0.1 (now Mozilla Firefox) in October 2002, Konqueror 3.1 in January 2003, and Safari in 2003. With the release of Internet Explorer 7 in 2006, all major web browsers featured a tabbed interface.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)

FF had tabs. IE had already adopted them. Chrome worked a bit better with lots of tabs. Iirc, pre-chrome, a crash (usually flash) in one tab would crash the browser. Chrome fixed that.

And if birds didn't have wings, that is enough for me to say that squirrels are better at flying.

Opera was the first browser with any significant market share that supported tabs. I vividly remember switching to Opera somewhere in the 2000s for that very reason.

It also had working bookmark syncing way earlier than the others - that was the second reason for me to use Opera in the 2000-2010 timeframe. I eventually switched to Chrome when it got too good to ignore, and lately to Firefox when it got good enough to compete head-to-head with Chrome.

According to this site with a bit of link-documentation, FF was first and the Opera-claim is false.

https://allthatiswrong.wordpress.com/2011/01/14/opera-did-no...

Opera's technology may not have been tabs, but it allowed the rise of tabbed based browsing. It just used the technology of the time (having it's own windowed interface, which incidentally allowed a tab-like arrangement). It's a bit disingenuous to make the claim that Opera was not instrumental in the development of tabbed based browsing, even if it wasn't specifically using the tab technology earliest.

Anecdotal but I switched to Chrome when it came out because it's JS engine was (or at least felt) massively faster than Firefox's.

Agree.I used to use Firefox and even Opera back in the day.Then both started lagging, even opening a simple website was always with some issues.Then I thought 'OK', let's try Chrome.It was faster, more compatible with some standards and simply felt better. I don't know how Mozilla managed to screw it up so well..

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