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Comment by negamax | Hacker News Reader

Damn Google! This is so short sighted. People/everyone just installed Chrome on whatever systems they could find and that's how Chrome become so prevalent. Not because it was a superior product, not because of technology but because everyone was anti IE. Google is painting Chrome into similar corner. In a way, this is a good indicator of decline of Google. Revenue not through innovation but by coercion

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I think that's rather revisionist. At a point in time Chrome was way better than not just IE, but way better than Firefox. The performance was leaps and bounds ahead.

I’ve been using both Firefox and Chrome since they came out and they have always felt near each others performance. It would be interesting to see some data on the subject.

arewefastyet.com used to show benchmark comparisons between Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. It seems to now only show Firefox's performance across a slew of benchmarks. However, the old metrics are still available on the Wayback Machine: http://web.archive.org/web/20110901000000*/arewefastyet.com

One huge advantage Chrome had was it's multi-process model. This was back in the day when stuff like Flash would often nuke your entire Firefox session.

Firefox has had this for years.

But it didn’t until years after a chrome did

At least on Linux, I've found Chromium to be dramatically more responsive than Firefox every time I've tried switching (since about the time Chromium became usable on X11). Firefox still drops frames for me, which I find to be exceptionally jarring; and in combination with a UI that I'm not really that fond of, a backlog of basic standards compliance issues that I've been burned by as a developer (and as a user), and generally less-useful built-in fine-grained script and cookie controls, it's never really made sense for me to use Firefox.

Now I use Brave, and it's cool, it also encourages you to use interesting stuff like IPFS Companion, which I didn't know existed for Chromium until I switched to Brave.

I think even if Google ruins Chromium, it'll continue in the open somewhere else, and still be better than Firefox at the things that are important to me.

As someone who kept bouncing between Firefox and Chromium for quite a long time before finally settling with Firefox, I think that's the case only for light workloads with not a lot of tabs open. I was switching from Firefox to Chromium because Firefox was getting slow, but after a while of my normal usage, Chromium wasn't just getting slow - it was getting unusable, so then I switched back to Firefox (and the same cycle repeated after a while). But yeah, right after refreshing the browser profile, fresh Chromium felt a little bit faster than fresh Firefox. I don't think that's the case anymore.

I remember Chrome being way better than anything else at the time. I switched from Firefox to Chrome during that period because it was just so fast and lightweight in comparison. I think it was also the first time mainstream users had access to features like tabbed browsing, which was truly novel at the time.

Firefox, Opera and IE7 had tabbed browsing years before Chrome was released.

Chrome was the first to give each tab its own thread, which helped prevent rogue pages from bringing the whole browser down (not completely, but it was a dramatic improvement).

Firefox had tabs. Chrome's selling point at the time was that its tabs were process-isolated. Crashing one couldn't bring down the others. Which was a common Firefox experience.

>Not because it was a superior product, not because of technology but because everyone was anti IE.

>>>I think that's rather revisionist.

I agree with the sibling comments that remembered the past differently: Back in 2008, Chrome was actually the superior product -- for both users and developers.

- Chrome had a better partitioned process for each tab. IE and Firefox 3.x didn't so they often crashed on buggy web pages or bad Javascript. In Firefox, that would also take down all the other tabs one had open which obviously frustrated users.

- Chrome with V8 had the fastest Javascript engine at the time. This translated to faster UI on Gmail, Google Maps, Google Docs, etc.

- Chrome had a built in PDF viewer which was convenient. In IE, clicking on a pdf link triggered a disruptive "Save file as" prompt or if one had Adobe installed, it would launch Adobe Reader which was a jarring UI experience. (Also add that Chrome included ability to print to PDF. To duplicate that functionality in IE required buying the full Adobe Acrobat Professional for $300 or installing a similar PDF printer driver such as Bullzip.)

- Chrome had very good dev tools included. With Firefox, you had to install the Firebug plugin which was slower and buggier

It's fascinating how Google's recent controversy has caused widespread amnesia of Chrome browser's real technical advantages in 2008.

Chrome had a built in PDF viewer which was convenient. In IE, clicking on a pdf link triggered a disruptive "Save file as" prompt or if one had Adobe installed, it would launch Adobe Reader which was a jarring UI experience&

Good points for the most part, but not that one. A shitty JavaScript .PDF viewer is a much more "jarring UI experience" than launching an external viewer that I intentionally installed for just that purpose.

What Chrome actually did was bundle a well-regarded viewing plugin on windows. The "shitty JavaScript .PDF viewer" was a Firefox innovation.

> - Chrome had very good dev tools included. With Firefox, you had to install the Firebug plugin which was slower and buggier

I remember very well that after I made the switch to Chrome, I still used Firefox for all my debugging purposes and web-development. Firebug was way ahead of Chrome Dev tools.

Firebug is dead though. They merged it with Firefox Developer Edition but it still isn't the same thing.

Chrome still has the fastest start up times from what I've seen.

That's because by default it keeps running in the background when you "close" it.

I think this is the revisionism to be honest.

Chrome became as widespread as it did because it was bundled like crapware with installers for various pieces of software and they plastered scare-mongering banners all over their service telling people they had to use Chrome to get the correct experience, or deliberately gimping their own services on other browsers.

Chrome may have been the better browser at release, but simply being better did not get it to where it is.

There was always Firefox. When Chrome first came out I tried it. It didnt have plugins therefore no AdBlocker so I went back to Firefox cause pop ups are super annoying. Then when it did have addons it had a crappy adblocker that wasnt effective at all. I never went back to Chrome except for as a secondary browser. Firefox has been my main driving browser since the mid 2000s.

People were anti-IE because IE was vastly inferior to other offerings. Firefox had been making steady but slow progress as tech-savvy folks would install it for their friends/family.

Chrome came out and it was even better than Firefox on speed (javascript especially, with v8), reliability (process isolation, websites would freeze all of your tabs if not your whole computer at the time), and usability (unified search/url bar). And it had Google marketing behind it, meaning non-tech folks knew and loved the company making it and don’t rely on their tech-savvy friends to hear about it.

Because anti-IE? I doubt it was the driving motive for much people. People usually switch to something because it's better or at least because it's cool and popular.

I switched to Opera because it was so much better than anything in 2000. Then I tried Firefox because a friend switched to it and I sticked with it occasionally as it was becoming better and better and cool extensions emerged. Then I switched to Chrome because Firefox became so slow it was driving me crazy (yes, I always use obsolete hardware) and Chrome was ok (it lacked functionality I loved in Firefox extensions but I could tolerate this).

Now I actually am increasingly anti-Chrome because I don't want Google's monopolism and dictate so I feel like I want to switch back to Firefox and guide friends to do so but Firefox is still notably more slow than Chrome although not as slow as it used to be. I hope Mozilla guys are going to keep on improving its performance.

Why not try Opera again? As the joke goes, both Opera users are happy.

You can even run Chrome extensions if you install this extension: https://addons.opera.com/en/extensions/details/install-chrom...

> Not because it was a superior product

Pardon? For years it was the best option out there. Its dev tools are still the best imo.

> People/everyone just installed Chrome on whatever systems they could find and that's how Chrome become so prevalent. Not because it was a superior product

This statement logically does not make sense.

People installed Chrome => Chrome was a superior product. Although, now it isn't anymore.

Revenue not through innovation but by coercion

Power corrupts. When did Google find they had the power to force people to do things? It started with some beneficial, "thou shall not." Power corrupts, however. Was it around 2011?

Brave is good† and probably if Google tries to close down the Chromium open source project, a lot of resources will just instead go to whoever maintains the biggest open source fork.

† except fine-grained cookie blocking is a bit broken compared to stock Chromium (only works properly if you always allow first-party cookies, which I also want it to ask first about), script blocking is about the same.

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