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I enjoyed this post, but I take issue with the idea that Chrome was initially adopted, or served, "to break the Web free from corporate greed." Chrome's appeal

I enjoyed this post, but I take issue with the idea that Chrome was initially adopted, or served, "to break the Web free from corporate greed." Chrome's appeal was primarily technical. Each tab got its own process and could crash without taking down the entire browser. No one else had this at the time, and it was a big deal because Flash was still widespread so sites were even less stable than they are today. Luckily, Firefox, arguably among the most "free from corporate greed" of the browsers, has now finally caught up to Chrome on stability and speed (in my experience), and is rapidly adding privacy and content blocking features and defaults that Chrome lacks. If it were still behind Chrome technically, as it was in 2008, it probably wouldn't matter that Mozilla is more trustworthy than Google.

Passthepeas 8y ago
In my experience I can't stream video on firefox without the video freezing within the first 5 minutes, and it feels clunky even with non video webpages. I really hate google the company, and I'd love to stop using their software, but so far I have yet to see a browser that even comes close to chrome.
- neogodless 8y ago
  What OS, hardware and video platform(s)? I haven't had any issues with Desktop Firefox on Windows 10 on any of my Core i7 machines, when watching YouTube/Vimeo. Even my old dual-core budget Inspiron 3137 laptop works for YouTube and Firefox as well as Pandora/Firefox/bluetooth audio blasting. (It does like to consume RAM as if it was running SQL Server though.)
  - tzakrajs 8y ago
    Also having a good time with Firefox on macOS running on an early 2018 MacBook Pro. It has fully replaced my Chrome use at work.
    - AsyncAwait 8y ago
      Same here on Arch Linux for me.
  - Passthepeas 8y ago
    It happens both on my Mac Book Pro and my Windows 10 desktop. I don't have the problem as much with pre uploaded videos but with live streaming sites like twitch.
- i_am_proteus 8y ago
  I am able to stream video on Firefox on Windows, Linux, and Mac, including on a computer with a 2nd-gen i3 with 4GB RAM. I suspect there may be something besides Firefox at fault for your issue.
- driverdan 8y ago
  The only problems I have with video in Firefox on Mac are with Hangouts / Meet sometimes not working correctly. This is likely due to Google not cross browser testing.
- vokep 8y ago
  This, very noticeable with something like shadertoy.
- schnable 8y ago
  I've been using Brave, which is basically Chrome but even faster, and with more privacy features. All Chrome extensions work.
ethelward 8y ago
> Chrome's appeal was primarily technical Among the tech crowd, probably. For the remaining 99.99% of users, absolutely not. Chrome's appeal came from the pervasive advertisement campaigns, from the bundling strategy with other pieces of software, for the pre-installation on new computers or from the ads on Google SEarch homepage.
- Longhanks 8y ago
  Or the fact that in the beginning it was just blazing fast and very hassle-free (single click installer, automatic updates, no "IE toolbar hell").
  - mthoms 8y ago
    Good point. Auto-updates were a groundbreaking feature (at least in browsers) that most people have largely forgotten about.
- awill 8y ago
  I'd also add that 2008 Google was trusted by the public a lot more than 2019 Google.
  - jolmg 8y ago
    > by the public by technical users I imagine the general public still trusts them all the same or maybe even more.
    - saagarjha 8y ago
      I think with the recent focus of privacy by the media, users are beginning to trust Google less. Maybe not enough to stop using their services, but enough to at least question what Google might be doing with their data.
    - justicezyx 8y ago
      Reads to me a descending attitude towards normal users. I was a non technical users when chrome come out. I was studying civil engineering then in college. I certainly like Google as a symbol of freedom and technology superiority in the more pure sense than msft.
LoSboccacc 8y ago
and firefox had deep memory issue, while v8 transformed the webapp experience. the main selling point to me was closing it and opening it back with all the tabs was not a dramatic event but part of a clutter-free workflow
recursive 8y ago
I mostly use FF, but often Chrome. On my Dell laptop, I frequently get notified that "Firefox has been blocked from accessing the graphics hardware" or something to that effect. It's never happened once in Chrome.
gsnedders 8y ago
> Each tab got its own process and could crash without taking down the entire browser. No one else had this at the time IE8 Beta 1 shipped March 5, 2008; Chrome's beta release wasn't till September. OK, admittedly, Chrome's stable release happened before IE8's, but MS was working on much the same thing.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- Yoric 8y ago
  I'm pretty sure that a very old version of IE (maybe IE4?) was released with multiprocess before Microsoft killed that project.
perlgeek 8y ago
> Chrome's appeal was primarily technical. Each tab got its own process and could crash without taking down the entire browser. Curious, I remember speed being the primary reason. Google invented V8 (the javascript engine), with some pretty decent optimizations and a well-working JIT on i386/amd64 platforms. At the time when chromium came out, it handled some JS-heavy applications very nicely that Firefox struggled with. There seems to be a bloat cycle with many products, browsers being one of them. They start off lean, gain features over time, and then they are or feel so heavy that a lean new competitor can feel like a fresh breeze. Remember when Firefox was the fresh breeze, compared to the Netscape suite? I remember Chrome being perceived the same way when it came out.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- cm2187 8y ago
  You would need to break web standards compatibility to fight the current bloat cycle on the web. But it might happen, a simpler, faster web.
  - scottlocklin 8y ago
    Or you could block the trackers, which are most of the bloat.
    - jimmy1 8y ago
      On some sites, on others it's the 2.5-5mb PWA-that-gracefully-falls-back-to-SPA-that-gracefully-falls-back-to-SSR-with-bundled-inline-styles-and-images JS app that has horrid caching that is causing most of the bloat.
  - duado 8y ago
    That’s what AMP is..,
- mapgrep 8y ago
  Good point, V8 (that is, fast Javascript) was key as well. (I suppose it makes sense I'd agree with someone else with a Perl-inspired handle :-)
cromwellian 8y ago
It still is behind technically isn't it? Does Firefox support Site Isolation yet?
- throwawaymath 8y ago
  No, Firefox doesn't have Site Isolation. It's a planned feature addition.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- pcwalton 8y ago
  There are features Chrome has that Firefox doesn't. There are also features that Firefox has that Chrome doesn't, such as Stylo and WebRender. You can argue that Site Isolation is more important than large performance improvements (I think that's a losing argument, given that Site Isolation as presently deployed in Chrome doesn't even defend against compromised renderers and as such is restricted to being another Spectre mitigation), but you're being way too glib here.
  - cromwellian 8y ago
    I'm not being glib, my current work involves security and privacy, and so I'm more sensitive / concerned about those issues than rendering performance. Current JITs like V8 even give me the willies in terms of attack surface area, such that I'm willing to stomach something like a WASM interpreter for my use cases. I recognize that WebRender is a huge technique achievement and I absolutely love it when people achieve silky smooth 60fps renders, and if I was working on games or graphics or UX, I'd probably rank that over top of Site Isolation. The original post mentioned process isolation and flash, so my comment was more a long the lines of 'it's still behind chrome (in isolation)'
    - pcwalton 8y ago
      Even if all you care about is security, I don't think Site Isolation makes a real-world difference right now, as it's simply a defense-in-depth Spectre mitigation in case the first-line Spectre mitigations, which are deployed in both Chrome and Firefox, fail. At present, using Site Isolation to protect against compromised renderers is a TODO for both Chrome and Firefox. It's true that Chrome is closer to getting there, though.
jwatt 8y ago
> I take issue with the idea that Chrome was initially adopted, or served, "to break the Web free from corporate greed." Indeed. When Chrome was first released Firefox had already broken the IE monopoly having reached around 33% of the browser "market share", and was still growing. Speed was the issue I seem to remember most people switching to Chrome for at the time.
- bobajeff 8y ago
  I remember it grew to about 26% and then sort of stalled. I don't remember where IE was at the time but I remember some websites were still only supporting it.
- isostatic 8y ago
  Firefox started with a terrible backdrop (Netscape 4), but after it's mozilla and phoenix days it was fairly fast fairly quickly. It then started adding bloat and terribleness, which Chrome didn't have. It's recovered now though, and is far better than chrome. It saddens me that so many on HN champion google and actively push for competitors to fail.
chmln 8y ago
> has now finally caught up to Chrome on stability and speed Arguably, with its market share dwindling fast, it's not enough to just be technically on par. Further, it is absolutely not up to par on Linux and from what I know, MacOS as well.
- tzakrajs 8y ago
  It’s got great performance on macOS, and I suggest that people try it again.
  - tsbinz 8y ago
    See jorvi's comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19264960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19264960 there are some bugs that drive me back to chrome when I try it
  - xattt 8y ago
    Firefox still feels non-native on OS X as a result of its reliance on XUL. My main issues are around UI. The menu bar only fully populates once the browser is almost loaded, not when the browser is first opened. The other thing is that UI elements exist in an uncanny valley, where they are not quite native, but not quite foreign. Camino meant to fix that, but it has moved onto greener pastures.
    - StevePerkins 8y ago
      > "Firefox still feels non-native on OS X..." As opposed to Chrome? Or Opera, Vivaldi, etc? Browsers are a class of application whose UI's have been "native" only to themselves for years now.
    - int_19h 8y ago
      Didn't they get rid of XUL entirely several releases ago?
- ionised 8y ago
  I use a 2017 Macbook Pro in work, on which I use Firefox as my main browser. I also have Firefox on my Windows 10 gaming machine at home and while I haven't run any performance anaylsis, I can;t tell the difference between the two in terms of speed and responsiveness. The Mac version has crashed on me a few times though whereas my Windows 10 version hasn't. Other than the OS they are on the two browser instances are set up exactly the same way.
EvanAnderson 8y ago
It's probably worth referring back to the comic that Google produced as an introduction to Chrome: https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/ https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/ I think the focus was technical-- stability, speed, security being the main focuses. There is an element of breaking away from proprietary software in the comic too. (Rather ironic, to my mind, considering that it's Google's Internet now... >sigh<)
ianamartin 8y ago
That's living in a bizarro fantasy world where any meaningful number of people evaluate anything on technical merits. Even the speed argument below is suspect. People can't tell the difference between their browser and their internet connection. Chrome was widely adopted because it didn't suck and because google--a brand they already learned to trust for search--was constantly beating them over the head to upgrade. IE wasn't just bad on technical grounds. It genuinely sucked for everyone. It was constantly getting infected with toolbars, popups, and generally crashing all to hell. It was confusing for people to use even when it wasn't any of those things. Chrome was adopted by the majority of users because it worked at all. IE just didn't.
slivanes 8y ago
For me, it was the unified bookmarks across all ones machines with Chrome. No more fiddling with copying bookmarks or syncing - it was done automatically and it worked. No other browser had it built in at the time.
- Unkechaug 8y ago
  Speed was nice, but this really hooked me. What really blew me away not long after was synced tabs between my computer and phone.
chimeracoder 8y ago
> Each tab got its own process and could crash without taking down the entire browser Chrome has never been process-per-tab - this is a common misconception. It's process per domain, except there are certain circumstances in which two tabs on different domains will still share the same process (such as opening a tab through a middle click).
otterley 8y ago
Here's the original announcement from Sundar Pichai - who was then the VP of Product Management, now CEO: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/fresh-take-on-browser.html https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/fresh-take-on-browse...
JohnTHaller 8y ago
Chrome's growth was due to speed initially, but at least a decent chunk of it later was due to trickery. I've had to uninstall Chrome from my Mom's computer multiple times. It's one of the most popular bundleware apps out there. Free antivirus, games, system 'utilities', Adobe Flash updates, etc all got paid to employ dark patterns to sneak Chrome onto PCs and have it automatically set as the default and pinned to your task bar. Examples: https://imgur.com/gallery/WWZxj https://imgur.com/gallery/WWZxj
- pojzon 8y ago
  This reason alone is tragic enough to NEVER use Chrome. And of course it has a complete garbage resources management which can be easly tested by opening few hundred empty tabs.. (mostly freezes whole OS around 180-270 tabs on modern desktops)
  - slurpeedog 8y ago
    which browser right now can handle 180-270 tabs lol?
    - detaro 8y ago
      Firefox does so easily, although Chrome did too last I used it.
    - dTal 8y ago
      289 tabs open right now in Firefox (I have a little addon installed that counts them for you).
tracker1 8y ago
Beyond even that, Firefox was already stripping market share away from IE at the time. Around 2010 or so it was really a 3-way split, which was really nice in terms of getting a lot of things worked out between the three (relatively speaking). A lot of people would have migrated away from IE, it just would have been more Firefox, less Chrome.
- bobajeff 8y ago
  At one point Firefox's growth stopped or slowed considerably. Without Chrome I doubt many would've migrated away from Internet Explorer.
  - clairity 8y ago
    firefox had been taking market share from IE slowly, then when it started to make some real gains, chrome came around and swiped it all out from under firefox. i've mainly used the mozilla lineage of browsers (all the way through netscape and back to mosaic) and was really dismayed when this happened because even by then it was pretty obvious that chrome was part of google's wild west landgrab before regulations and law had a chance to catch up to online surveillance.
    - robocat 8y ago
      > online surveillance I think the drive behind Chrome was to compete with Microsoft, by making a browser that was good enough to deliver your applications, and so make your OS irrelevant. They have succeeded to the point where the only thing I would use Windows for now is Excel (and sometimes some obsolete development tools). Chrome (when not on Android) seems far more benign than most applications as far as "surveillance" goes.
      - clairity 8y ago
        yes, chrome was part of google's hedge against microsoft, but microsoft poorly understand the web and badly bungled their internet strategy, to the point that it seemed that they were desperately trying to cede the leadership position to anyone but themselves. google really hadn't needed to worry about microsoft there. make no mistake, chrome's primary strategic purpose was to control the web in ways that extended and solidified google's reach in search, ad views, and personal data. they flanked it with a suite of tools (e.g., gmail, maps), content (e.g, youtube), and platforms (e.g., android) and made them work best on chrome (à la microsoft with IE). chrome phones home constantly and uses increasingly intrusive techniques to identity us (like requiring a google account). whether you believe it's benign or not, that's surveillance. they're slowly boiling the pot and we're the frogs.
burtonator 8y ago
I've been heads down building an app which relies on Google Chrome and I go back and forth on this. Polar is an app for managing your reading. It also supports advanced features like caching web pages locally, annotating PDFs, tagging the documents you're reading, etc. https://getpolarized.io/ https://getpolarized.io/ It's based on Electron and I've been going deep into Chrome internals as well as experimenting with Chrome extensions. It's definitely a double edges sword here but I think there's an overly negative view of Chrome and/or having one platform. Chrome is owned by Google. However, Chromium is Open Source. Electron wouldn't exist without Chromium and there are other browsers based on Chromium. I don't really see the benefit of duplicating things for the sake of duplicating them. A lot of Firefox fans here argue that Firefox provides an alternative to keep us safe. Safe from what? Chromium? It's Open Source? Do we really need a duplicated HTML renderer? It's not like Chromium is going to vanish. There's the argument that most Chromium developers are employed by Google - but not if Mozilla employs them. It's always possible for fork these things.
- isostatic 8y ago
  > I've been heads down building an app which relies on Google Chrome IE6 called
- sstangl 8y ago
  > Safe from what? Chromium? It's Open Source? Safe from monopoly control over Web standards. The Web has been a consensus ecosystem, and Google does not have a track record of proposing reasonable standards. In my mind this is most grossly evident in the case of PNaCl, which was tied to their Pepper API and effectively impossible for non-Blink browsers to implement. Google pushed for PNaCl to become a Web standard, and it was only through years of difficult effort that Mozilla was able to show AsmJS as a better solution, which eventually gave rise to the reasonable standard of WebAssembly. Were Google in a monopoly market position back then, they would have pushed PNaCl, and non-Blink browsers would be unable to render the modern Web. That might sound fine if you believe that Blink is the be-all-and-end-all of Web technology. But we have Servo now, and we already know better.
  - 8y ago
NittLion78 8y ago
I like the car analogy for browsers back then: Back when I first started using Chrome (I think in 2008), I used to describe it as a weekend race car with all the seats, upholstery, and HVAC stripped out. Fast, no frills. Firefox, on the other hand, was your 1970s custom van with a cool wizard painted on the side, really comfortable seats, and lots of room for further customization. Not fast, but certainly versatile and designed to your liking. IE7, naturally, was a Yugo.
Numberwang 8y ago
Firefox is super slow compared to Chrome. Are you joking? Sure, chose free software, but don't make up lies like this.
kmkemp 8y ago
For non-technical users: faster pages, account syncing, google name recognition and default searching. For technical users: V8, dev tools, better privacy, evergreen, frequent updates, tabs as processes, fast implementations of new specifications. There were many reasons that Chrome rapidly gained market share.
- pojzon 8y ago
  > better privacy Pardon ? Its completely opposite, same with performance, try to open more than 100 tabs on firefox and chrome..
  - collinmanderson 8y ago
    They're commenting on why "Chrome rapidly gained market share.", not commenting on the current situation.
    - NeoBasilisk 8y ago
      How did Chrome have better privacy than Firefox at any point in the past?
      - kmkemp 8y ago
        Chrome's primary competition wasn't FireFox as they've never been anything close to a market leader. My post was about what features led to Chrome gaining such high market share, and their default privacy settings were superior to some other browsers.
misnome 8y ago
> Chrome's appeal was primarily technical. Each tab got its own process and could crash without taking down the entire browser This was my main initial reason for switching - sick of constantly having one tab lock up the entire browser. It was also prettier, and I liked the combined search and URL bar. Now, I have no reason to change. Plus, Firefox is on all the machines at work, and really badly handles multi-system user accounts - if logged in on one computer then you cannot use on any others without launching with a special command line flag and switching to an entirely new profile (where none of the settings/logins are kept). Last I checked they had no interest in fixing this.
callahad 8y ago
> Each tab got its own process and could crash without taking down the entire browser. No one else had this at the time IE8 had a public release with process-per-tab before Chrome debuted.
Phrodo_00 8y ago
Yeah, before Chrome became popular, Firefox had close to 50% marketshare, and Firefox is a lot farther away from your typical corp than Chrome.
muststopmyths 8y ago
>Chrome's appeal was primarily technical. Each tab got its own process and could crash without taking down the entire browser. No one else had this at the time, and it was a big deal because Flash was still widespread so sites were even less stable than they are today. Actually IE8 had the same thing (and it was in development by 2007, so the few-months-later release date vs Chrome doesn't matter in terms of architecture).
TheOperator 8y ago
I certainly feel the gap between chrome and firefox has narrowed. I struggle to think of a reason NOT to use firefox anymore. I do find myself clicking on that red fox more and more. I've sort of made firefox my incognito "browser". If the firefox vs IE wars taught me anything its that tech savvy users have a huge impact on adoption. If you win over the nerds they will install firefox absolutely everywhere. They will develop their stuff to work well with firefox. Chrome hasn't quite become ie6 yet but I feel like if trends continue Firefox will become power users favored browser. Firefox even today is still more extensible and customizable. It also has a more credible reputation for privacy. I believe even now the threat of Firefox is what makes Google hesitate to do things like kill ad blocking.
botverse 8y ago
> Firefox, arguably among the most "free from corporate greed" of the browsers, has now finally caught up to Chrome on stability and speed (in my experience) I’m sad to say that I hope that was my experience, but I’ve being trying Firefox (again) for the last 6 months and I still manage to make it irresponsive while developing, and very slow when using plugins like dark reader. So I had to revert to Chrome but I’ll try again in a few months.
- amphibian87 8y ago
  The dark theme in Firefox isn't great, it's why I can't get people to switch, I've tried a half dozen add-ons, and while some of them are acceptable, FF flashes white between every page load, producing a blinding beam that immediately sends people back to Chrome. I know enough to try to change it in the config files, but I couldn't figure it out in the time I spent attepting = /
bad_user 8y ago
I switched back to Firefox before it was cool to switch back :-) And no, for me if Chrome is superior, it’s absolutely irrelevant. The only thing that matters is that I cannot trust Chrome and that Firefox has been good enough for quite some time. Yes I know the general population doesn’t think like me. I also think that ignorance in tech is dangerous.
jrs95 8y ago
It doesn't matter if Firefox has caught up if their usage share is still dropping. With Microsoft moving to a Chromium based browser as well, Firefox is very close to being irrelevant. More than 90% of the market will be Webkit or Blink. In my opinion, despite their technical achievements, Firefox is currently headed down the same path Opera went down before they became essentially a Chromium reskin. Their dropping usage share is negatively affecting sites compatibility with Firefox, which is the only reason I went back to Chrome after giving Quantum a try.
m-p-3 8y ago
I'm making an effort to stay on Firefo, but frankly the experience on mobile is IMO not as good as Chrome in term of navigation. I miss the pull to refresh, the inability to hide the URL bar when using a PWA (could be some websites that aren't fully compliant though..)
dandigangi 8y ago
Did folks really switch because of the tab /per process? I honestly didn't know until I saw memory hogging + folks posting about it.
austincheney 8y ago
Chrome was the first browser to give each tab a unique subprocess but it did not start out with this. I think this may have been 2010. Also when Flash crashed it would crash its container opposed to the outer page. Flash was also a separate process from the containing page.
josteink 8y ago
Not disagreeing with the rest of your post, but... > No one else had this at the time, and it was a big deal because Flash was still widespread so sites were even less stable than they are today. I never saw a site crash my browser/tab until I used chrome. To me it seemed like a workaround to a immature code-vase, because Firefox never had issues like this. Either way: not really a selling point to me, at least. WRT crashing stuff: I’ve used mostly Windows and Linux. Is unstable web browsers just a Mac thing?
voidmain0001 8y ago
This is what I remember about Chrome's release: https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/ https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/ The first change it referenced was a process per tab, and then on page 13 it referenced V8.
MichaelTheGamer 8y ago
Hey hey. My name is Michael. So, just did a quick cut&paste of part of your comment that I wish to comment on: "Luckily, Firefox, arguably among the most 'free from corporate greed' of the browsers, has now finally caught up to Chrome on stability and speed (in my experience)," No, you're not alone. I will absolutely agree with you about Firefox quickly catching up to Chrome and at an alarming (but satisfying) rate. By that, I only mean that Google is no longer a sort of "underdog" like it was-at least when standing next to Microsoft-(and hasn't been for some time).And I have to agree with Reda's comment that Google has become the very thing that it was trying to stomp out in Microsoft: a sort of monopoly-just-short-enough-of-being-a-monopoly to escape the law's notice. What I fear is that Google will get so big and powerful that if they did get close enough to technically qualifying as being a monopoly that they could and quite possibly would be like, "SO?! WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?" And being able to because at that point, who COULD do anything? I never thought it possible for any one company until recently. It is too close for comfort. Thanks, Michael ps- sorry it was so long. I actually am working on that.

Passthepeas 8y ago

In my experience I can't stream video on firefox without the video freezing within the first 5 minutes, and it feels clunky even with non video webpages. I really hate google the company, and I'd love to stop using their software, but so far I have yet to see a browser that even comes close to chrome.

neogodless 8y ago
What OS, hardware and video platform(s)? I haven't had any issues with Desktop Firefox on Windows 10 on any of my Core i7 machines, when watching YouTube/Vimeo. Even my old dual-core budget Inspiron 3137 laptop works for YouTube and Firefox as well as Pandora/Firefox/bluetooth audio blasting. (It does like to consume RAM as if it was running SQL Server though.)
- tzakrajs 8y ago
  Also having a good time with Firefox on macOS running on an early 2018 MacBook Pro. It has fully replaced my Chrome use at work.
  - AsyncAwait 8y ago
    Same here on Arch Linux for me.
- Passthepeas 8y ago
  It happens both on my Mac Book Pro and my Windows 10 desktop. I don't have the problem as much with pre uploaded videos but with live streaming sites like twitch.
i_am_proteus 8y ago
I am able to stream video on Firefox on Windows, Linux, and Mac, including on a computer with a 2nd-gen i3 with 4GB RAM. I suspect there may be something besides Firefox at fault for your issue.
driverdan 8y ago
The only problems I have with video in Firefox on Mac are with Hangouts / Meet sometimes not working correctly. This is likely due to Google not cross browser testing.
vokep 8y ago
This, very noticeable with something like shadertoy.
schnable 8y ago
I've been using Brave, which is basically Chrome but even faster, and with more privacy features. All Chrome extensions work.

ethelward 8y ago

> Chrome's appeal was primarily technical Among the tech crowd, probably. For the remaining 99.99% of users, absolutely not. Chrome's appeal came from the pervasive advertisement campaigns, from the bundling strategy with other pieces of software, for the pre-installation on new computers or from the ads on Google SEarch homepage.

Longhanks 8y ago
Or the fact that in the beginning it was just blazing fast and very hassle-free (single click installer, automatic updates, no "IE toolbar hell").
- mthoms 8y ago
  Good point. Auto-updates were a groundbreaking feature (at least in browsers) that most people have largely forgotten about.
awill 8y ago
I'd also add that 2008 Google was trusted by the public a lot more than 2019 Google.
- jolmg 8y ago
  > by the public by technical users I imagine the general public still trusts them all the same or maybe even more.
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    I think with the recent focus of privacy by the media, users are beginning to trust Google less. Maybe not enough to stop using their services, but enough to at least question what Google might be doing with their data.
  - justicezyx 8y ago
    Reads to me a descending attitude towards normal users. I was a non technical users when chrome come out. I was studying civil engineering then in college. I certainly like Google as a symbol of freedom and technology superiority in the more pure sense than msft.

LoSboccacc 8y ago

and firefox had deep memory issue, while v8 transformed the webapp experience. the main selling point to me was closing it and opening it back with all the tabs was not a dramatic event but part of a clutter-free workflow

recursive 8y ago

I mostly use FF, but often Chrome. On my Dell laptop, I frequently get notified that "Firefox has been blocked from accessing the graphics hardware" or something to that effect. It's never happened once in Chrome.

gsnedders 8y ago

> Each tab got its own process and could crash without taking down the entire browser. No one else had this at the time IE8 Beta 1 shipped March 5, 2008; Chrome's beta release wasn't till September. OK, admittedly, Chrome's stable release happened before IE8's, but MS was working on much the same thing.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Yoric 8y ago
I'm pretty sure that a very old version of IE (maybe IE4?) was released with multiprocess before Microsoft killed that project.

perlgeek 8y ago

> Chrome's appeal was primarily technical. Each tab got its own process and could crash without taking down the entire browser. Curious, I remember speed being the primary reason. Google invented V8 (the javascript engine), with some pretty decent optimizations and a well-working JIT on i386/amd64 platforms. At the time when chromium came out, it handled some JS-heavy applications very nicely that Firefox struggled with. There seems to be a bloat cycle with many products, browsers being one of them. They start off lean, gain features over time, and then they are or feel so heavy that a lean new competitor can feel like a fresh breeze. Remember when Firefox was the fresh breeze, compared to the Netscape suite? I remember Chrome being perceived the same way when it came out.

deleted 8y ago
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cm2187 8y ago
You would need to break web standards compatibility to fight the current bloat cycle on the web. But it might happen, a simpler, faster web.
- scottlocklin 8y ago
  Or you could block the trackers, which are most of the bloat.
  - jimmy1 8y ago
    On some sites, on others it's the 2.5-5mb PWA-that-gracefully-falls-back-to-SPA-that-gracefully-falls-back-to-SSR-with-bundled-inline-styles-and-images JS app that has horrid caching that is causing most of the bloat.
- duado 8y ago
  That’s what AMP is..,
mapgrep 8y ago
Good point, V8 (that is, fast Javascript) was key as well. (I suppose it makes sense I'd agree with someone else with a Perl-inspired handle :-)

cromwellian 8y ago

It still is behind technically isn't it? Does Firefox support Site Isolation yet?

throwawaymath 8y ago
No, Firefox doesn't have Site Isolation. It's a planned feature addition.
deleted 8y ago
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pcwalton 8y ago
There are features Chrome has that Firefox doesn't. There are also features that Firefox has that Chrome doesn't, such as Stylo and WebRender. You can argue that Site Isolation is more important than large performance improvements (I think that's a losing argument, given that Site Isolation as presently deployed in Chrome doesn't even defend against compromised renderers and as such is restricted to being another Spectre mitigation), but you're being way too glib here.
- cromwellian 8y ago
  I'm not being glib, my current work involves security and privacy, and so I'm more sensitive / concerned about those issues than rendering performance. Current JITs like V8 even give me the willies in terms of attack surface area, such that I'm willing to stomach something like a WASM interpreter for my use cases. I recognize that WebRender is a huge technique achievement and I absolutely love it when people achieve silky smooth 60fps renders, and if I was working on games or graphics or UX, I'd probably rank that over top of Site Isolation. The original post mentioned process isolation and flash, so my comment was more a long the lines of 'it's still behind chrome (in isolation)'
  - pcwalton 8y ago
    Even if all you care about is security, I don't think Site Isolation makes a real-world difference right now, as it's simply a defense-in-depth Spectre mitigation in case the first-line Spectre mitigations, which are deployed in both Chrome and Firefox, fail. At present, using Site Isolation to protect against compromised renderers is a TODO for both Chrome and Firefox. It's true that Chrome is closer to getting there, though.

jwatt 8y ago

> I take issue with the idea that Chrome was initially adopted, or served, "to break the Web free from corporate greed." Indeed. When Chrome was first released Firefox had already broken the IE monopoly having reached around 33% of the browser "market share", and was still growing. Speed was the issue I seem to remember most people switching to Chrome for at the time.

bobajeff 8y ago
I remember it grew to about 26% and then sort of stalled. I don't remember where IE was at the time but I remember some websites were still only supporting it.
isostatic 8y ago
Firefox started with a terrible backdrop (Netscape 4), but after it's mozilla and phoenix days it was fairly fast fairly quickly. It then started adding bloat and terribleness, which Chrome didn't have. It's recovered now though, and is far better than chrome. It saddens me that so many on HN champion google and actively push for competitors to fail.

chmln 8y ago

> has now finally caught up to Chrome on stability and speed Arguably, with its market share dwindling fast, it's not enough to just be technically on par. Further, it is absolutely not up to par on Linux and from what I know, MacOS as well.

tzakrajs 8y ago
It’s got great performance on macOS, and I suggest that people try it again.
- tsbinz 8y ago
  See jorvi's comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19264960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19264960 there are some bugs that drive me back to chrome when I try it
- xattt 8y ago
  Firefox still feels non-native on OS X as a result of its reliance on XUL. My main issues are around UI. The menu bar only fully populates once the browser is almost loaded, not when the browser is first opened. The other thing is that UI elements exist in an uncanny valley, where they are not quite native, but not quite foreign. Camino meant to fix that, but it has moved onto greener pastures.
  - StevePerkins 8y ago
    > "Firefox still feels non-native on OS X..." As opposed to Chrome? Or Opera, Vivaldi, etc? Browsers are a class of application whose UI's have been "native" only to themselves for years now.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    Didn't they get rid of XUL entirely several releases ago?
ionised 8y ago
I use a 2017 Macbook Pro in work, on which I use Firefox as my main browser. I also have Firefox on my Windows 10 gaming machine at home and while I haven't run any performance anaylsis, I can;t tell the difference between the two in terms of speed and responsiveness. The Mac version has crashed on me a few times though whereas my Windows 10 version hasn't. Other than the OS they are on the two browser instances are set up exactly the same way.

EvanAnderson 8y ago

It's probably worth referring back to the comic that Google produced as an introduction to Chrome: https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/ https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/ I think the focus was technical-- stability, speed, security being the main focuses. There is an element of breaking away from proprietary software in the comic too. (Rather ironic, to my mind, considering that it's Google's Internet now... >sigh<)

ianamartin 8y ago

That's living in a bizarro fantasy world where any meaningful number of people evaluate anything on technical merits. Even the speed argument below is suspect. People can't tell the difference between their browser and their internet connection. Chrome was widely adopted because it didn't suck and because google--a brand they already learned to trust for search--was constantly beating them over the head to upgrade. IE wasn't just bad on technical grounds. It genuinely sucked for everyone. It was constantly getting infected with toolbars, popups, and generally crashing all to hell. It was confusing for people to use even when it wasn't any of those things. Chrome was adopted by the majority of users because it worked at all. IE just didn't.

slivanes 8y ago

For me, it was the unified bookmarks across all ones machines with Chrome. No more fiddling with copying bookmarks or syncing - it was done automatically and it worked. No other browser had it built in at the time.

Unkechaug 8y ago
Speed was nice, but this really hooked me. What really blew me away not long after was synced tabs between my computer and phone.

chimeracoder 8y ago

> Each tab got its own process and could crash without taking down the entire browser Chrome has never been process-per-tab - this is a common misconception. It's process per domain, except there are certain circumstances in which two tabs on different domains will still share the same process (such as opening a tab through a middle click).

otterley 8y ago

Here's the original announcement from Sundar Pichai - who was then the VP of Product Management, now CEO: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/fresh-take-on-browser.html https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/fresh-take-on-browse...

JohnTHaller 8y ago

Chrome's growth was due to speed initially, but at least a decent chunk of it later was due to trickery. I've had to uninstall Chrome from my Mom's computer multiple times. It's one of the most popular bundleware apps out there. Free antivirus, games, system 'utilities', Adobe Flash updates, etc all got paid to employ dark patterns to sneak Chrome onto PCs and have it automatically set as the default and pinned to your task bar. Examples: https://imgur.com/gallery/WWZxj https://imgur.com/gallery/WWZxj

pojzon 8y ago
This reason alone is tragic enough to NEVER use Chrome. And of course it has a complete garbage resources management which can be easly tested by opening few hundred empty tabs.. (mostly freezes whole OS around 180-270 tabs on modern desktops)
- slurpeedog 8y ago
  which browser right now can handle 180-270 tabs lol?
  - detaro 8y ago
    Firefox does so easily, although Chrome did too last I used it.
  - dTal 8y ago
    289 tabs open right now in Firefox (I have a little addon installed that counts them for you).

tracker1 8y ago

Beyond even that, Firefox was already stripping market share away from IE at the time. Around 2010 or so it was really a 3-way split, which was really nice in terms of getting a lot of things worked out between the three (relatively speaking). A lot of people would have migrated away from IE, it just would have been more Firefox, less Chrome.

bobajeff 8y ago
At one point Firefox's growth stopped or slowed considerably. Without Chrome I doubt many would've migrated away from Internet Explorer.
- clairity 8y ago
  firefox had been taking market share from IE slowly, then when it started to make some real gains, chrome came around and swiped it all out from under firefox. i've mainly used the mozilla lineage of browsers (all the way through netscape and back to mosaic) and was really dismayed when this happened because even by then it was pretty obvious that chrome was part of google's wild west landgrab before regulations and law had a chance to catch up to online surveillance.
  - robocat 8y ago
    > online surveillance I think the drive behind Chrome was to compete with Microsoft, by making a browser that was good enough to deliver your applications, and so make your OS irrelevant. They have succeeded to the point where the only thing I would use Windows for now is Excel (and sometimes some obsolete development tools). Chrome (when not on Android) seems far more benign than most applications as far as "surveillance" goes.
    - clairity 8y ago
      yes, chrome was part of google's hedge against microsoft, but microsoft poorly understand the web and badly bungled their internet strategy, to the point that it seemed that they were desperately trying to cede the leadership position to anyone but themselves. google really hadn't needed to worry about microsoft there. make no mistake, chrome's primary strategic purpose was to control the web in ways that extended and solidified google's reach in search, ad views, and personal data. they flanked it with a suite of tools (e.g., gmail, maps), content (e.g, youtube), and platforms (e.g., android) and made them work best on chrome (à la microsoft with IE). chrome phones home constantly and uses increasingly intrusive techniques to identity us (like requiring a google account). whether you believe it's benign or not, that's surveillance. they're slowly boiling the pot and we're the frogs.

burtonator 8y ago

I've been heads down building an app which relies on Google Chrome and I go back and forth on this. Polar is an app for managing your reading. It also supports advanced features like caching web pages locally, annotating PDFs, tagging the documents you're reading, etc. https://getpolarized.io/ https://getpolarized.io/ It's based on Electron and I've been going deep into Chrome internals as well as experimenting with Chrome extensions. It's definitely a double edges sword here but I think there's an overly negative view of Chrome and/or having one platform. Chrome is owned by Google. However, Chromium is Open Source. Electron wouldn't exist without Chromium and there are other browsers based on Chromium. I don't really see the benefit of duplicating things for the sake of duplicating them. A lot of Firefox fans here argue that Firefox provides an alternative to keep us safe. Safe from what? Chromium? It's Open Source? Do we really need a duplicated HTML renderer? It's not like Chromium is going to vanish. There's the argument that most Chromium developers are employed by Google - but not if Mozilla employs them. It's always possible for fork these things.

isostatic 8y ago
> I've been heads down building an app which relies on Google Chrome IE6 called
sstangl 8y ago
> Safe from what? Chromium? It's Open Source? Safe from monopoly control over Web standards. The Web has been a consensus ecosystem, and Google does not have a track record of proposing reasonable standards. In my mind this is most grossly evident in the case of PNaCl, which was tied to their Pepper API and effectively impossible for non-Blink browsers to implement. Google pushed for PNaCl to become a Web standard, and it was only through years of difficult effort that Mozilla was able to show AsmJS as a better solution, which eventually gave rise to the reasonable standard of WebAssembly. Were Google in a monopoly market position back then, they would have pushed PNaCl, and non-Blink browsers would be unable to render the modern Web. That might sound fine if you believe that Blink is the be-all-and-end-all of Web technology. But we have Servo now, and we already know better.
- 8y ago

NittLion78 8y ago

I like the car analogy for browsers back then: Back when I first started using Chrome (I think in 2008), I used to describe it as a weekend race car with all the seats, upholstery, and HVAC stripped out. Fast, no frills. Firefox, on the other hand, was your 1970s custom van with a cool wizard painted on the side, really comfortable seats, and lots of room for further customization. Not fast, but certainly versatile and designed to your liking. IE7, naturally, was a Yugo.

Numberwang 8y ago

Firefox is super slow compared to Chrome. Are you joking? Sure, chose free software, but don't make up lies like this.

kmkemp 8y ago

For non-technical users: faster pages, account syncing, google name recognition and default searching. For technical users: V8, dev tools, better privacy, evergreen, frequent updates, tabs as processes, fast implementations of new specifications. There were many reasons that Chrome rapidly gained market share.

pojzon 8y ago
> better privacy Pardon ? Its completely opposite, same with performance, try to open more than 100 tabs on firefox and chrome..
- collinmanderson 8y ago
  They're commenting on why "Chrome rapidly gained market share.", not commenting on the current situation.
  - NeoBasilisk 8y ago
    How did Chrome have better privacy than Firefox at any point in the past?
    - kmkemp 8y ago
      Chrome's primary competition wasn't FireFox as they've never been anything close to a market leader. My post was about what features led to Chrome gaining such high market share, and their default privacy settings were superior to some other browsers.

misnome 8y ago

> Chrome's appeal was primarily technical. Each tab got its own process and could crash without taking down the entire browser This was my main initial reason for switching - sick of constantly having one tab lock up the entire browser. It was also prettier, and I liked the combined search and URL bar. Now, I have no reason to change. Plus, Firefox is on all the machines at work, and really badly handles multi-system user accounts - if logged in on one computer then you cannot use on any others without launching with a special command line flag and switching to an entirely new profile (where none of the settings/logins are kept). Last I checked they had no interest in fixing this.

callahad 8y ago

> Each tab got its own process and could crash without taking down the entire browser. No one else had this at the time IE8 had a public release with process-per-tab before Chrome debuted.

Phrodo_00 8y ago

Yeah, before Chrome became popular, Firefox had close to 50% marketshare, and Firefox is a lot farther away from your typical corp than Chrome.

muststopmyths 8y ago

>Chrome's appeal was primarily technical. Each tab got its own process and could crash without taking down the entire browser. No one else had this at the time, and it was a big deal because Flash was still widespread so sites were even less stable than they are today. Actually IE8 had the same thing (and it was in development by 2007, so the few-months-later release date vs Chrome doesn't matter in terms of architecture).

TheOperator 8y ago

I certainly feel the gap between chrome and firefox has narrowed. I struggle to think of a reason NOT to use firefox anymore. I do find myself clicking on that red fox more and more. I've sort of made firefox my incognito "browser". If the firefox vs IE wars taught me anything its that tech savvy users have a huge impact on adoption. If you win over the nerds they will install firefox absolutely everywhere. They will develop their stuff to work well with firefox. Chrome hasn't quite become ie6 yet but I feel like if trends continue Firefox will become power users favored browser. Firefox even today is still more extensible and customizable. It also has a more credible reputation for privacy. I believe even now the threat of Firefox is what makes Google hesitate to do things like kill ad blocking.

botverse 8y ago

> Firefox, arguably among the most "free from corporate greed" of the browsers, has now finally caught up to Chrome on stability and speed (in my experience) I’m sad to say that I hope that was my experience, but I’ve being trying Firefox (again) for the last 6 months and I still manage to make it irresponsive while developing, and very slow when using plugins like dark reader. So I had to revert to Chrome but I’ll try again in a few months.

amphibian87 8y ago
The dark theme in Firefox isn't great, it's why I can't get people to switch, I've tried a half dozen add-ons, and while some of them are acceptable, FF flashes white between every page load, producing a blinding beam that immediately sends people back to Chrome. I know enough to try to change it in the config files, but I couldn't figure it out in the time I spent attepting = /

bad_user 8y ago

I switched back to Firefox before it was cool to switch back :-) And no, for me if Chrome is superior, it’s absolutely irrelevant. The only thing that matters is that I cannot trust Chrome and that Firefox has been good enough for quite some time. Yes I know the general population doesn’t think like me. I also think that ignorance in tech is dangerous.

jrs95 8y ago

It doesn't matter if Firefox has caught up if their usage share is still dropping. With Microsoft moving to a Chromium based browser as well, Firefox is very close to being irrelevant. More than 90% of the market will be Webkit or Blink. In my opinion, despite their technical achievements, Firefox is currently headed down the same path Opera went down before they became essentially a Chromium reskin. Their dropping usage share is negatively affecting sites compatibility with Firefox, which is the only reason I went back to Chrome after giving Quantum a try.

m-p-3 8y ago

I'm making an effort to stay on Firefo, but frankly the experience on mobile is IMO not as good as Chrome in term of navigation. I miss the pull to refresh, the inability to hide the URL bar when using a PWA (could be some websites that aren't fully compliant though..)

dandigangi 8y ago

Did folks really switch because of the tab /per process? I honestly didn't know until I saw memory hogging + folks posting about it.

austincheney 8y ago

Chrome was the first browser to give each tab a unique subprocess but it did not start out with this. I think this may have been 2010. Also when Flash crashed it would crash its container opposed to the outer page. Flash was also a separate process from the containing page.

josteink 8y ago

Not disagreeing with the rest of your post, but... > No one else had this at the time, and it was a big deal because Flash was still widespread so sites were even less stable than they are today. I never saw a site crash my browser/tab until I used chrome. To me it seemed like a workaround to a immature code-vase, because Firefox never had issues like this. Either way: not really a selling point to me, at least. WRT crashing stuff: I’ve used mostly Windows and Linux. Is unstable web browsers just a Mac thing?

voidmain0001 8y ago

This is what I remember about Chrome's release: https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/ https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/ The first change it referenced was a process per tab, and then on page 13 it referenced V8.

MichaelTheGamer 8y ago

Hey hey. My name is Michael. So, just did a quick cut&paste of part of your comment that I wish to comment on: "Luckily, Firefox, arguably among the most 'free from corporate greed' of the browsers, has now finally caught up to Chrome on stability and speed (in my experience)," No, you're not alone. I will absolutely agree with you about Firefox quickly catching up to Chrome and at an alarming (but satisfying) rate. By that, I only mean that Google is no longer a sort of "underdog" like it was-at least when standing next to Microsoft-(and hasn't been for some time).And I have to agree with Reda's comment that Google has become the very thing that it was trying to stomp out in Microsoft: a sort of monopoly-just-short-enough-of-being-a-monopoly to escape the law's notice. What I fear is that Google will get so big and powerful that if they did get close enough to technically qualifying as being a monopoly that they could and quite possibly would be like, "SO?! WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?" And being able to because at that point, who COULD do anything? I never thought it possible for any one company until recently. It is too close for comfort. Thanks, Michael ps- sorry it was so long. I actually am working on that.