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How so? People with an already functioning browser that ships with their OS have to make a conscious decision to download and install Chrome. Most people would

by nerdix 3y ago

How so? People with an already functioning browser that ships with their OS have to make a conscious decision to download and install Chrome. Most people would not do that if the default browser of their OS was serviceable. Chrome gained traction because IE was really, really bad. Now it has mindshare and you might could argue that Google maintains this mindshare with malpractice.

warning26 3y ago
Yeah, GP is forgetting what the browser landscape looked like in 2008. IE was awful, and Firefox was…perfectly cromulent. Chrome was so much better than any of the competition.
- exceptione 3y ago
  Average joe did not do research. Forget it. - They found the internet had gotten a new icon and had no idea how it got there. (bundling with popular software) - They were instructed by google. That is how chrome came to top. See other comments for more context.
  - warning26 3y ago
    I mean, what would you expect? The fact is, browsers aren't a product, they're a platform feature. Users have zero incentive to ever switch from whatever their OS came bundled with, unless you make a massive advertising push. The fact that Google managed to get people to switch to a non-platform browser at all is a shocking achievement.
    - olyjohn 3y ago
      Done by tricking people, and sneakily bundling itself with everything. Sleezey, scumbag achievement.
      - warning26 3y ago
        I agree that some of their tactics were questionable, but they were up against IE, and Microsoft's bundling of it. Would you rather everyone still be using IE? Because that's exactly what would have happened otherwise.
throwawayadvsec 3y ago
firefox was already good when chrome was launched, chrome didn't gain traction because of IE
- zeroonetwothree 3y ago
  Chrome was much faster than FF at launch. FF only caught up recently.
- nerdix 3y ago
  Firefox was slowly chipping away at IE market share before Chrome because IE sucked. But Chrome was just better than Firefox when it launched so it accelerated the IE decline.
  - olyjohn 3y ago
    I still remember fixing people's PCs who had Chrome installed, and they had no idea what Chrome was or how it got on their computers. I saw it hundreds and hundreds of times. People didn't give a shit that Chrome was slightly faster, most people had turd computers with not enough ram and didn't even know what browser tabs were and the speeds were indistinguishable for most people. This feels exactly like the whole Mac M1 thing. Every techie person seems to think that the M1 was going to cause all sorts of people to switch to Macs. Guess what? Nobody gives a shit about a 5% faster processor except for power users. Regular people don't care about Chrome being "better," either and that's not how it got market dominance.
FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>People with an already functioning browser that ships with their OS have to make a conscious decision to download and install Chrome. Most people would not do that if the default browser of their OS was serviceable. We live in the 1950's, I work for Maddison Street and build a massive ad campaign putting ads everywhere you look about smoking, saying how it's so cool and beneficial for your health and how all people should do it if they wanna be cool and healthy. After a while, consumers already happy with breathable atmospheric air become smokers en-masses, voluntarily, putting toxic fumes in their lungs to look cool as advertised. Who's responsible here?
- Arch-TK 3y ago
  Clearly the atmosphere's marketing team failed to effectively market their special blend of oxygen, nitrogen and spices. Really it's just market forces at work and the cigarette manufacturers developed a superior product and should be rewarded for it.
- nerdix 3y ago
  That's not malpractice. Chrome's main competitors (except Firefox) literally ship their browsers with their OS and put in place hoops to make changing the OS default browser harder. If anything the ads just help neutralize the massive built in advantage that Microsoft and Apple have.
exceptione 3y ago
Wrong, it was bundled with software for instance. The average joe found that the launch icon of the original browser had been removed and learned that the internet had gotten a new icon. Google pushed it also via google results. Btw, the EU has fined Google in the past for promoting their products over competitors in their search results. That was already the hint that google has gotten too big to be not in conflict of interest anymore. The damage was done, people learned to "download the internet" from google first. And if they forgot, all Google services kept pushing them till they did.
- nerdix 3y ago
  What software was Chrome bundled with? I don't recall ever seeing that.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    Alost everything mainstream that was popular on Windows back then: PDF readers, picture viewers, Mp3 players, video players, codec packs, CD/DVD burning SW, anti-virus SW, firewalls, torrent clients, downloads managers, system drivers, etc. They all had checkboxes for Chrome and other ad-ware. If you didn't pay attention to unchecked them during installation you'd find your default browser changed and other crap. Those who did "tech-support" for family members remember.
    - exceptione 3y ago
      Exactly this. You had to be really vigilant during install. Average joe: next next next done. Don't ever fantasize about average users back then doing research if there would be a better web browser and then going ahead to download and install chrome on their own. "What is a web browser?"
    - nerdix 3y ago
      I remember third party IE toolbars being bundled (and that practice pre-dated Chrome, IIRC). But I don't remember the full Chrome browser being bundled (I do remember the Google Toolbar). I was a Chrome user from basically the day it was released because I found it to be superior so I may have been blind to the practice since I was already using Chrome.
pyrale 3y ago
> Chrome gained traction because IE was really, really bad. Now it has mindshare and you might could argue that Google maintains this mindshare with malpractice. Chrome copied lots of stuff from Opera, and Opera had 2.5% of marketshare. Firefox (who I personally didn't enjoy as much as Opera) had benefited from a grasroots campaign had taken years to get 35% of marketshare. Both were nobrainers compared to how broken IE was, and they were on the market years before chrome. So.. Yeah. Chrome was a good product. But competitors had showed that being a good browser without insane advertising was never going to be enough.
- crickey 3y ago
  As far as i know Opera and Firefox are doing fine. Kind of ironic in a thread about antitrust people still peddle this idea of needing full market dominance to be considered successful.
  - alexvoda 3y ago
    The Opera GP was talking about is dead, it is now just a skin on top of Chromium. And Firefox, the only alternative to the WebKit/Blink monopoly today, has a tiny market share compared to its peak. They are definitely not doing fine.
- lp0_on_fire 3y ago
  Opera was a _great_ browser back in its day. They had tabbed browsing before anyone (as far as I remember). The Presto engine was fast and lightweight. Overall it was a pleasure to use. I was real sad when they decided to abandon Presto and adopted chromium.
  - pyrale 3y ago
    Even before that, it was really sad when it got acquired by a shady corporation transforming it into, essentially, a malware. Back then, I moved to Firefox, and with Opera's popular features becoming the de-facto UX standard for browsers, I never moved back to Vivaldi.
GeekyBear 3y ago
Chrome's issue was that you needed a computer with more RAM than normal home users had at the time. It definitely wasn't better or faster after it forced your system to start heavily using a swap file on spinning rust storage.
nirvdrum 3y ago
My recollection may be a bit off, but I recall the Google Toolbar got bundled with everything. People were regularly installing it and not realizing it because it got added to installers for a whole bunch of unrelated things (accounting software, music players, archiving utilities, etc.). Then that toolbar and Google's search page kept spamming people to install Chrome, promising it to be a better Google experience. Which, I believe it was, because Google was doing proprietary things that only their web properties could take advantage of (a precursor to SPDY, I believe). Many others had it installed for them by tech support family members. That's not to say IE was better than Chrome. I just don't think it appearing on the desktop was a deliberate decision for many. I'd be surprised if many even realized they had installed it.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  My recollection is Chrome was legitimately better than anything else on Windows, even Firefox. One especially awesome feature was a built in pdf creator. You did not have to download cutePDF or whatever. It was also more reliable and crashed less, and probably other things I forget.
  - nirvdrum 3y ago
    For the first couple of years Chrome crashed pretty regularly for me. I hated its automatic updates because it would completely break with more-than-acceptable frequency. I got pretty tired of the glib "Aw, snap!" page. To their credit, I didn't have to wait for an OS system pack to get a fix. Upon its release it also predictably had compatibility problems, leading Google to implement a wrapper around the IE engine. Firefox had compatibility issues as well. I'm not trying to say one was better than the other. I think people tend to forget the environment Chrome was released into. Do while IE wasn't great, it was far more stable for me. I favored Firefox, but it was in a bit of tumult at the time. I'm sure Chrome was a better experience for others. I think at the time Google was still basking in its adulation from tech enthusiasts, papering over Chrome's flaws. That was back when people got excited for new Google products and trusted them to not be evil. As a bonus fun fact, Chrome created a massive headache for Selenium because Firefox's internals where called "Chrome" and "chrome://" was a URL scheme. Selenium used those URLs and got stuck with loads of support requests from the ensuing confusion. Everyone thought Chrome was just an internal project name and that Google would surely pick something that didn't conflict with another browser.
justinclift 3y ago
Also, GMail would display a prominent banner about it working better with Chrome, at the same time as it would purposely mis-function on non-Chrome browsers. The "purposely mis-function" thing isn't a mis-characterisation either. It became fairly well documented over time.

by nerdix 3y ago

warning26 3y ago

Yeah, GP is forgetting what the browser landscape looked like in 2008. IE was awful, and Firefox was…perfectly cromulent. Chrome was so much better than any of the competition.

exceptione 3y ago
Average joe did not do research. Forget it. - They found the internet had gotten a new icon and had no idea how it got there. (bundling with popular software) - They were instructed by google. That is how chrome came to top. See other comments for more context.
- warning26 3y ago
  I mean, what would you expect? The fact is, browsers aren't a product, they're a platform feature. Users have zero incentive to ever switch from whatever their OS came bundled with, unless you make a massive advertising push. The fact that Google managed to get people to switch to a non-platform browser at all is a shocking achievement.
  - olyjohn 3y ago
    Done by tricking people, and sneakily bundling itself with everything. Sleezey, scumbag achievement.
    - warning26 3y ago
      I agree that some of their tactics were questionable, but they were up against IE, and Microsoft's bundling of it. Would you rather everyone still be using IE? Because that's exactly what would have happened otherwise.

throwawayadvsec 3y ago

firefox was already good when chrome was launched, chrome didn't gain traction because of IE

zeroonetwothree 3y ago
Chrome was much faster than FF at launch. FF only caught up recently.
nerdix 3y ago
Firefox was slowly chipping away at IE market share before Chrome because IE sucked. But Chrome was just better than Firefox when it launched so it accelerated the IE decline.
- olyjohn 3y ago
  I still remember fixing people's PCs who had Chrome installed, and they had no idea what Chrome was or how it got on their computers. I saw it hundreds and hundreds of times. People didn't give a shit that Chrome was slightly faster, most people had turd computers with not enough ram and didn't even know what browser tabs were and the speeds were indistinguishable for most people. This feels exactly like the whole Mac M1 thing. Every techie person seems to think that the M1 was going to cause all sorts of people to switch to Macs. Guess what? Nobody gives a shit about a 5% faster processor except for power users. Regular people don't care about Chrome being "better," either and that's not how it got market dominance.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago

>People with an already functioning browser that ships with their OS have to make a conscious decision to download and install Chrome. Most people would not do that if the default browser of their OS was serviceable. We live in the 1950's, I work for Maddison Street and build a massive ad campaign putting ads everywhere you look about smoking, saying how it's so cool and beneficial for your health and how all people should do it if they wanna be cool and healthy. After a while, consumers already happy with breathable atmospheric air become smokers en-masses, voluntarily, putting toxic fumes in their lungs to look cool as advertised. Who's responsible here?

Arch-TK 3y ago
Clearly the atmosphere's marketing team failed to effectively market their special blend of oxygen, nitrogen and spices. Really it's just market forces at work and the cigarette manufacturers developed a superior product and should be rewarded for it.
nerdix 3y ago
That's not malpractice. Chrome's main competitors (except Firefox) literally ship their browsers with their OS and put in place hoops to make changing the OS default browser harder. If anything the ads just help neutralize the massive built in advantage that Microsoft and Apple have.

exceptione 3y ago

Wrong, it was bundled with software for instance. The average joe found that the launch icon of the original browser had been removed and learned that the internet had gotten a new icon. Google pushed it also via google results. Btw, the EU has fined Google in the past for promoting their products over competitors in their search results. That was already the hint that google has gotten too big to be not in conflict of interest anymore. The damage was done, people learned to "download the internet" from google first. And if they forgot, all Google services kept pushing them till they did.

nerdix 3y ago
What software was Chrome bundled with? I don't recall ever seeing that.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  Alost everything mainstream that was popular on Windows back then: PDF readers, picture viewers, Mp3 players, video players, codec packs, CD/DVD burning SW, anti-virus SW, firewalls, torrent clients, downloads managers, system drivers, etc. They all had checkboxes for Chrome and other ad-ware. If you didn't pay attention to unchecked them during installation you'd find your default browser changed and other crap. Those who did "tech-support" for family members remember.
  - exceptione 3y ago
    Exactly this. You had to be really vigilant during install. Average joe: next next next done. Don't ever fantasize about average users back then doing research if there would be a better web browser and then going ahead to download and install chrome on their own. "What is a web browser?"
  - nerdix 3y ago
    I remember third party IE toolbars being bundled (and that practice pre-dated Chrome, IIRC). But I don't remember the full Chrome browser being bundled (I do remember the Google Toolbar). I was a Chrome user from basically the day it was released because I found it to be superior so I may have been blind to the practice since I was already using Chrome.

pyrale 3y ago

> Chrome gained traction because IE was really, really bad. Now it has mindshare and you might could argue that Google maintains this mindshare with malpractice. Chrome copied lots of stuff from Opera, and Opera had 2.5% of marketshare. Firefox (who I personally didn't enjoy as much as Opera) had benefited from a grasroots campaign had taken years to get 35% of marketshare. Both were nobrainers compared to how broken IE was, and they were on the market years before chrome. So.. Yeah. Chrome was a good product. But competitors had showed that being a good browser without insane advertising was never going to be enough.

crickey 3y ago
As far as i know Opera and Firefox are doing fine. Kind of ironic in a thread about antitrust people still peddle this idea of needing full market dominance to be considered successful.
- alexvoda 3y ago
  The Opera GP was talking about is dead, it is now just a skin on top of Chromium. And Firefox, the only alternative to the WebKit/Blink monopoly today, has a tiny market share compared to its peak. They are definitely not doing fine.
lp0_on_fire 3y ago
Opera was a _great_ browser back in its day. They had tabbed browsing before anyone (as far as I remember). The Presto engine was fast and lightweight. Overall it was a pleasure to use. I was real sad when they decided to abandon Presto and adopted chromium.
- pyrale 3y ago
  Even before that, it was really sad when it got acquired by a shady corporation transforming it into, essentially, a malware. Back then, I moved to Firefox, and with Opera's popular features becoming the de-facto UX standard for browsers, I never moved back to Vivaldi.

GeekyBear 3y ago

Chrome's issue was that you needed a computer with more RAM than normal home users had at the time. It definitely wasn't better or faster after it forced your system to start heavily using a swap file on spinning rust storage.

nirvdrum 3y ago

My recollection may be a bit off, but I recall the Google Toolbar got bundled with everything. People were regularly installing it and not realizing it because it got added to installers for a whole bunch of unrelated things (accounting software, music players, archiving utilities, etc.). Then that toolbar and Google's search page kept spamming people to install Chrome, promising it to be a better Google experience. Which, I believe it was, because Google was doing proprietary things that only their web properties could take advantage of (a precursor to SPDY, I believe). Many others had it installed for them by tech support family members. That's not to say IE was better than Chrome. I just don't think it appearing on the desktop was a deliberate decision for many. I'd be surprised if many even realized they had installed it.

lotsofpulp 3y ago
My recollection is Chrome was legitimately better than anything else on Windows, even Firefox. One especially awesome feature was a built in pdf creator. You did not have to download cutePDF or whatever. It was also more reliable and crashed less, and probably other things I forget.
- nirvdrum 3y ago
  For the first couple of years Chrome crashed pretty regularly for me. I hated its automatic updates because it would completely break with more-than-acceptable frequency. I got pretty tired of the glib "Aw, snap!" page. To their credit, I didn't have to wait for an OS system pack to get a fix. Upon its release it also predictably had compatibility problems, leading Google to implement a wrapper around the IE engine. Firefox had compatibility issues as well. I'm not trying to say one was better than the other. I think people tend to forget the environment Chrome was released into. Do while IE wasn't great, it was far more stable for me. I favored Firefox, but it was in a bit of tumult at the time. I'm sure Chrome was a better experience for others. I think at the time Google was still basking in its adulation from tech enthusiasts, papering over Chrome's flaws. That was back when people got excited for new Google products and trusted them to not be evil. As a bonus fun fact, Chrome created a massive headache for Selenium because Firefox's internals where called "Chrome" and "chrome://" was a URL scheme. Selenium used those URLs and got stuck with loads of support requests from the ensuing confusion. Everyone thought Chrome was just an internal project name and that Google would surely pick something that didn't conflict with another browser.

justinclift 3y ago

Also, GMail would display a prominent banner about it working better with Chrome, at the same time as it would purposely mis-function on non-Chrome browsers. The "purposely mis-function" thing isn't a mis-characterisation either. It became fairly well documented over time.