It was a lot faster for me than Firefox at the beginning, I remember that. It also looked a lot nicer; the UI was super slick at the time. I remember it being a pretty easy and obvious switch for me at the time.
I had forgotten about the UI! Kinda remembering now how they pushed the tabs up into the window chrome next to the close/minimize buttons which let them really shrink down the size of the top bar back when browsers typically spent a ton of vertical space on ~stuff. I bet having a single bar instead of separate URL / search bars was nifty too.
I guess Chrome's launch is also from a different era where sentiment around Google was much closer to uniformly positive which I'm sure helped.
at that time, (when browsers like firefox 3 and ie8 were around), browsers were still having bars on top of bars on top of bars: window bar, on top of a file menu, on top of address bar (with a split search bar), and they'd throw in a bookmarks bar in too by default (which chrome had turned off by default), and that's beside toolbars which were still a thing (and were not a thing at all in chrome). all that would come up at a total of 3 to 5 bars, which was a lot.
particularly the combining of window title bar and tabs bar into one (along with putting tabs up top, and forgoing window title and file menu along the way), was a big thing. which seems to have influenced all the other browsers later on. (see firefox 4, opera 10, ie9 which all did kind of a spin on that, with ie9 surprisingly going even further and putting both address bar and tabs bar on a single bar)
it kinda changed everything, with its approach to simplicity. i'd argue that even now chrome remains one of simpler browsers among those popular ones out today (compare to firefox, opera, vivaldi, edge, etc. which all seem to have features piling up and just popping out at you). but it is also getting crowded as well, in that button zone around main menu. if I could hide those (given that they're also redunant, cause most of those things are in main menu anyway), i wouldn't miss them at all.
Tab Groups and/or Tree-style tabs are pretty much required for working with hundreds of tabs, though.
Many of us don't have enough horizontal space on all their machines to comfortably waste a bunch of it on a tree style tabs sidebar.
I performed a test again. This is on a 1920x1080p screen, which is pretty standard. Firefox progressively shrinks tabs, until there are 21 or so. Then, you can scroll the tab bar left and right with the scrollwheel.
Chrome continues shrinking tabs, until there are 90 or so. Then you can switch tabs with the scrollwheel or with the drop-down arrow on the right. However, it will fail to display some of the most recently opened tabs in the tab bar.
My workflow usually consists in opening a new tab for a new activity, for instance search the web for a product category. Then open multiple tabs from here, and multiple other tabs from each, while searching more and more precise information (like spec sheets, or digging into some documentation). I progressively walk back, closing the tabs as I am done researching a topic. This process is very analogous to a mind map (and it's a representation I wish was available in browsers, together with annotations, a bit like pearltrees). Tree-style tabs come close enough, as you can collapse a group or close it at once.
The reason why Firefox's approach work is analogous to the principle of locality[1]: data that needs to be frequently accessed tends to be close together (in time and space). By opening new tabs close to the current one (middle-click a link or the new tab button), they stay close to each other, and scrolling the tab bar allows to shift your context window. It works quite well.
Now, Firefox has one big advantage compared to Chrome: its address bar is very effective for jumping to an open tab far away (or some matching browser history/bookmarks). Chrome probably has a conflict of interest here where they want you to search the web first. If you want to jump back to a topic 40 tabs to the left, you don't have to scroll, just type in some keywords in the address bar.
Lastly, and that works with both browsers (still thanks to this locality principle), you can shift-select multiple tabs to move them to a new window to form a "tab group" substitute. Though in practice, I just tend to use private windows.
> Many of us don't have enough horizontal space on all their machines to comfortably waste a bunch of it on a tree style tabs sidebar.
Now, I find this argument to be weak. The only screen I have trouble using it is my vertical 1360x768p screen (so 768 horizontal pixels). Most screens will otherwise fit this quite comfortably, and have more horizontal than vertical real estate. The Tree Style Tab extension, by default, is toggled with F1, so I just hide it on that screen, and bring it up when needed. Thinking about this, some auto-hiding panel could work very well here.
I am conceding the fact that my initial reply was exaggerated. After testing this again, Chromium's usability threshold is more around 30 tabs. And given the RAM chromium requires for maintaining numerous tabs, I am wondering if it isn't by design.
To summarize, well, it probably depends on what you are used to... You wouldn't catch me dead on either hill though.
I can't really compare this with Firefox's native solution though, because I use Sidebery (and I used tree-style tabs before that).