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When Chrome initially appeared, it was pretty much on par with Firefox, not significantly better. What made it succeed is great marketing and being forced and pushed down every possible Google channel there was, including being preinstalled on Android phones.

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For significant periods of time in the mid-late 00-s to mid 10s, this just isn't true. Firefox's plugin, process and memory management was significantly worse than Chrome until relatively recently. As a result, for memory limited machines (all of them - remember, 4GB was considered huge), Chrome was the only real choice. I personally gave up on FF for 10 years from 2011 or so because I was sick of the plugin manager crashing and taking the machine with it.

Maybe in the middle part of that period. I'm saying that when it first appeared, it wasn't clearly superior. I'd argue it's also not clearly superior anymore.

To bring my own experience to it, I stuck with Firefox all throughout that period and never had significant bugs, slowdowns or crashes. Though I will admit that there was a period when Chrome felt noticeably smoother.

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