No, Chrome was not faster at the time. It was slower on all speed benchmarks. However, it was more responsive thanks to smart UX design and implementation. The

No, Chrome was not faster at the time. It was slower on all speed benchmarks. However, it was more responsive thanks to smart UX design and implementation. The real advantage of WebKit (or KHTML) was that it was way, way, way easier to embed than Gecko. That made experimenting much easier. > They would have had to convince Mozilla to do all of this stuff. https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html People tend to forget that the Chrome team was initially a Firefox team paid by Google to work on "the chrome" (which has always been the name of the back-end of Firefox). Legend has that Google decided to roll out their own browser when they realized that they could not arbitrarily land any feature in Firefox without a review from someone out of Google. More specifically, legend has it that Google prepared a large refactor of Firefox called "Places", reviewed it internally, then attempted to land this as a single patch to Firefox, without any public review. It is my understanding that this is how Google open-source typically works (big code drops), but definitely not how true open-source works (incremental changes). This was blocked by Mozilla until it could be split into smaller changes that could be reviewed and discussed individually. Places eventually landed (and new versions of Places are still part of Firefox to this day) but, says the legend, Google was pissed off and decided that they would be better off with their own, in-house, browser.