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I've used firefox and never bothered with chrome as a daily driver. The speed issue is entirely marketing driven. Nobody cares about a few tenths of a second of

I've used firefox and never bothered with chrome as a daily driver. The speed issue is entirely marketing driven. Nobody cares about a few tenths of a second of load times until the ads were shoving stats down our throats that chrome was so much faster Firefox is and has always been perfectly adequate, except maybe for a few html5 canvas type apps.

brazzledazzle 8y ago
It wasn’t entirely market driven. Chrome was collectively faster, smoother and tab crashes were isolated which was critical back then. My dad was firmly middle aged when it came out and was very attached to Firefox. After a few debates we did some very unscientific desktop-to-page render comparisons as well as loading some pretty js heavy sites and chrome beat Firefox handily. He still took a while to come around and ultimately it was the tab isolation that convinced him. Tabs were a critical component to how he did research and a few crashes were all it took.
- greglindahl 8y ago
  Sounds like your Dad would not have switched without your advocacy.
  - brazzledazzle 8y ago
    It was less about advocacy and more about arguing with him. I was a teenager at the time eager to best him in any argument I could.
    - behringer 8y ago
      True as that may be, we're arguing that you would not have argued it had Chrome not been advertised the way it was.
strokirk 8y ago
No one is quite the overstatement, and I suspect it is completely wrong. Anecdotally, I and several people I know switched to Chrome when it came out due to it's blazing speed. It would seem that was the case for many more people, see for example for a fairly old article: https://www.cnet.com/news/why-i-switched-from-firefox-to-chrome/ https://www.cnet.com/news/why-i-switched-from-firefox-to-chr... Of course, many were using plugins with Firefox which contributed to the speed advantage of Chrome. But milliseconds matter, even program startup time.
marcosdumay 8y ago
Firefox was incredibly slow by that time. It was having maintainability problems for a few years, with unfixed memory leaks, deadlocks and core instabilities. Mozilla had a large ongoing effort for fixing those things, but it took some time until they got results. Javascript heavy sites were also very slow on every browser, except for Chrome that invested in a good JS interpreter.
hnbroseph 8y ago
back then, for me, there was a massive qualitative difference between chrome and the rest. i didn't have any particular preference, but chrome just was a far superior user experience.

brazzledazzle 8y ago

It wasn’t entirely market driven. Chrome was collectively faster, smoother and tab crashes were isolated which was critical back then. My dad was firmly middle aged when it came out and was very attached to Firefox. After a few debates we did some very unscientific desktop-to-page render comparisons as well as loading some pretty js heavy sites and chrome beat Firefox handily. He still took a while to come around and ultimately it was the tab isolation that convinced him. Tabs were a critical component to how he did research and a few crashes were all it took.

greglindahl 8y ago
Sounds like your Dad would not have switched without your advocacy.
- brazzledazzle 8y ago
  It was less about advocacy and more about arguing with him. I was a teenager at the time eager to best him in any argument I could.
  - behringer 8y ago
    True as that may be, we're arguing that you would not have argued it had Chrome not been advertised the way it was.

strokirk 8y ago

No one is quite the overstatement, and I suspect it is completely wrong. Anecdotally, I and several people I know switched to Chrome when it came out due to it's blazing speed. It would seem that was the case for many more people, see for example for a fairly old article: https://www.cnet.com/news/why-i-switched-from-firefox-to-chrome/ https://www.cnet.com/news/why-i-switched-from-firefox-to-chr... Of course, many were using plugins with Firefox which contributed to the speed advantage of Chrome. But milliseconds matter, even program startup time.

marcosdumay 8y ago

Firefox was incredibly slow by that time. It was having maintainability problems for a few years, with unfixed memory leaks, deadlocks and core instabilities. Mozilla had a large ongoing effort for fixing those things, but it took some time until they got results. Javascript heavy sites were also very slow on every browser, except for Chrome that invested in a good JS interpreter.

hnbroseph 8y ago

back then, for me, there was a massive qualitative difference between chrome and the rest. i didn't have any particular preference, but chrome just was a far superior user experience.