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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

>The reason Firefox has lost market share in my opinion is because:

My opinion is that none of those actually matters. The "one" single reason Chrome won market share was the same playbook how Google Search Engine Started.

Speed.

I watched hundreds of users, given the choice, or doing so themselves installing / using Chrome by their own selection. It was faster. The user experience was far better.

You could advertise the heck out of your product, but if it wasn't any good it wouldn't matter. For nearly 10 years Google Chrome was undoubtedly the fastest browser on the planet. It wasn't until Quantum landed on Firefox before you could at least have a few metric of performance wins going to Mozilla, and that is also partly because Chrome has slowed down a lot in recent years.

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> I watched hundreds of users, given the choice, or doing so themselves installing / using Chrome by their own selection.

I don't know who you are, but having watched “hundreds of people” installing a web browser sounds a bit dubious…

Personally, I have discussed with a few dozens of websites users and most of them would answer the question “what web browser do you use” with “Google” no matter if they were using Chrome, Firefox, or IE (there are few Mac users in my country).

Firefox users had it installed on their computer by some computer-savy relatives, and most of Chrome users didn't know were it came from (most believing it was already there beforehands) which is a good marker of people getting it bundled with other pieces of software.

"having watched “hundreds of people” installing a web browser sounds a bit dubious…"

There's definitely jobs where this is possible... IT support at a medium sized company, various user research, etc.

I remember seeing non-technical people back in the days making the switch to chrome because it was faster indeed. Firefox had to do some catch up, and words of mouth didn't work in Firefox's best interest for quite some time.

back in the early days I remember people switching over to it because it had a built-in Flash plugin. In more recent years, I've seen people installing it because they were sick of the pop-ups advertising it on Google sites, or they just assumed that it worked better with Google products because Google made it. Having learned that Google kind of made things that way, I'm not surprised.

Gmail was bait to lure millions into the Googleverse, where they usually don't leave.

Personally I'm kind of happy to see Microsoft Edge gaining some marketshare at Chrome's expense. (even if it's mostly just Chrome)

> because they were sick of the pop-ups advertising it on Google sites

for the longest time chrome advertising on google.com were actually malware : (

This forum isn't some obscure backwater.. A large chunk of all the world's tech wizards congregate here during boring meetings, bathroom breaks, etc.

If someone claims to have done some work with tech, chances are they're telling the truth

This is a case of the problem of "most people are idiots in this realm". It pops up in many different domains.

I actually bothered to load both side-by-side and check. Firefox loads pages faster.

Really the parent commenter is right: Chrome is dominant only because of its huge marketing budget.

P.S. Chrome is also buggy as hell and crashes pages all the time, which Firefox doesn't do.

> I actually bothered to load both side-by-side and check. Firefox loads pages faster

Are you comparing current Chrome to current Firefox? Relatively recently, compared to the overall trend we're seeing here, Firefox got much faster than it had been: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/14/introducing-firefox...

The discussion above, however, is about how Chrome came to grow so much while Firefox shrank so much, and for that the question is how did Firefox and Chrome compare historically. There was ~10y from Chrome's release until Quantum came out.

(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)

Yes. I remember when I first tried Chrome. It launched within 10 seconds while Firefox 3? 4?, my default browser back then, took almost half a minute to launch. It was fast.

It sounds like you're describing how long it takes the browser to launch, when earlier you were describing how long it took to load pages? Browser launch time isn't nearly as important to most people as speed once running, because mostly you open the browser once, and then load many pages.

That's relatively irrelevant - Chrome was much faster at the most important sites - which are coincidentally mostly google owned - but still faster - GMail, Youtube, Google itself felt faster on Chrome back then. Then there's the flash handling which was important back then.

Also FF was shitty at stability, it didn't have multi process architecture for the longest time and I've had a page crash my entire browser (especially in the flash days) regularly.

And then chrome started pushing excellent dev tools (even in FF nightly I get dev tools hanging on complex sites because of how slow they are)

Chrome was the better browser back then and it won the power users and developers, then it took over the casuals as it was advertised on google and it was recommended as the best by everyone - it took FF too long to catch up and now a lot of sites don't even test compatibility - I've been trying to switch back to FF before this fiasco for a month and it wasn't a smooth experience compatibility wise.

Going fullscreen in youtube is always instant in Chrome. In Firefox however, it is very slow (like 5s) when you have 1000 tabs open.

Even opening a select box is slow, if you have several 1000 tabs.

Funny enough, opening a new window (and keeping all the other tabs open) makes it fast again, if you are in that window.

Seems like Firefox has some slow code paths, like notifying every tab about going fullscreen?

> Going fullscreen in youtube is always instant in Chrome. In Firefox however, it is very slow (like 5s) when you have 1000 tabs open.

Is it possible to have 1000 tabs open in Chrome? When I had like 50, it ate my whole 8GB last time I tried it.

In Firefox I frequently have 1000 tabs with no issues. (almost none, recently I noticed that there is some memory leak and the ram slowly disappears).

This is the reason why I went back to Firefox after using Chrome for like 2 weeks, it is great for 1-10 tabs.

I don't know if anybody REALLY can have more than 1000 tabs open as in completely loaded into RAM. When my computer is slow I pray that I don't have any unsent edit windows or unfinished youtube/twitch videos and just kill all the render processes.

Chrome kills them regularly on it's own, which means they simply crash with out of memory.

For me, Chrome generally handles killed renderers better, e.g. it shows a popup about crashed extensions and just reloads them. Firefox requires me to quickly disable and enable adblock and I lose the build in screenshot extension permanently (except disabling and renabling it with about:config). But for chrome a renderer often just freezes and only a day later there is a popup about it which offers to kill it.

Firefox seems to handle the tabs better overall, but at some point session resume fails with javascript errors in the shell. Chrome seems to handle session restore a bit better.

> I actually bothered to load both side-by-side and check. Firefox loads pages faster.

WHo cares? A Ferrari and a Lamborghini in 2020 provide about the same speed experience. What matters is that for the past 10 years Mozilla had the speed of an old Volvo versus the Ferrari that was Chrome/Chromium in comparison. The fact that Mozilla merely caught up in the end is rather a proof that they lost technical leadership a long time ago.

Bs. The speed difference in real life was never that much.

I used Firefox and Chrome simultaneously every day for many years on everything from a low-end laptop to pretty quick desktop. Firefox for personal stuff, Chrome for work.

Speed's always been similar for me, Firefox has generally been more reliable (partly due to being able to block so much crap, probably). Chrome used to break with alarming regularity and need a total reinstall. Sometimes there was a site which wasn't compatible with Firefox, and if I needed it I'd open it in a Chrome incognito window.

These days I've switched to Vivaldi for the work stuff (vertical tabs, "hibernate background tabs", tiling!), though I still debug JS in Chrome.

It's not just page load speed, although that is important. After the page load, some sites still feel slower (e.g. the new Facebook). It's also the speed of UI interactions, in particular detaching a tab is slower in Firefox than Chrome. All up, Chrome still feels faster to me.

I find Firefox much, much, much less reliable than chrome.

This.

To win over non tech people, there should be at least one "killer feature" out of the box.

In case of Google Chrome it was speed.

In case of Google search, it was quality of results.

In case of whatsapp, it was availability on all kinds of devices.

Etc..

Or enforced by organization etc.. that's different thing.

The managers at Google who authorized the huge as budgets clearly thought the ads did matter.

> I watched hundreds of users, given the choice, or doing so themselves installing / using Chrome by their own selection. It was faster. The user experience was far better.

For the first time or because they were already familiar with it? Once you've established yourself as the "default", it can be ridiculously difficult to convince people to switch to something else. Google has executed this strategy perfectly and they know that there's nothing Mozilla can do or anybody else will do. And that despite the fact that Google clearly abused its dominant position in another industry to establish dominance in this field. I'm sick of Google abusing its position and I'm sick of people defending Google because it's a "free market". No, that's not how it works.

> Once you've established yourself as the "default", it can be ridiculously difficult to convince people to switch to something else.

Not very believable as FF actually gained a much bigger market share than default IE over time.

The statement is believable to me once there's context added.

IE was a terrible browser. Everyone knew it and Firefox was better in every imaginable way especially for "web masters". The Firebug system was a godsend.

Firefox unseated IE because of how much better it was. Microsoft could not get its head straight in this particular case. Always a non-conforming, slow browser with far fewer features.

That's what it takes to unseat the default - you have to be multiples better before people take notice in serious ways.

And, Chrome did that beautifully by leaning into the one thing the masses cared about. Speed.

Those ads were so good - extremely viral. Did they show anything objective or real? Maybe... maybe not. It's what caught people's attention and then when they tested it themselves, they believed it.

Personally I tested it and it was, by a very noticeable amount - I was hooked. Took me a bit of time to get over the loss of Firebug, but mostly sentiment because Chrome's debugger was quite good.

If Firefox was the semi-truck, Chrome was the Ferrari. Both got me to A => B. With firefox I could carry anything, plugins, extensions, whatever I needed. But it was a lumbering giant. Chrome came with none of that at launch but it went fast - and people talked about it.

Those were the days.

I'd also point out that tabs and adblock were compelling end user features to the extent that nothing any major browser has on its competitors today compare to. Sync is the closest to a compelling killer feature any browser has got to these days, and all browsers had it very quickly (except Safari, which doesn't have to care when you don't have a choice on iOS).

The fact that Firefox was faster than IE and any technical expert you asked for recommendation would prefer it due to better standards compliance/extensions/having the only devtools were really the icing on the cake.

Google also has the kind of trust amongst end users, especially non-technical end users, that Mozilla couldn't hope to have since Google has their hands in so many pies. And as a technical friend/family member asked to make a recommendation, if anything the incentive is to recommend Chrome to reduce tech support calls when HangoutMeetDuoChat/YouTube/Photos/their preferred google product is acting weird in Firefox again.

It's hard at this point to see what any browser could do to build that kind of end user feature lead again this far into the game.

Did you really measure the speed difference? I doubt it was that much. It was mostly about perception.

I really want to like and use Firefox, but the difference (on a top-end computer) is very noticeable and annoying. Perhaps Firefox should work on their perceived speed, if that's the difference.

So you didn't measure it. Worthless opinions as to me on my gaming pc chrome is most definitely slower. Both are opinions and worthless without numbers.

Real world benchmarks show they are neck and neck leap frogging each other all the time, so both of you are wrong; they're generally so close a human can't tell the difference, it's all biases these days unless someone shows you the numbers. Lots of people don't realize the extensions they add can also severely upset performance, but that's on the user. My 4 year old computer works just fine with both of them and 4 or 5 extensions.

It also depends a lot on use cases and available resources. When on a single or just a few tabs, my perception usually favored Chrome, but in real usage I'm often keeping hundreds of tabs open and Firefox keeps being speedy enough most of the time while Chrome becomes unbearable very quickly.

Agreed, with a caveat: on non-Google pages. Google is actively slowing down their pages on Firefox (or at least heavily optimizes them, but just on Chrome - which is the same).

> The statement is believable to me once there's context added.

So, the statement does not mean anything anymore then. It should rather be: "it's difficult to unseat a technically superior product with an inferior one" which is patently obvious.

>Firefox unseated IE because of how much better it was.

Nitpick, but Firefox never had the majority of the market or a bigger piece than IE. Firefox was on the way to reaching that but they peaked around 33% share before Chrome came along and ate everyone's lunch.

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