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That’s not how I remembered it. Chrome really was a good browser and I would argue is still a good browser (for now). IE got displaced by Firefox’s predecessor

That’s not how I remembered it. Chrome really was a good browser and I would argue is still a good browser (for now). IE got displaced by Firefox’s predecessors because MS got caught napping - they disbanded the IE team thinking they have won. Firefox simply got outcompeted by Chrome as Google went crazy making it faster and faster. Firefox fell behind often enough that Chrome managed to take almost all of its market share. I’m not happily with Chrome’s dominance, and Google’s abuse of its market position, but it was a good product for most of its life span.

maccard 3y ago
> Firefox simply got outcompeted by Chrome as Google went crazy making it faster and faster. I disagree - if that was the case then people would be switching back to Firefox now. Firefox got outcompeted by chrome by Google adding a "works better in chrome" button to their home pages.
- worrycue 3y ago
  Some people do. I switched back and forth. But most people are “low frequency” switchers. Chrome is ahead often enough that most people stick with them.
- TheCoelacanth 3y ago
  Also by paying a bunch of black-hat marketers to use malware to trick people into installing Chrome unintentionally.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  >if that was the case then people would be switching back to Firefox now It's like sayinig people would be switching off of Facebook or Twitter. It's really hard to disengage the general audience. With that said, I did in fact switch to Firefox in 2023. I still unfortunately need google translate on mobile, but once Firefox can get those add on features out of beta it will be a pretty seemless transition.
dao- 3y ago
This is partly rewriting history. Yes, Chrome literally outperformed Firefox, but there are other parts to this story. First, Google pulled engineers it had paid to work on Firefox, including the project lead, to kick-start Chrome instead. That's fair game (and Mozilla's fault for not seeing it coming), but it obviously set back Firefox as Mozilla had to scramble to fill those gaps without much of a forewarning. Secondly and perhaps most importantly, Google dumped countless millions of marketing money and often engaged in dark patterns to promote Chrome, e.g. bundling it with random shareware and freeware that would automatically make Chrome the default browser. That was even before they paid laptop vendors to preinstall Chrome, something that Mozilla could never afford, and Google could only afford because of its monopoly in search / advertising.
fuzzy2 3y ago
That’s the “nerd history”, which I mostly agree with. Normal users however don’t care much about performance and whatnot. Their PC came with Chrome, so they use it. If you give them some other browser, they probably won’t be able to tell the difference. Chrome didn’t “win” because it was good. It won because of Google’s hyper-aggressive marketing on all channels. They basically did was Microsoft was fined for by the EU back in the day.
- tremon 3y ago
  Their PC came with Internet Explorer. It was Java (that almost everyone had to download at some point) that came with Chrome.
  - fuzzy2 3y ago
    I'm thinking about more recent times. Internet Explorer has been dead for almost a decade now. Chrome did not kill it. Chrome was however preinstalled on many PCs/laptops as part of the crapware package. Also, yes, it came bundled with basically everything.
- npsomaratna 3y ago
  I adopted Chrome almost as soon as it was released. Chrome was better than the other browsers available at that time. Firefox was a mess, and Internet Explorer... well, best left unsaid.
  - kuchenbecker 3y ago
    I started using chrome vs Firefox because each tab had it's own process, novel at the time, such that a crappy website crashing would bring down the tab and not the browser.
- ftaghn 3y ago
  >Normal users however don’t care much about performance and whatnot. Their PC came with Chrome, so they use it You talk like it's impossible for nerds to have influence on their surroundings. Way before Chrome got preinstalled on a computer or went on a dark pattern campaign, I heavily recommended it to my acquaintances, friends, family. I even remember a perfectly "normal user" type uncle using Chrome before I recommended it to him because he had learned of its existence from another person's word of mouth. I constantly see people try to diminish the power of word of mouth spreading good products here on HN, which is complete nonsense. Contrary to the popular belief on HN that "normies" are idiots who only ever settle for "defaults", they routinely try new things if their peers recommend it, it's how non-preinstalled apps like Whatsapp grow. It's not just the networking effect, you need to be better than the default. Sending things like pictures through texting apps sucked, group messaging sucked, Whatsapp provided something /much better/ so people used it. By the way, it's out of topic, but mentioning messaging apps reminds me of how Google in fact could not, despite its monopoly and advertisement power, get anyone to use theirs. If you think dark patterns and preinstalling apps is enough to gain success, then why has google failed, time and time again? Apps like Google Duo were preinstalled on all android phones I've seen and literally no one I know in real life ever made use of them. Maybe google's apps weren't bad, but they were not /better/ enough to encourage people to give a shit. To convert people, you can't just be "as good" as the competition, you need some serious oomph. When Chrome came out, it was a landslide. IE was dead, and Firefox was dramatically inferior in both performance and security. The multiprocess architecture of Chrome combined with other security related decisions, and the V8 JIT for javascript made it a vastly superior browser and people knew about it. Firefox took a VERY long time to get to a place where it didn't feel bad to use once websites started taking advantage of Chrome's superior performance and got more bloated in the process. Some of the changes it made to get there were heavily contentious with the nerds who ended up being the main population of users for FF, like removing XUL, further pushing FF into a very specific niche : the privacy conscious and people who use it solely to reject google's monopoly. The "normal people" who would have used Firefox instead of IE back in the day because of peer recommendations would not use Firefox instead of Chrome today unless they're very obsessed with those things, because FF is no longer clearly better than the alternative, to the contrary, it's still weaker, though not as much as it used to be. And while the crowd on HN tends to focus heavily on things like privacy, if there's anything the average person doesn't care about in my experience, it's that. They will never trade convenience for more privacy.
tgv 3y ago
I think it was clear when they started with Google docs that they were using their browser to get market domination. They offered a free product that people liked, but almost forced them to switch to Chrome. They got entire nations to switch their education tooling to chrome and google docs. Now they keep adding features that enable bad developers to create websites that don't work properly in Firefox and Safari. There's been no change. Chrome has always been part of Google's strategy.
- worrycue 3y ago
  Google’s web products have always worked with Firefox to my knowledge. Maybe they run a bit faster on Chrome but I don’t recall them ever being broken on Firefox. Perhaps I’m wrong. Can you cite incidents of Google’s stuff not working right on Firefox (or Safari even). Also which features enable developers to create sites that don’t work in Firefox and Safari? (I really don’t know. I’m not a web developer.)
  - tgv 3y ago
    I'm a lifelong FF user, and I had problems with google docs in the beginning. I vaguely remember it was using JS features that FF hadn't implemented yet. Currently, Chrome has a number of CSS features that Firefox and/or Safari don't support. You can find them at [1]. Some make life a bit easier, and devs use them because they like easy or even because they think everyone should force their browser maker to adapt all those features ASAP. In an old thread, I explained that my code ignores these features because we want to be compatible with as many users as possible. I got some miffed replies saying we should make our users upgrade. Really. Then there are also APIs in Chrome that have not been standardized, and some of which should not be in a browser (IMO), like USB access (see [2]). Some of that is an attempt by Google to replace "native" applications by web pages, which would give them even more leverage. [1] https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+115,firefox+116&compareCats=CSS https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+115,firefox+116&compareC... [2] https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+115,firefox+116&compareCats=JS%20API https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+115,firefox+116&compareC...
  - acdha 3y ago
junon 3y ago
This is also how I remember it. "getfirefox.com" is burned into memory from ages ago, the first real competitor to IE. Everyone wanted to switch to it. Then chrome came along and people reluctantly switched at first, then enthusiastically. Firefox had the reputation of eating RAM like candy.
- ftaghn 3y ago
  >Firefox had the reputation of eating RAM like candy. It wasn't unwarranted. They were dealing with a great deal of memory leak issues in the early Chrome vs FF era. The most important thing is that even when Chrome ended up taking more ram than FF for an equal amount of tab and equal websites loaded, closing tabs on Chrome was far more likely to let you free ram usage than on Firefox, and nobody likes to have to close the entire browser session to reclaim ram. In the XUL days, Firefox was quite janky. XUL enabled powerful addons that made it a great power user browser, and people still occasionally can be seen missing it on places like HN, but it was also a curse upon the browser and they took too long to decide to get rid of it and rearchitect their browser into something more modern.
  - junon 3y ago
    Yes true, it was very much a warranted reputation, no doubt about that. I still use Firefox and am put off about its UX much in the same way as when chrome was released.
  - acdha 3y ago
    The other thing which was a problem were popular extensions which leaked memory. A lot of people went on this cycle where they’d install extensions until their browser was slow / unstable, switch to a different browser, say it was much faster, and then lard it up with extensions before repeating the process.
majani 3y ago
Being the better browser helped gain initial momentum in the 2000s with desktop users, but they took the lead once they made Chrome the default browser in Android. The majority of software users don't change their default settings
troupo 3y ago
> Firefox simply got outcompeted by Chrome Yes, a lot of issues are of Firefox's own making. Google sabotaging them helped, too: https://archive.is/tgIH9 https://archive.is/tgIH9

maccard 3y ago

> Firefox simply got outcompeted by Chrome as Google went crazy making it faster and faster. I disagree - if that was the case then people would be switching back to Firefox now. Firefox got outcompeted by chrome by Google adding a "works better in chrome" button to their home pages.

worrycue 3y ago
Some people do. I switched back and forth. But most people are “low frequency” switchers. Chrome is ahead often enough that most people stick with them.
TheCoelacanth 3y ago
Also by paying a bunch of black-hat marketers to use malware to trick people into installing Chrome unintentionally.
johnnyanmac 3y ago
>if that was the case then people would be switching back to Firefox now It's like sayinig people would be switching off of Facebook or Twitter. It's really hard to disengage the general audience. With that said, I did in fact switch to Firefox in 2023. I still unfortunately need google translate on mobile, but once Firefox can get those add on features out of beta it will be a pretty seemless transition.

dao- 3y ago

This is partly rewriting history. Yes, Chrome literally outperformed Firefox, but there are other parts to this story. First, Google pulled engineers it had paid to work on Firefox, including the project lead, to kick-start Chrome instead. That's fair game (and Mozilla's fault for not seeing it coming), but it obviously set back Firefox as Mozilla had to scramble to fill those gaps without much of a forewarning. Secondly and perhaps most importantly, Google dumped countless millions of marketing money and often engaged in dark patterns to promote Chrome, e.g. bundling it with random shareware and freeware that would automatically make Chrome the default browser. That was even before they paid laptop vendors to preinstall Chrome, something that Mozilla could never afford, and Google could only afford because of its monopoly in search / advertising.

fuzzy2 3y ago

That’s the “nerd history”, which I mostly agree with. Normal users however don’t care much about performance and whatnot. Their PC came with Chrome, so they use it. If you give them some other browser, they probably won’t be able to tell the difference. Chrome didn’t “win” because it was good. It won because of Google’s hyper-aggressive marketing on all channels. They basically did was Microsoft was fined for by the EU back in the day.

tremon 3y ago
Their PC came with Internet Explorer. It was Java (that almost everyone had to download at some point) that came with Chrome.
- fuzzy2 3y ago
  I'm thinking about more recent times. Internet Explorer has been dead for almost a decade now. Chrome did not kill it. Chrome was however preinstalled on many PCs/laptops as part of the crapware package. Also, yes, it came bundled with basically everything.
npsomaratna 3y ago
I adopted Chrome almost as soon as it was released. Chrome was better than the other browsers available at that time. Firefox was a mess, and Internet Explorer... well, best left unsaid.
- kuchenbecker 3y ago
  I started using chrome vs Firefox because each tab had it's own process, novel at the time, such that a crappy website crashing would bring down the tab and not the browser.
ftaghn 3y ago
>Normal users however don’t care much about performance and whatnot. Their PC came with Chrome, so they use it You talk like it's impossible for nerds to have influence on their surroundings. Way before Chrome got preinstalled on a computer or went on a dark pattern campaign, I heavily recommended it to my acquaintances, friends, family. I even remember a perfectly "normal user" type uncle using Chrome before I recommended it to him because he had learned of its existence from another person's word of mouth. I constantly see people try to diminish the power of word of mouth spreading good products here on HN, which is complete nonsense. Contrary to the popular belief on HN that "normies" are idiots who only ever settle for "defaults", they routinely try new things if their peers recommend it, it's how non-preinstalled apps like Whatsapp grow. It's not just the networking effect, you need to be better than the default. Sending things like pictures through texting apps sucked, group messaging sucked, Whatsapp provided something /much better/ so people used it. By the way, it's out of topic, but mentioning messaging apps reminds me of how Google in fact could not, despite its monopoly and advertisement power, get anyone to use theirs. If you think dark patterns and preinstalling apps is enough to gain success, then why has google failed, time and time again? Apps like Google Duo were preinstalled on all android phones I've seen and literally no one I know in real life ever made use of them. Maybe google's apps weren't bad, but they were not /better/ enough to encourage people to give a shit. To convert people, you can't just be "as good" as the competition, you need some serious oomph. When Chrome came out, it was a landslide. IE was dead, and Firefox was dramatically inferior in both performance and security. The multiprocess architecture of Chrome combined with other security related decisions, and the V8 JIT for javascript made it a vastly superior browser and people knew about it. Firefox took a VERY long time to get to a place where it didn't feel bad to use once websites started taking advantage of Chrome's superior performance and got more bloated in the process. Some of the changes it made to get there were heavily contentious with the nerds who ended up being the main population of users for FF, like removing XUL, further pushing FF into a very specific niche : the privacy conscious and people who use it solely to reject google's monopoly. The "normal people" who would have used Firefox instead of IE back in the day because of peer recommendations would not use Firefox instead of Chrome today unless they're very obsessed with those things, because FF is no longer clearly better than the alternative, to the contrary, it's still weaker, though not as much as it used to be. And while the crowd on HN tends to focus heavily on things like privacy, if there's anything the average person doesn't care about in my experience, it's that. They will never trade convenience for more privacy.

tgv 3y ago

I think it was clear when they started with Google docs that they were using their browser to get market domination. They offered a free product that people liked, but almost forced them to switch to Chrome. They got entire nations to switch their education tooling to chrome and google docs. Now they keep adding features that enable bad developers to create websites that don't work properly in Firefox and Safari. There's been no change. Chrome has always been part of Google's strategy.

worrycue 3y ago
Google’s web products have always worked with Firefox to my knowledge. Maybe they run a bit faster on Chrome but I don’t recall them ever being broken on Firefox. Perhaps I’m wrong. Can you cite incidents of Google’s stuff not working right on Firefox (or Safari even). Also which features enable developers to create sites that don’t work in Firefox and Safari? (I really don’t know. I’m not a web developer.)
- tgv 3y ago
  I'm a lifelong FF user, and I had problems with google docs in the beginning. I vaguely remember it was using JS features that FF hadn't implemented yet. Currently, Chrome has a number of CSS features that Firefox and/or Safari don't support. You can find them at [1]. Some make life a bit easier, and devs use them because they like easy or even because they think everyone should force their browser maker to adapt all those features ASAP. In an old thread, I explained that my code ignores these features because we want to be compatible with as many users as possible. I got some miffed replies saying we should make our users upgrade. Really. Then there are also APIs in Chrome that have not been standardized, and some of which should not be in a browser (IMO), like USB access (see [2]). Some of that is an attempt by Google to replace "native" applications by web pages, which would give them even more leverage. [1] https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+115,firefox+116&compareCats=CSS https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+115,firefox+116&compareC... [2] https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+115,firefox+116&compareCats=JS%20API https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+115,firefox+116&compareC...
- acdha 3y ago

junon 3y ago

This is also how I remember it. "getfirefox.com" is burned into memory from ages ago, the first real competitor to IE. Everyone wanted to switch to it. Then chrome came along and people reluctantly switched at first, then enthusiastically. Firefox had the reputation of eating RAM like candy.

ftaghn 3y ago
>Firefox had the reputation of eating RAM like candy. It wasn't unwarranted. They were dealing with a great deal of memory leak issues in the early Chrome vs FF era. The most important thing is that even when Chrome ended up taking more ram than FF for an equal amount of tab and equal websites loaded, closing tabs on Chrome was far more likely to let you free ram usage than on Firefox, and nobody likes to have to close the entire browser session to reclaim ram. In the XUL days, Firefox was quite janky. XUL enabled powerful addons that made it a great power user browser, and people still occasionally can be seen missing it on places like HN, but it was also a curse upon the browser and they took too long to decide to get rid of it and rearchitect their browser into something more modern.
- junon 3y ago
  Yes true, it was very much a warranted reputation, no doubt about that. I still use Firefox and am put off about its UX much in the same way as when chrome was released.
- acdha 3y ago
  The other thing which was a problem were popular extensions which leaked memory. A lot of people went on this cycle where they’d install extensions until their browser was slow / unstable, switch to a different browser, say it was much faster, and then lard it up with extensions before repeating the process.

majani 3y ago

Being the better browser helped gain initial momentum in the 2000s with desktop users, but they took the lead once they made Chrome the default browser in Android. The majority of software users don't change their default settings

troupo 3y ago

> Firefox simply got outcompeted by Chrome Yes, a lot of issues are of Firefox's own making. Google sabotaging them helped, too: https://archive.is/tgIH9 https://archive.is/tgIH9