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Comment by wccrawford | Hacker News Reader

So the real question is: What did Chrome do differently than Firefox to gain market share that fast?

Google has spent a ton to increase Chrome's market share - both on adertising, and on bundling it with other products. The Skype installer downloads Chrome and installs its as the default browser—but only if the current default browser is IE. There's a choice to opt out, but the installer's standard action for IE users is to install Chrome as the new default browser.

I imagine the Skype installer deal will change once Microsoft takes over, but Chrome is also bundled in the installers for other popular software like Avast Antivirus and (I think) some of Adobe's products. That sort of deal means a lot of people will get Chrome without actively seeking it out.

Google's annual revenue is 300 times more than Mozilla's annual revenue. Even Google's net profit is 100 times more than Mozilla's entire revenue. And while Google does have many more products than just a browser, their huge cash flow gives them the flexibility to spend for browser marketshare in ways that are just not an option for Mozilla.

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Sources (I also have first-hand reports from friends who've had Chrome installed by Skype):

http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=67785482-1A64-67EA-E4A686A8....

https://blog.avast.com/2009/12/03/avast-and-google-chrome/

[Disclosure: I work for Mozilla, but I speak for myself.]

Did what Firefox did to IE? They treated Firefox as a slow, bloated, antiquated browser; a browser too in your face with too many security holes.

In other words they built a better browser, and had the powerhouse that is Google behind it for marketing.

It's fast.

Oh, and it pop-up blocks, adblocks, and flashblocks.

The question was what Chrome does differently to Firefox. Firefox had adblocking before Chrome ever existed.

IMO Chrome:

- Feels faster

- Looks a bit better

Firefox, on the other hand:

- Has better extensions

- Has a better URL bar search function

I actually use Chrome nowadays. It turns out that the speed and looks of the UI are important enough that I can put up with less polished extensions and a slightly inferior URL bar.

I wish Google would make their URL bar better though. Surely it can't be that hard to match in the middle of URLs rather than just matching from the beginning? :/

Can I add to this that I really don't like Chrome's tab handling in comparison? I'll regularly have 10+ tabs per window open. Firefox? No problem, they scroll and there's a pop-down menu to let me see what they all are at a glance. Chrome does neither of these, squashing my tab bar into unreadable oblivion.

I'd also rate Firefox's bookmark and history functions as in another league compared to Chrome's rather basic offering, but neither of them are dealbreakers for me. Large tab group handling is, and Chrome just doesn't do it.

* - Has a better URL bar search function *

For me, it's the opposite. Chrome's search bar does what I want predictably (run a Google search) where the awesome bar sends me all sorts of crazy places. It's that feature alone that keeps me on chrome.

I guess it depends on what you want to do. The Firefox awesome bar does a better job at guessing what bookmarked or historical site you want.

For instance, if I type in "y" or "yc" in Firefox, then it correctly guesses that I probably want "news.ycombinator.com", because it's a site I often visit and one of the very few with "y" or "yc" in the domain name.

Chrome, on the other hand, seems to only match from the start of bookmarked URLs. So "y" doesn't match, and nor does "yc". Instead it advises me to do a Google search. On the other hand, if I type "n", then it does guess that I want "news.ycombinator.com" (or "news.bbc.co.uk").

In Firefox 4, the default address bar search changed to a regular Google search, rather than the "browse by name" behavior used in Firefox 3.6 which would sometimes do a search and sometimes go straight to the top result [1]. It should be much more predictable now.

[1]: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_:_Tips_:_Location_Bar_Sear...

When Chrome came out it was (or felt?) ridiculously faster than anything else on the market - I could open Chrome and go to a page faster than I could open another browser.

Periodically I'll get curious about seeing something in Firefox, but before it can load I'll get so bored I kill the process.

There's a new kind of popup that's been eluding all browsers (Chrome, Fx, Safari, IE, etc), i don't know the technical details, but you can watch it visiting ThePirateBay for instance with a couple of clicks at most: it's there.

How do they do it? I don't know, but no actual browser can block it. I'd guess they tie the click as a real user action to trigger the popup or something similar...

Because it is tied to your clicks, most popup injections now happen when you focus on a search-like field or click something, this is not an automated popup that the browser can block, the browser does believe you wanted to open that extra window.

Supposedly this Firefox extension can help defeat them.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-plus-...

It's fast.

It does not take ages to start especially.

One process per tab. Firefox constantly stalls up on me while a background tab halts it. Rather infuriating.

Massive advertising campaigns online and offline.

well for one: advertising on the google home page.

This is why Google+ will surely get a huge audience.

For me like the original incantations of Firefox, aka. Phoenix, Chrome has the following "features". Fast, unobtrusive (no bookmarks bar, "Your browsing an insecure site", blah blah blah, nor million popups), and you just type stuff into the address bar and it knows what to do. I'm sure as market share increases it will regain bloat in the same way that FF did. And yet another developer will think, I know let's get rid of all those annoying popups.

I downloaded FF 5 the other day, 27 megs, I remember when it was ~2MB.

I really wonder the same thing. I saw my friends computers and they have Chrome installed. They are not tech savvy, and some of them don't know what it is. I don't know how it did install, but it did. I think it might be the install button in the Google Search home page, bundling with other apps (like Skype)...

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