4 ms·
It's hard to believe what a behemoth Chrome has become when it was only announced in 2008. What makes this even more amazing is it did this when IE/Edge ships a
by cletus 7y ago
It's hard to believe what a behemoth Chrome has become when it was only announced in 2008. What makes this even more amazing is it did this when IE/Edge ships as standard on Windows (which seems to be ~80% marketshare) and Safari ships as standard on OSX/iOS. It wasn't until Android 4.1 (2012) that Chrome even shipped on Android.
Chrome did several things really well out of the gate:
- Auto update. Words can't adequately describe just how freeing and refreshing this was (and is). Doesn't FF STILL ask you when you open it to install an update? In 2019? Really? For non-technical people, auto update is what you want. For technical people, it's also what you want.
- The Omnibar. To this day, FF persists with the two-box model where one is technically for URLs and the other for search. No one wants that of course so search basically works in the URL box. Why they don't just merge this is beyond me.
- N-Gram completion of searches in the Omnibar
- This was a big one: while tabs existed before Chrome, Chrome was the first major browser to have one process per tab to isolate crashes and performance issues. This was huge at the time.
- Javascript performance initially was night and day between Chrome and everyone else.
- Chrome was standards compliant.
- Chrome ran across multiple platforms
- (This came later) Chrome Sync is hugely convenient.
- (Also later) I'm not sure when this one started exactly but Chrome took a fairly aggressive stance against ISP DNS hijacking.
Where once MS leveraged their desktop OS dominance to kill Netscape, the fact that Chrome essentially forced MS to kill Edge in favour of rebranding Chrome is... astounding. This also goes to show just how problematic antitrust application is in tech because its amazing how quickly market dominance can disappear or cease to be relevant.
I find it laughable that some here and elsewhere attribute Chrome's rise to dark patterns or they throw around terms like "antitrust" without really knowing what that means (seriously, look deeper into Standard Oil) when there were and are a ton of good reasons to use Chrome that other vendors have been unable or unwilling to replicate.
Just take cross-platform as one. This made Safari and Edge a nonstarter for me from day one (despite Safari's brief venture into Windows support).
All this alarmist Butwhatifism about alleged market dominance is (IMHO) not only unhelpful, it's counterproductive. It's the boy who cried wolf. It makes people numb.
- notlukesky 7y agoChrome was and unbelievably still is the most developer friendly. Our Opera extension has been languishing for 7 months for approval or a response to our emails (we gave up) and snooty FireFox put us through the ringer to get our extension (they call it an add-on) approved and more than 2 months. Chrome is amazing for developers. Maybe unless you are an adblocker. That might be the opportunity for MS Edge Chromium.
- javagram 7y ago> - The Omnibar. To this day, FF persists with the two-box model where one is technically for URLs and the other for search. No one wants that of course so search basically works in the URL box. Why they don't just merge this is beyond me. Privacy. Google doesn't worry about privacy, of course, but firefox tries to avoid sending all the URLs you ever type to google or your alternate search suggestion provider.
- mft_ 7y agoIsn't that just a bit of code to fix? if (s matches possibly valid URL pattern) then try to open it else send s to search provider
- javagram 7y agoSearches are sent as you type, so it's not really that simple. Firefox already does what you suggested when hitting enter in the default URL bar - if it's not a valid URL, it gets used as a search. FWIW, I now see search bar has been off by default in firefox for the last 2 years (still grandfathered in for legacy users like me), so I think mozilla gave up on this. https://www.ghacks.net/2017/09/09/firefox-57-search-bar-off-by-default/ https://www.ghacks.net/2017/09/09/firefox-57-search-bar-off-...
- iggldiggl 7y ago> Searches are sent as you type, so it's not really that simple. You might also very well end up with something that is not a valid URL when searching in your local history or bookmarks.
- bwat49 7y agoRegarding your first 2 points, it sounds like you haven't used firefox in a long time... 1. Firefox does automatically download and apply updates like chrome does (at least on Windows), and has for some time. It notifies you when update is downloaded and applied (I think it's just a notification badge on the hamburger menu), but user interaction is not required... the update would automatically get applied the next time the user happens to restart the browser, just like chrome. 2. Firefox has the equivalent of Chrome's omnibar for some time now... you can still add the second search box via the customize screen, but it's optional and is no longer the default...