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Comment by pyrale | Hacker News Reader

> Chrome ate Firefox and IE back in the day because it was monumentally better, technologically speaking.

The difference between Firefox and IE was orders of magnitude larger than the difference between Chrome and Firefox. The explosive growth from Chrome can't be explained just by it being better than competition, or Firefox would have replaced IE in 6 months earlier.

The real explanation is that Chrome benefited from immeasurable (can't really calculate the cost of chrome being advertised prominently on every Google property) amounts of advertising.

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I think you're forgetting some of the key benefits:

* auto-updates when firefox was still: HELLO WEDNESDAY'S VERSION HAS DROPPED WOULD U LIKE TO DOWNLOAD IT?

* tabs were isolated per process where an entire Firefox session could still get taken down by one tab not responding

* That super sexy tab handling code where the resizing happened when you clicked away meaning you could close multiple tabs by simply clicking a lot (which you couldn't in Firefox because it was resizing them all the time).

You seem to be missing the point.

My point is that being incredibly more advanced than the incumbent browser was simply not enough to have a great adoption, as evidenced by FF or Opera's market progression before Chrome's introduction.

People who make that claim in 2023 simply ignore how important Google's advertising was in securing Chrome's position.

Forgive me, as I also feel compelled to start with a mandatory posturing statement that adds nothing to the conversation.

Now that's done with; I would also suggest that given how much better Chrome was at the time than any other browser that much of its adoption was organic. At the time of its release Google still had a considerable amount of good will from the tech public. I was certainly telling anyone willing to listen at that time to install Chrome because of genuinely good it was.

> I would also suggest that given how much better Chrome was at the time than any other browser that much of its adoption was organic.

I tried it a number of times.

The tab close thing was the only thing that was significantly better on my machines,

... and if I really want to close a number of tabs quickly and without thinking I just right-click and chose "close tabs to the right/to the left/other tabs".

Chrome had an ad on the Google homepage! (which is not for sale).

And at the top of basically every search in FF, they recommended Chrome.

Chrome was much much better than Firefox at the time, mainly because of V8. Firefox only got it's first JIT 9 months after Chrome.

On my 2003 PC the difference was very noticeable. I switched instantly.

I tried a number of times.

I am one of those who can sense and get annoyed by a few tens of milliseconds lag and for me Linux is a massive UX improvement despite its font issues and alignment issues (actually I can't see them even when I try) because all the random lags from Windows are gone.

I never experienced any improvement on Chrome on any of my setups so I discarded it immediately because the extension API was so crippled right from the start it was mostly just glorified web sites, not actual extensions like on Firefox.

(At that time Firefox had full blown FTP clients implemented as Firefox extensions, and even Firebug [1] was just and extension, so going for a browser that only allowed canned websites as "extensions" for trivial performance gains wasn't an option.)

[1]: not the first such tool but I will argue it was so impressive that it became the inspiration for all later web developer tools in all browsers.

Did you try Opera back then?

> The difference between Firefox and IE was orders of magnitude larger than the difference between Chrome and Firefox

I don't think so. When Chrome came out it was much better than competition too[1]. I don't know if Firefox was that much better than Internet Explorer.

It is also possible that Chrome rode the wave of Firefox i.e, Firefox got people thinking about improved browsing experience by switching from Internet Explorer. Then Chrome came along and picked up many new users who may have otherwise gotten picked up by Firefox.

[1] https://youtu.be/LRmrMiOWdfc

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