11 ms·

> 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

> 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 :-)
laumars 8y ago
As you alluded to at the start of your post, Chromes speed improvements were more technical than it was due to a lack of bloat. In fact Chrome consumed more memory than FF did at that time and that was down to it being multi-processed (ie one heavy page wouldn’t slow down the rest of the application in other tabs) but that came at a cost in terms of RAM used. Obviously the v8 stuff also made a massive difference too.
- jsight 8y ago
  Honestly, I hate the term "bloat". Most of the times when I've seen bloat blamed, the real cause has been a bad algorithm somewhere. Just as was the case with Chrome, its often the case that using more RAM (and maybe more "bloat") can make things faster.
  - laumars 8y ago
    Yeah, i agree. And very succinctly put too.
  - gregmac 8y ago
    After fixing bad algorithms, dealing with performance and resource utilization basically comes down to a series of trade-offs. In most cases: Less RAM = More CPU or more disk space (and much slower) Less CPU = more disk or RAM Less disk = more network, RAM and/or CPU
  - darkarmani 8y ago
    > a bad algorithm somewhere Along the lines of a custom memory manager, that never releases memory back to the OS. If you open tons of tabs, closing them wouldn't release the memory back. Which is a decent guess - it used the memory once, it will probably need it again.
- apostacy 8y ago
  I think another factor is just that Chrome's speed changed the landscape of web design itself, which fed back into Chrome's popularity. By making javascript so much faster, it allowed web designers to do things that only Chrome could do.
agumonkey 8y ago
I assumed it was in clear relationship to the gmail era of web applications trying to be a full desktop equivalent.
wnevets 8y ago
>Curious, I remember speed being the primary reason. Chromes super fast start up speed and clean UI is what caused me to switch when it first came out.
- jeena 8y ago
  I never switched because once upon a time I switched from Opera to Firefox because it was the most free (as in libre) browser and I haven't found a more free browser yet. I try to live after the maxim: freedom before convenience (at least in parts of my life).
  - llampx 8y ago
    If there's one thing that Google does well, it's convince the relevant people that their software is open source. See: Chrome and Android
    - jhasse 8y ago
      They are though. There are no Edge forks or free iOS distributions.
      - stephenr 8y ago
        No, they’re not. They’re based on open source software. But by that measure safari is open source because WebKit is open source.
        jhasse 8y ago
        > But by that measure safari is open source because WebKit is open source. There's a lot more closed source code in Safari than there's in Chrome. But sure: Why not give them credit for open-sourcing WebKit? Safari is closer to open-source than IE.
        stephenr 8y ago
VBprogrammer 8y ago
I'm surprised there aren't more people on here who moved to chome for the dev tools. That is what moved me over there. Firebug was great in it's day but at some point Chrome's dev tools just became too much better to make staying on Firefox possible.
- kaiby 8y ago
  Firebug was awesome, then 2011 happened and Firebug’s lead dev joined the Google Chrome team to work on their dev tools [1]. [1] https://news.softpedia.com/news/Lead-Firebug-Developer-Joins-Google-Chrome-Team-212278.shtml https://news.softpedia.com/news/Lead-Firebug-Developer-Joins...
- yesco 8y ago
  Even to this day Firefox doesn't have websocket frame inspection. Its very frustrating to me that dev tools aren't a higher priority for Firefox. As they are now, they are only slightly worse than Chromes which is unacceptable considering more and more websites are being developed with only Chrome in mind.
  - Vinnl 8y ago
    That is frustrating, but the good news is that this is being picked up as part of (somewhat ironically) Google Summer of Code: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=885508#c49 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=885508#c49
    - yesco 8y ago
      I find it ironic that they kept lowering the priority since an extension already added the ability, yet that very same extension no longer works thanks to their recent API changes. Perhaps lowering the priority several times wasn't that best idea after all?
      - Laforet 8y ago
        The decision to revamp their extensions API also cost a lot of goodwill from the community. FF today may be faster and more secure than two years ago, but from my perspective it has permanently lost some of its utility and appeal.
rifung 8y ago
> Curious, I remember speed being the primary reason. This was how I remember it as well. Not only that but the timing was very fortunate for Chrome because at the time Firefox had some very bad memory leaks which in my opinion really helped with Chrome adoption since people who use Firefox were more likely to be willing to switch browsers having already switched from another browser.
- slowmovintarget 8y ago
  Chrome won people away from Firefox because it was fast enough, and it worked correctly. The "working correctly" part was what pulled me away from Firefox. Breaking ad-blocking is sending me back to Firefox.
tenebrisalietum 8y ago
I remember using Firefox in the pre 1.0 days. It took slightly longer to launch than IE, but since it had tabs, I didn't care, because I wasn't opening a new instances constantly.
- Yoric 8y ago
  Fwiw, IE was pre-launched with Windows. That was the secret behind its (often) fast startup. Not doing the same in Firefox was a conscious design decision by the Firefox team, which didn't want to hoard the memory when Firefox wasn't in use.
  - Phrodo_00 8y ago
    Yeah, seamonkey (and maybe opera) also had ways to start the browser with the os.
om2 8y ago
v8 was initially 32-bit x86 only. And it wasn’t coded in a CPU independent way or word size independent way at all. Adding a new CPU amounted to basically rewriting the whole JIT. Chrome took a long time to go 64-bit for this reason.
ownagefool 8y ago
If it was either, why wasn't it a patch set against firefox, rather than IP owned by google?
- jhasse 8y ago
  Probably because WebKit was easier to patch.
microcolonel 8y ago
> They start off lean, gain features over time I'm pretty sure there's a copy of MooTools in the Chromium repository.
krferriter 8y ago
Yeah speed is the reason I used (and sometimes still) use it. Also the dev tools are better than Firefox's.
crimsonalucard 8y ago
I always thought it was the cool name and logo. Chrome sounds way more slick then internet explorer or firefox. Plus the logo for chrome was shiny.
Lorkki 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 It was probably both. I know I was definitely sick of sites (mostly Flash) crashing the browser and throwing my entire session in the bin. I was probably already using some Gecko-based "light" browser instead of Firefox, but V8 did make a difference when using the emerging web app style sites like Gmail.
3xblah 8y ago
Perhaps it is the so-called "corporate greed" that creates the bloat. The added funtionality that the browser "needs", once added, is in practice overwhelmingly directed at commercial purposes, primarily advertising-supported businesses. In theory it could be used for anything. Correct me if wrong, but Netscape was originally intended to be a browser for commercial enterprise where companies would pay licensing fees. And Firefox, whatever its purpose was (perhaps an alternative to another corporate browser from Microsoft), ended up being the precursor to Chrome, a browser written by an ad sales company, as the original Chrome developers were originally Firefox developers. Following the ideal that the web is this wonderful open platform accessible to anyone, I would like to see more browsers, with reduced functionalty (and perhaps increased safety/privacy and freedom from ads), written not by companies nor organizations that try to compete feature-for-feature with those corporations. These simpler browsers could target the non-commercial web, e.g. the web as a free information source. A web where an individual page need not be a conglomeration of random third parties vying for user attention. Methinks it should be more troubling to the HN crowd that "browsers" are not amongst the class of programs that can be easily written, edited and compiled by anyone. They could be, but the popular definition of "browser" needs to change, moving away from "all the features of Company's browser" or "all the features Working Group is discussing with input from Companies" and more toward what a given user (cf. company, advertiser), including non-commercial users, actually needs for a given task. There will always be corporate-sponsored web browsers with corporate-friendly, advertising-friendly features. But we need non-corporate browsers too. They may be enough to accomplish the user's non-commercial tasks but not well-suited for web advertising, e.g. optional auto-loading third party resources.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

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 :-)

laumars 8y ago

As you alluded to at the start of your post, Chromes speed improvements were more technical than it was due to a lack of bloat. In fact Chrome consumed more memory than FF did at that time and that was down to it being multi-processed (ie one heavy page wouldn’t slow down the rest of the application in other tabs) but that came at a cost in terms of RAM used. Obviously the v8 stuff also made a massive difference too.

jsight 8y ago
Honestly, I hate the term "bloat". Most of the times when I've seen bloat blamed, the real cause has been a bad algorithm somewhere. Just as was the case with Chrome, its often the case that using more RAM (and maybe more "bloat") can make things faster.
- laumars 8y ago
  Yeah, i agree. And very succinctly put too.
- gregmac 8y ago
  After fixing bad algorithms, dealing with performance and resource utilization basically comes down to a series of trade-offs. In most cases: Less RAM = More CPU or more disk space (and much slower) Less CPU = more disk or RAM Less disk = more network, RAM and/or CPU
- darkarmani 8y ago
  > a bad algorithm somewhere Along the lines of a custom memory manager, that never releases memory back to the OS. If you open tons of tabs, closing them wouldn't release the memory back. Which is a decent guess - it used the memory once, it will probably need it again.
apostacy 8y ago
I think another factor is just that Chrome's speed changed the landscape of web design itself, which fed back into Chrome's popularity. By making javascript so much faster, it allowed web designers to do things that only Chrome could do.

agumonkey 8y ago

I assumed it was in clear relationship to the gmail era of web applications trying to be a full desktop equivalent.

wnevets 8y ago

>Curious, I remember speed being the primary reason. Chromes super fast start up speed and clean UI is what caused me to switch when it first came out.

jeena 8y ago
I never switched because once upon a time I switched from Opera to Firefox because it was the most free (as in libre) browser and I haven't found a more free browser yet. I try to live after the maxim: freedom before convenience (at least in parts of my life).
- llampx 8y ago
  If there's one thing that Google does well, it's convince the relevant people that their software is open source. See: Chrome and Android
  - jhasse 8y ago
    They are though. There are no Edge forks or free iOS distributions.
    - stephenr 8y ago
      No, they’re not. They’re based on open source software. But by that measure safari is open source because WebKit is open source.
      - jhasse 8y ago
        > But by that measure safari is open source because WebKit is open source. There's a lot more closed source code in Safari than there's in Chrome. But sure: Why not give them credit for open-sourcing WebKit? Safari is closer to open-source than IE.
        stephenr 8y ago

VBprogrammer 8y ago

I'm surprised there aren't more people on here who moved to chome for the dev tools. That is what moved me over there. Firebug was great in it's day but at some point Chrome's dev tools just became too much better to make staying on Firefox possible.

kaiby 8y ago
Firebug was awesome, then 2011 happened and Firebug’s lead dev joined the Google Chrome team to work on their dev tools [1]. [1] https://news.softpedia.com/news/Lead-Firebug-Developer-Joins-Google-Chrome-Team-212278.shtml https://news.softpedia.com/news/Lead-Firebug-Developer-Joins...
yesco 8y ago
Even to this day Firefox doesn't have websocket frame inspection. Its very frustrating to me that dev tools aren't a higher priority for Firefox. As they are now, they are only slightly worse than Chromes which is unacceptable considering more and more websites are being developed with only Chrome in mind.
- Vinnl 8y ago
  That is frustrating, but the good news is that this is being picked up as part of (somewhat ironically) Google Summer of Code: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=885508#c49 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=885508#c49
  - yesco 8y ago
    I find it ironic that they kept lowering the priority since an extension already added the ability, yet that very same extension no longer works thanks to their recent API changes. Perhaps lowering the priority several times wasn't that best idea after all?
    - Laforet 8y ago
      The decision to revamp their extensions API also cost a lot of goodwill from the community. FF today may be faster and more secure than two years ago, but from my perspective it has permanently lost some of its utility and appeal.

rifung 8y ago

> Curious, I remember speed being the primary reason. This was how I remember it as well. Not only that but the timing was very fortunate for Chrome because at the time Firefox had some very bad memory leaks which in my opinion really helped with Chrome adoption since people who use Firefox were more likely to be willing to switch browsers having already switched from another browser.

slowmovintarget 8y ago
Chrome won people away from Firefox because it was fast enough, and it worked correctly. The "working correctly" part was what pulled me away from Firefox. Breaking ad-blocking is sending me back to Firefox.

tenebrisalietum 8y ago

I remember using Firefox in the pre 1.0 days. It took slightly longer to launch than IE, but since it had tabs, I didn't care, because I wasn't opening a new instances constantly.

Yoric 8y ago
Fwiw, IE was pre-launched with Windows. That was the secret behind its (often) fast startup. Not doing the same in Firefox was a conscious design decision by the Firefox team, which didn't want to hoard the memory when Firefox wasn't in use.
- Phrodo_00 8y ago
  Yeah, seamonkey (and maybe opera) also had ways to start the browser with the os.

om2 8y ago

v8 was initially 32-bit x86 only. And it wasn’t coded in a CPU independent way or word size independent way at all. Adding a new CPU amounted to basically rewriting the whole JIT. Chrome took a long time to go 64-bit for this reason.

ownagefool 8y ago

If it was either, why wasn't it a patch set against firefox, rather than IP owned by google?

jhasse 8y ago
Probably because WebKit was easier to patch.

microcolonel 8y ago

> They start off lean, gain features over time I'm pretty sure there's a copy of MooTools in the Chromium repository.

krferriter 8y ago

Yeah speed is the reason I used (and sometimes still) use it. Also the dev tools are better than Firefox's.

crimsonalucard 8y ago

I always thought it was the cool name and logo. Chrome sounds way more slick then internet explorer or firefox. Plus the logo for chrome was shiny.

Lorkki 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 It was probably both. I know I was definitely sick of sites (mostly Flash) crashing the browser and throwing my entire session in the bin. I was probably already using some Gecko-based "light" browser instead of Firefox, but V8 did make a difference when using the emerging web app style sites like Gmail.

3xblah 8y ago

Perhaps it is the so-called "corporate greed" that creates the bloat. The added funtionality that the browser "needs", once added, is in practice overwhelmingly directed at commercial purposes, primarily advertising-supported businesses. In theory it could be used for anything. Correct me if wrong, but Netscape was originally intended to be a browser for commercial enterprise where companies would pay licensing fees. And Firefox, whatever its purpose was (perhaps an alternative to another corporate browser from Microsoft), ended up being the precursor to Chrome, a browser written by an ad sales company, as the original Chrome developers were originally Firefox developers. Following the ideal that the web is this wonderful open platform accessible to anyone, I would like to see more browsers, with reduced functionalty (and perhaps increased safety/privacy and freedom from ads), written not by companies nor organizations that try to compete feature-for-feature with those corporations. These simpler browsers could target the non-commercial web, e.g. the web as a free information source. A web where an individual page need not be a conglomeration of random third parties vying for user attention. Methinks it should be more troubling to the HN crowd that "browsers" are not amongst the class of programs that can be easily written, edited and compiled by anyone. They could be, but the popular definition of "browser" needs to change, moving away from "all the features of Company's browser" or "all the features Working Group is discussing with input from Companies" and more toward what a given user (cf. company, advertiser), including non-commercial users, actually needs for a given task. There will always be corporate-sponsored web browsers with corporate-friendly, advertising-friendly features. But we need non-corporate browsers too. They may be enough to accomplish the user's non-commercial tasks but not well-suited for web advertising, e.g. optional auto-loading third party resources.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]