Why? Because they can. And we can, although in a very small part, blame also Mozilla for this. Firefox back then had a bright future since any Windows user com

Why? Because they can. And we can, although in a very small part, blame also Mozilla for this. Firefox back then had a bright future since any Windows user comparing it with IE could immediately notice how it was leagues beyond in features, security and stability. There was a problem though: it was slow as molasses on normal machines, so when Google published the first Chrome version, it was like someone turned on the afterburner on web surfing. That was back when "do no evil" was still part of Google's mission and when I and many others would gladly do crazy things to work there, so it wasn't much of a problem to migrate to it, which I did and kept using for a few years. I don't know the reasons behind Firefox slowness, probably the XUL engine and/or the lack of optimization, but alas this was very noticeable, especially in multitab sessions which for me are the norm. Then Google completed its transition from a techies heaven to a corporation, with the inevitable changes to their politics, which made me and others migrate back to Firefox even before it was rewritten to become much more snappy. The rest is recent history. Nowadays Firefox and Chrome are pretty much equivalent wrt speed, although Firefox seems still faster and better suited to sustain lots of active extensions (currently I have 24, 21 of which enabled), but of course privacy plays a major role here, and I wouldn't go back to Chrome even if it still was much faster than Firefox. Lots of people's mileage will vary of course. What I wonder is however what would have happened, had back then Firefox been already written with speed in mind; could Chrome easily take the top position in an era when Google wasn't today's Google? I think not. At least not that easily. The bottom line should be: optimize your damn code even if a 10% slower competition doesn't make it a top priority, before a new unexpected 20% faster product catches you unprepared.