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> 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 perv

> 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.
    - jolmg 8y ago
      Not condescending (if that's what you mean), it's more of an attitude of hopelessness. After all, it will be "normal" users that control where the market goes.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    This stuff has been on the front pages of mainstream media for long enough. Ask your non-tech acquaintances what they think about Google, Facebook etc - you might be surprised.
    - jolmg 8y ago
      In general, they don't care. They care about the conveniences forsaking privacy brings. Haven't talked to everyone on this topic, though. So who knows, there might be some.
  - est31 8y ago
    Technical users are multiplicators though.
    - jolmg 8y ago
      multiplicators? You mean because we advocate with those near us? Normal users also advocate in favor of products based on features which are sometimes based on forsaking privacy.
mushufasa 8y ago
I switched to chrome before I became technically literate, because it seemed a lot faster and less prone to breaking. I couldn't describe why, but the effect was felt. Now, I still struggle to move to firefox as I'm on a retina MBP, where firefox riles up my cpu and drains my battery.
- jorvi 8y ago
  Yup. I'm using Firefox on macOS as well and suffering from the same bug. If you use your Macbook with the resolution set to 'scaled' Firefox absolutely murders your battery. On top of that there's a bug where H264 video doesn't get properly accelerated. Both these bugs have been in Firefox at least since FF62. Both have alternatingly been marked 'priority 2' or 'fix-optional' which is absolutely baffling to me considering how crucial battery life is in today's portable world. I've even gone into the Firefox IRC multiple times where the fix has been promised to be in a 'point release' since FF63.. I get that they have limited resources but it makes getting people to switch (and stay) on Firefox increasingly hard if it cuts battery life of their laptop nearly in half.
  - pcwalton 8y ago
    It isn't a bug; it's the fact that Firefox uses a transparent window and doesn't yet use Core Animation, which offloads scrolling to the window server. Switching to CA involves heavy lifting inside the compositor and is not an easy task. My planeshift crate does some of the work needed to make the WebRender path use Core Animation. In the meantime, setting gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque to true in about:config helps battery life significantly, at the cost of rounded corners and vibrancy.
    - jorvi 8y ago
      I'm curious (genuine curiosity, not meant sarcastic), why is Firefox only now switching to CoreAnimation? AFAIK CoreAnimation has been around since Leopard which makes it nearly 12 year old, which is positively ancient in the tech world. Also, coincidentally, do you know what exactly causes the H264 problem on macOS? I've tried to track it down in bugzilla to no success, but I am 100% sure it is a bug. The energy impact for playing a H264 YouTube video in Safari has an energy impact of ~25. Firefox used to be ~60, but these days its ~180 (!) > In the meantime, setting gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque to true in about:config helps battery life significantly, at the cost of rounded corners and vibrancy. Thanks for this! :)
jonplackett 8y ago
For the remaining users I reckon tech-literate family members set it as their search engine for them. I certainly switched over A LOT of people this way.
leftyted 8y ago
Chrome's main appeal was that it was much faster than firefox and IE. At everything. I had no technical knowledge when chrome came out, was using firefox, tried chrome, never looked back. It's not really possible to separate out the effects of advertising from the effects of the product actually being better. Maybe I installed chrome because I saw an ad, but I stopped using firefox because it was clear that chrome was better. The fact that you're emphasizing ads over the very real performance advantages just means you've got an axe to grind.
- rchaud 8y ago
  IIRC, it was faster than Firefox 3 specifically, which caused many FF users to migrate. Something happened between FF2 and FF3, since the latter appeared noticeably slower.
  - uodtl 8y ago
    YES! I remember Firefox 2 being so much faster than 3 that I kept using it until most websites started to break. Then I switched to Chrome.
- a1369209993 8y ago
  > The fact that you're emphasizing ads over the very real performance advantages just means you've got an axe to grind. Alternatively, it could mean that, like me, they had NoScript installed when Chrome came out[0], making Firefox genuinely faster by dint of brute do-less-stuff-ism. 0: or when we heard about it anyway.
  - leftyted 8y ago
    I'm not sure why so many HN posters feel the need to boast about not executing JavaScript. All that means is that you've opted out of the web that the rest of the world is using. Good for you. But people who have disabled JS make up such a small porportion of web users (~.2% of pageviews) that your experience is pretty much irrelevant to the question of general browser trends. I'd also bet that Chrome was faster at painting pages than Firefox, so it wasn't just a JS engine advantge.
agumonkey 8y ago
I beg to disagree. Chrome was also extremely lean, but very well thought out. - a bit unrelated but installer was a shim, ~downloading it took 3 seconds and 500kB - Few buttons - Transient status bar - Transient download widget - Good ergonomics (easy to close tabs in rapid successions without moving your mouse, the next one would fall in place) - Clear preference panel - Maybe later: pdf support and print dialog
- ethelward 8y ago
  I'm not pretending it was not well thought; I'm merely saying its technical advantages were not the main drive behind its huge adoption rate. With all due respect, none of the pluses you mentioned would be a reason for a random, tech-illiterate, using-a-computer-for-FB person to install Chrome.
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    You're right, there's also a bootstrap thing, they couldn't know before installing. The only thing they'd know would be "it's by Google". But all the point listed above were strong factors for newbs too. They could easily discard it if it was an annoyance I believe.
type-2 8y ago
Agreed, the google homepage wouldn't shut up about it.
jdietrich 8y ago
I spent years stridently recommending Chrome to non-technical users, because it was by far the fastest and most secure browser available. Google's primary objective for Chrome and Android was simply to get people to use the internet more, on the (entirely reasonable) assumption that they'd probably use Google and they would see a lot of AdSense units. They invested heavily in getting better software into the hands of as many users as possible. Of course they harvest a whole bunch of user data, but dragging up the quality of the browsing experience was a far bigger factor IMO. Would Edge exist if Chrome had never happened? Would Firefox have a fast JS engine and proper sandboxing? What would the non-Apple smartphone market look like without Android? Whether you like Google's business practices or not, they've massively increased our expectations of browser software, in the same way that Starbucks created a world where you can buy a half-decent cappuccino in McDonalds.
- treis 8y ago
  >Google's primary objective for Chrome and Android was simply to get people to use the internet more, on the (entirely reasonable) assumption that they'd probably use Google and they would see a lot of AdSense units. Google paid Apple 12 billion dollars last year to be the default search engine in Safari and another half billion to Firefox for the same. Google's primary objectives with Chrome was to lower that amount and to guard their monopoly on search.
- JohnFen 8y ago
  It's very hard for me to consider Chrome as a "most secure" browser. But I suppose it depends on what you do and don't consider security threats.
drewmol 8y ago
>For the remaining 99.99% of users, absolutely not. Chrome's appeal came from... Bingo! Thank you for pointing this out. For those younger readers, Chrome's penetration was forceful and uninvited. A browser add-on/search hijacker/ persistant spyware known as Google Toolbar was it's predecessor project from Google. It was an epidemic across the PC landscape for half a decade and all those infected machines became Chromes initial foothold. There's plenty of positives from the project, but for Chrome to achieve browser monopoly status, user consent sure did seem to get sacrificed.
nearbuy 8y ago
I think Chrome's design appeal is obvious just from looking at a screenshot of Chrome and Firefox in 2008: https://imgur.com/a/uyBcxI0 https://imgur.com/a/uyBcxI0. Firefox and Edge eventually adopted Chrome's design choices to have more content area, no "File, Edit, View" menu bar and an integrated search and address bar. But for years Chrome was ahead.
- firexcy 8y ago
  This. The most refreshing thing I felt when Chrome came out in 2008 was that it let me treat a webpage as an application _per se_, instead of a document being opened by an application (i.e. the browser).
hortense 8y ago
> Among the tech crowd, probably. For the remaining 99.99% of users, absolutely not. Guess who sets up the computers for the remaining 99.99%? If you seduce the tech crowd, you also get the other users.

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.
  - jolmg 8y ago
    Not condescending (if that's what you mean), it's more of an attitude of hopelessness. After all, it will be "normal" users that control where the market goes.
- int_19h 8y ago
  This stuff has been on the front pages of mainstream media for long enough. Ask your non-tech acquaintances what they think about Google, Facebook etc - you might be surprised.
  - jolmg 8y ago
    In general, they don't care. They care about the conveniences forsaking privacy brings. Haven't talked to everyone on this topic, though. So who knows, there might be some.
- est31 8y ago
  Technical users are multiplicators though.
  - jolmg 8y ago
    multiplicators? You mean because we advocate with those near us? Normal users also advocate in favor of products based on features which are sometimes based on forsaking privacy.

mushufasa 8y ago

I switched to chrome before I became technically literate, because it seemed a lot faster and less prone to breaking. I couldn't describe why, but the effect was felt. Now, I still struggle to move to firefox as I'm on a retina MBP, where firefox riles up my cpu and drains my battery.

jorvi 8y ago
Yup. I'm using Firefox on macOS as well and suffering from the same bug. If you use your Macbook with the resolution set to 'scaled' Firefox absolutely murders your battery. On top of that there's a bug where H264 video doesn't get properly accelerated. Both these bugs have been in Firefox at least since FF62. Both have alternatingly been marked 'priority 2' or 'fix-optional' which is absolutely baffling to me considering how crucial battery life is in today's portable world. I've even gone into the Firefox IRC multiple times where the fix has been promised to be in a 'point release' since FF63.. I get that they have limited resources but it makes getting people to switch (and stay) on Firefox increasingly hard if it cuts battery life of their laptop nearly in half.
- pcwalton 8y ago
  It isn't a bug; it's the fact that Firefox uses a transparent window and doesn't yet use Core Animation, which offloads scrolling to the window server. Switching to CA involves heavy lifting inside the compositor and is not an easy task. My planeshift crate does some of the work needed to make the WebRender path use Core Animation. In the meantime, setting gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque to true in about:config helps battery life significantly, at the cost of rounded corners and vibrancy.
  - jorvi 8y ago
    I'm curious (genuine curiosity, not meant sarcastic), why is Firefox only now switching to CoreAnimation? AFAIK CoreAnimation has been around since Leopard which makes it nearly 12 year old, which is positively ancient in the tech world. Also, coincidentally, do you know what exactly causes the H264 problem on macOS? I've tried to track it down in bugzilla to no success, but I am 100% sure it is a bug. The energy impact for playing a H264 YouTube video in Safari has an energy impact of ~25. Firefox used to be ~60, but these days its ~180 (!) > In the meantime, setting gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque to true in about:config helps battery life significantly, at the cost of rounded corners and vibrancy. Thanks for this! :)

jonplackett 8y ago

For the remaining users I reckon tech-literate family members set it as their search engine for them. I certainly switched over A LOT of people this way.

leftyted 8y ago

Chrome's main appeal was that it was much faster than firefox and IE. At everything. I had no technical knowledge when chrome came out, was using firefox, tried chrome, never looked back. It's not really possible to separate out the effects of advertising from the effects of the product actually being better. Maybe I installed chrome because I saw an ad, but I stopped using firefox because it was clear that chrome was better. The fact that you're emphasizing ads over the very real performance advantages just means you've got an axe to grind.

rchaud 8y ago
IIRC, it was faster than Firefox 3 specifically, which caused many FF users to migrate. Something happened between FF2 and FF3, since the latter appeared noticeably slower.
- uodtl 8y ago
  YES! I remember Firefox 2 being so much faster than 3 that I kept using it until most websites started to break. Then I switched to Chrome.
a1369209993 8y ago
> The fact that you're emphasizing ads over the very real performance advantages just means you've got an axe to grind. Alternatively, it could mean that, like me, they had NoScript installed when Chrome came out[0], making Firefox genuinely faster by dint of brute do-less-stuff-ism. 0: or when we heard about it anyway.
- leftyted 8y ago
  I'm not sure why so many HN posters feel the need to boast about not executing JavaScript. All that means is that you've opted out of the web that the rest of the world is using. Good for you. But people who have disabled JS make up such a small porportion of web users (~.2% of pageviews) that your experience is pretty much irrelevant to the question of general browser trends. I'd also bet that Chrome was faster at painting pages than Firefox, so it wasn't just a JS engine advantge.

agumonkey 8y ago

I beg to disagree. Chrome was also extremely lean, but very well thought out. - a bit unrelated but installer was a shim, ~downloading it took 3 seconds and 500kB - Few buttons - Transient status bar - Transient download widget - Good ergonomics (easy to close tabs in rapid successions without moving your mouse, the next one would fall in place) - Clear preference panel - Maybe later: pdf support and print dialog

ethelward 8y ago
I'm not pretending it was not well thought; I'm merely saying its technical advantages were not the main drive behind its huge adoption rate. With all due respect, none of the pluses you mentioned would be a reason for a random, tech-illiterate, using-a-computer-for-FB person to install Chrome.
- agumonkey 8y ago
  You're right, there's also a bootstrap thing, they couldn't know before installing. The only thing they'd know would be "it's by Google". But all the point listed above were strong factors for newbs too. They could easily discard it if it was an annoyance I believe.

type-2 8y ago

Agreed, the google homepage wouldn't shut up about it.

jdietrich 8y ago

I spent years stridently recommending Chrome to non-technical users, because it was by far the fastest and most secure browser available. Google's primary objective for Chrome and Android was simply to get people to use the internet more, on the (entirely reasonable) assumption that they'd probably use Google and they would see a lot of AdSense units. They invested heavily in getting better software into the hands of as many users as possible. Of course they harvest a whole bunch of user data, but dragging up the quality of the browsing experience was a far bigger factor IMO. Would Edge exist if Chrome had never happened? Would Firefox have a fast JS engine and proper sandboxing? What would the non-Apple smartphone market look like without Android? Whether you like Google's business practices or not, they've massively increased our expectations of browser software, in the same way that Starbucks created a world where you can buy a half-decent cappuccino in McDonalds.

treis 8y ago
>Google's primary objective for Chrome and Android was simply to get people to use the internet more, on the (entirely reasonable) assumption that they'd probably use Google and they would see a lot of AdSense units. Google paid Apple 12 billion dollars last year to be the default search engine in Safari and another half billion to Firefox for the same. Google's primary objectives with Chrome was to lower that amount and to guard their monopoly on search.
JohnFen 8y ago
It's very hard for me to consider Chrome as a "most secure" browser. But I suppose it depends on what you do and don't consider security threats.

drewmol 8y ago

>For the remaining 99.99% of users, absolutely not. Chrome's appeal came from... Bingo! Thank you for pointing this out. For those younger readers, Chrome's penetration was forceful and uninvited. A browser add-on/search hijacker/ persistant spyware known as Google Toolbar was it's predecessor project from Google. It was an epidemic across the PC landscape for half a decade and all those infected machines became Chromes initial foothold. There's plenty of positives from the project, but for Chrome to achieve browser monopoly status, user consent sure did seem to get sacrificed.

nearbuy 8y ago

I think Chrome's design appeal is obvious just from looking at a screenshot of Chrome and Firefox in 2008: https://imgur.com/a/uyBcxI0 https://imgur.com/a/uyBcxI0. Firefox and Edge eventually adopted Chrome's design choices to have more content area, no "File, Edit, View" menu bar and an integrated search and address bar. But for years Chrome was ahead.

firexcy 8y ago
This. The most refreshing thing I felt when Chrome came out in 2008 was that it let me treat a webpage as an application _per se_, instead of a document being opened by an application (i.e. the browser).

hortense 8y ago

> Among the tech crowd, probably. For the remaining 99.99% of users, absolutely not. Guess who sets up the computers for the remaining 99.99%? If you seduce the tech crowd, you also get the other users.