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Comment by Drakim | Hacker News Reader

Gmail launched on 1st of april and was thought to be a joke since it gave you a gitabyte (I think) of storage wheras email providers like hotmail gave you 50mb.

Chrome launching was also a pretty big deal, I recall.

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Gmail also had a live counter showing your storage space increasing every few seconds. The storage space definitely seemed astronomical relative to the competition at that time.

Google earth was nice too, and street view. It was hard to believe at first.

But Chrome was just a re-hash of firefox, nothing exciting there.

Kind of agree. The last time I think I was this stoked to play with a mass market tech tool like this was street-view, and before that Google Earth.

No, Chrome was a revelation when it came out. It was way faster than Firefox and it had many great features we now take for granted, like isolated tabs, popup blocking etc.

Revisionist history. Firefox had a built-in pop up blocker in 2003, years before Chrome was even a seed in Sundar’s balls. I know because I used it. Chrome was and is a step back, foisted on people with dark patterns, back in the day having speed by sacrificing features like extensibility and customisability.

Now you're the one revising history. Separate processes per window and process isolation was a big deal in early Chrome. Yes, Google has taken away much of the user control that made Chrome good and replaced it with things that optimize for the comfort of their advertising model.

But there's also a reason software people switched to Chrome for a long while. It was just better. It's not anymore. I switched back to Firefox when Chrome broke ad blocking.

Chrome might have been slightly better than Firefox, but not ground breaking like google earth, street view, gmail etc.

I remember everyone being excited about it suggesting searches on the address bar and suggesting websites in it you had never previously visited. Every other browser only autocompleted addresses you had visited before.

isolated tabs and popup blocking (which firefox already had) were not ground breaking in any way. They were implementation details. By that point, Firefox was stable enough to not make a big difference if it was isolated tabs or not.

was stable enough and slow

building a slightly faster browser is not ground breaking... I feel like people were just excited about anything coming out of google, back then. But it was not a revolution in browsers or anything like that. Chrome only got the upper-hand in browser wars because they install it on all the android devices(and not being able to uninstall it) - which I am not sure how they got away with, they should have been kept in check by anti-monopoly measures.

A re-hash of Firefox?

I am a Firefox user now, and I was a Firefox user when Chrome came out, but Chrome was miles ahead of Firefox in pretty much most things that mattered for most people, especially performance and usability.

Chrome was a revolution for the web.

Hotmail only offered 2MB for a long time. Then Yahoo started offering 250MB which seemed crazy. So when Google offered effectively unlimited storage, it really did seem like a joke.

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