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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.