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Comment by meestaahjoshee | Hacker News Reader

firefox definitely had tabbed browsing and private mode before chrome was released.

pretty sure opera had tabbed browsing as well.

i just recall chrome being very minimal, clean and fast when it was first released. plus as kreeben said, Google was pretty revered at the time.

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You're right. Opera had tabbed browsing before Firefox existed, and Firefox had tabbed browsing before Chrome existed.

I could be wrong but it looks like Opera introduced tabs in 2009 with v10.5 while Firefox's first release was in 2002. Unless we're referring to different things.

That's not right. Opera had tabs in version 4, released in early 2000.

Some people apparently think tabs has to be drag-and-droppable, which Opera had in 2003, in order to be called tabs: https://allthatiswrong.wordpress.com/2011/01/14/opera-did-no...

No. Opera from early 2000s atleast had tabbed browsing. It also had gestures, paste-and-go, open non-hyper plaintext links in tab etc.

Chrome made a big thing at launch about their process isolation of tabs. Was that their innovation?

What chrome sold was speed. Most of their ads were all about how fast websites would open. And tabs was cherry on top. I know that’s what made me jump from IE. I remember I have a Sony vaio desktop then and IE would weigh it down to a crawl, then I install chrome and that just made me swear to never use IE again.

Process isolation of tabs, speed (V8), incognito mode, silent updates. Most of this they covered in the announcement comic.

I remember switching to Chrome just because of the minimalist UI. I don't know if Chrome was faster at that time, but it felt faster and leaner than anything else. I switched back to Firefox when I realized that there were everal extensions I didn't want to part with. And then back to Chrome again after a few years when Firefox upgraded their UI to make everything bigger and bulbous.

Chrome's process isolation meant that one terrible website would not crash or lag the whole browser, as was the case with Firefox.

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