Now, I encourage people to use anything but Chrome. Firefox is really great these days.
Firefox took a long time to catch up and their CEO was utterly incompetent, which seriously harmed Mozilla.
Chrome was the first browser to be immune to all of those functions.
Mozilla really screwed the pooch not long after. Their biggest single misstep was forcing automatic updates in corporate networks. At the time, they still had pretty good adoption in the kinds of environments that had a couple of people somewhere deciding what everyone was allowed to run on the company computers. Chrome had already moved to forced updates, so these environments went to Firefox. When Firefox decided to follow Chrome, they no longer had that differentiation, and corporate IT had to choose between two browsers that both had automatic updates, but one of them had frequent memory and performance problems.
I've happily returned to Firefox a few years ago and don't have Chrome installed on any device I control.
This is basically whole history of Mozilla and to be honest most of open source projects that dont have BDFL type of leadership.
Wikipedia/Wikimedia is another example of a project with massive funding with similar problems even though the latter has a (not so) BDFL.
Firefox on other hand is just something only nerds like us care about and only alive because Alphabet / Google is scared of antitrust legal action possibility.
Back when Chrome was new, you could run Firefox with a decent selection of add-ons to get security benefits of similar magnitude through different mechanisms. The NoScript extension was at the forefront, providing a lot of functionality way beyond just blocking JavaScript per domain. And Firefox with extensions always had better privacy controls.
This is true, but this is why we create faster and faster PCs, so our software can do more. The cost was because you were getting new safety features. Want the app to be fast, able to show you lots of tabs with no delay? That takes RAM and CPU. The CPU and RAM are there to be used for features the user wants. It's actually 100% ok if a computer has to work really hard to run an app as long as that app is designed well, it means the user is making it do lots of useful work. That's what the computer is there for.
I think you accidentally responded to the wrong comment, I didn't make any excuses or debate tradeoffs. I said "things have costs".
You can make your arguments about noscript if you'd like (I have a great respect for the project) but I think it was essentially irrelevant to user security at the time, real users were really harmed by malware that exploited Firefox, Java, and Flash, and Chrome killed every one of those attack paths in virtually no time at all.
Computers were far more dangerous before Chrome. You watch old TV shows and it's a joke that people would visit a site and get hacked - that's unrecognizable today, it simply doesn't happen. It used to, Chrome changed that.
This is insane. As a power FF user, I don't think Chrome ever "got ahead". There were 2 reasons for its success (in order):
1. Made by a respected company that was killing everything in those days.
2. It was occasionally faster, and more stable.
Feature-wise - it was always worse.
That is ahead for the majority of people.
And before that it was Netscape
All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.
Chrome was simply touted as an insanely fast browser. At the time, Firefox was an absolute dog when it came to performance and heaviness.
That was enough to win - Chrome kneecapped Firefox over that metric alone.
For me, the speed improvement in Chrome was marginal. Perhaps my PC at the time was simply too slow to notice the difference.
The thing is - I was happy to sacrifice speed to get the features in the addons.
This indicates there was actually a lot of technical merit in it and the problem was with the GTM and leadership.
The fact is Android could be scaled down way better than KaiOS could be scaled up.
(and you could just wait for the perf/$ to continue to decrease).
You have not heard of it because it primarily targets feature phones and primarily in emerging markets. If you are not in the market for a feature phone in India or building software for one it makes total sense you're blissfully unaware.
(And as the other comment mentioned, after a very successful run as a FirefoxOS fork - Android caught up )
At the time, Firefox's old engine was getting quite tired. It was single core, no sandboxing, a lot of cruft under the hood. Extensions had deep integration which would weigh it down. Load times were really rough, and things needed rewriting.
The Firefox you see now is part of the 2017 Quantum rebuild. that said, Quantum wasn't great either (because it jettisoned a LOT of great extensions), but it was necessary for survival. They did work on it and things got better over time, but there are still scars from that rug pull that was the extensions fiasco. I wish they had a better solution. RIP Tab Mix Plus.
Most of these things were not true on the Windows side. At least not to the same degree.
Hasn't been the case since at least 2017.
Google has consistently sad they want to stop exposing url's. That's 100% them wanting to prevent people from bypassing them when accessing the web.
In a company that size, you move around a few buttons and hundreds of millions come out. You delete some feature and poof BILLIONS are made. Who care if it upsets some % of the user base? It's billions with a B!
It was also astonishing to see HN cheer on the Great Firewall of the USA and make excuses for it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35408837
Here google has inserted it self between you and the www. It has ruled it self judge and executioner without any disclosure or accountability while simultaneously receiving your entire browser history in real time.
When they pull the plug on some website because they don't like the content it is immediately replaced by a scary red screen lying about malware that doesn't have a skip button. There use to be a button in the firefox settings to disable it but hey! Even when they reinstate it, say a week later, your website is pretty much officially dead already. Customers should take their business to someone who doesn't install malware on their computer.
If my business was to sell ads and I could simply disable your means to not view my ads I wouldn't be able to explain it to my investors. They would be like, Billions with a B! it would be hard for them to listen to the positive side of disabling my product. But lets take it to a vote...
A - Billions
B - not Billions
I never did because I remember internet explorer and lack of transparent PNG support.
All of the things that made Chrome great for the web in 2010 are still there.
It's strange how we can kind of misremember things to fit whatever narrative we currently believe.
uBlock Origin didn't migrate to v3 because they use the webRequest API and didn't want to switch to the less-powerful replacement, declarativeNetRequest (uBlock Origin Lite uses the new API and is available in the store).
Based on this context, it seems reasonable to assume that one of the reasons the person I replied to believes Chrome isn't making the web better any more is due to the removal of uBlock Origin. And this is due to the removal of the webRequest API.
Something that was great in 2010 may not look great in 2026.
It's been 16 years. The Internet has moved on. Blocking ads is the norm now, and they are removing that functionality.