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Is there a canonical answer (or three) for why Chrome beat out Firefox the way that it did? I think I remember Chrome doing per-tab sandboxing back when a singl

by eieio 3y ago

Is there a canonical answer (or three) for why Chrome beat out Firefox the way that it did? I think I remember Chrome doing per-tab sandboxing back when a single Firefox tab could brick your whole browser, but I'd be a little surprised if that was a huge deal to the average user; maybe Firefox (which I used through ~2016) just crashed a lot more than I remember? Or maybe Chrome was just wayyy faster back when it launched? I stayed on Firefox for years so that I could use Pentadactyl[1], an extension that made the Firefox UI minimal and vim-like. I think I had to run LTS Firefox to keep it working through 2016 or so and then moved on. I miss it! Maybe it's just because I'm based in NYC but a lot of folks I know have moved to Arc this year - I'm excited to see where it goes and whether it can push things forward! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentadactyl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentadactyl

flashback2199 3y ago
It was a lot faster for me than Firefox at the beginning, I remember that. It also looked a lot nicer; the UI was super slick at the time. I remember it being a pretty easy and obvious switch for me at the time.
- eieio 3y ago
  Alright yeah, speed makes sense. I had forgotten about the UI! Kinda remembering now how they pushed the tabs up into the window chrome next to the close/minimize buttons which let them really shrink down the size of the top bar back when browsers typically spent a ton of vertical space on ~stuff. I bet having a single bar instead of separate URL / search bars was nifty too. I guess Chrome's launch is also from a different era where sentiment around Google was much closer to uniformly positive which I'm sure helped.
  - pxoe 3y ago
    yep, having just two bars - tabs + window buttons, and omnibox + browser buttons (which were also condensed just to 'page' and 'settings'), was kinda huge. at that time, (when browsers like firefox 3 and ie8 were around), browsers were still having bars on top of bars on top of bars: window bar, on top of a file menu, on top of address bar (with a split search bar), and they'd throw in a bookmarks bar in too by default (which chrome had turned off by default), and that's beside toolbars which were still a thing (and were not a thing at all in chrome). all that would come up at a total of 3 to 5 bars, which was a lot. particularly the combining of window title bar and tabs bar into one (along with putting tabs up top, and forgoing window title and file menu along the way), was a big thing. which seems to have influenced all the other browsers later on. (see firefox 4, opera 10, ie9 which all did kind of a spin on that, with ie9 surprisingly going even further and putting both address bar and tabs bar on a single bar) it kinda changed everything, with its approach to simplicity. i'd argue that even now chrome remains one of simpler browsers among those popular ones out today (compare to firefox, opera, vivaldi, edge, etc. which all seem to have features piling up and just popping out at you). but it is also getting crowded as well, in that button zone around main menu. if I could hide those (given that they're also redunant, cause most of those things are in main menu anyway), i wouldn't miss them at all.
- pohuing 3y ago
  Didn't Google also bug you to try Chrome?
- mort96 3y ago
  I still use Firefox, I find its UI prettier than Chrome's these days... but I wish it handled many tabs better. Google's solution of squishing the tabs until only the favicons are visible seems so obviously better than the horizontal scroll with wide tabs Firefox does.
  - MayeulC 3y ago
    To each their own, I find Chrome's solution unusable past 20 tabs or so. Tab Groups and/or Tree-style tabs are pretty much required for working with hundreds of tabs, though.
    - mort96 3y ago
      So you agree that Chrome's solution is better out of the box than Firefox's, right? Since Firefox's tab bar is even more unusable past 20 tabs or so. Many of us don't have enough horizontal space on all their machines to comfortably waste a bunch of it on a tree style tabs sidebar.
      - MayeulC 3y ago
        This is not what I said at all. I performed a test again. This is on a 1920x1080p screen, which is pretty standard. Firefox progressively shrinks tabs, until there are 21 or so. Then, you can scroll the tab bar left and right with the scrollwheel. Chrome continues shrinking tabs, until there are 90 or so. Then you can switch tabs with the scrollwheel or with the drop-down arrow on the right. However, it will fail to display some of the most recently opened tabs in the tab bar. My workflow usually consists in opening a new tab for a new activity, for instance search the web for a product category. Then open multiple tabs from here, and multiple other tabs from each, while searching more and more precise information (like spec sheets, or digging into some documentation). I progressively walk back, closing the tabs as I am done researching a topic. This process is very analogous to a mind map (and it's a representation I wish was available in browsers, together with annotations, a bit like pearltrees). Tree-style tabs come close enough, as you can collapse a group or close it at once. The reason why Firefox's approach work is analogous to the principle of locality[1]: data that needs to be frequently accessed tends to be close together (in time and space). By opening new tabs close to the current one (middle-click a link or the new tab button), they stay close to each other, and scrolling the tab bar allows to shift your context window. It works quite well. Now, Firefox has one big advantage compared to Chrome: its address bar is very effective for jumping to an open tab far away (or some matching browser history/bookmarks). Chrome probably has a conflict of interest here where they want you to search the web first. If you want to jump back to a topic 40 tabs to the left, you don't have to scroll, just type in some keywords in the address bar. Lastly, and that works with both browsers (still thanks to this locality principle), you can shift-select multiple tabs to move them to a new window to form a "tab group" substitute. Though in practice, I just tend to use private windows. > Many of us don't have enough horizontal space on all their machines to comfortably waste a bunch of it on a tree style tabs sidebar. Now, I find this argument to be weak. The only screen I have trouble using it is my vertical 1360x768p screen (so 768 horizontal pixels). Most screens will otherwise fit this quite comfortably, and have more horizontal than vertical real estate. The Tree Style Tab extension, by default, is toggled with F1, so I just hide it on that screen, and bring it up when needed. Thinking about this, some auto-hiding panel could work very well here. I am conceding the fact that my initial reply was exaggerated. After testing this again, Chromium's usability threshold is more around 30 tabs. And given the RAM chromium requires for maintaining numerous tabs, I am wondering if it isn't by design. To summarize, well, it probably depends on what you are used to... You wouldn't catch me dead on either hill though. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locality_of_reference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locality_of_reference
zeroonetwothree 3y ago
Chrome was much better back when it first came out. After that I guess inertia and no obvious reason to switch.
- eieio 3y ago
  Do you remember what you found better about it? Speed? the UI? Definitely believe that it was better (people switched to it fast!) but I'm curious about the details.
  - mdaniel 3y ago
    It had, and to this very second continues to have, world-class dev-tools. Which is doubly ironic because I believe that the dev-tools are an independent open source repo from Chromium itself but what I can't say with certainty is how many hooks are required into Chromium itself that would prevent adoption by Firefox I can't recall so much from the early days but modern Chromium releases are packed with "shiny new toys" that the web-dev crews love. I deeeeeeeeeply appreciate that saying such a thing further entrenches the "Chromium is eating the world" perspective, but I'm just pointing out that web-devs love shiny toys and Chromium seems to ship them on the regular So, too, do they ship an unholy number of C++ footguns, but omelet-breaking-eggs-etc-etc :-/
    - amon22 3y ago
      I did some experiments with webauth a couple months ago and I was pleasantly surprised that chrome has an authenticator emulator built into dev tools! I mainly use firefox but I had to install chromium for this feature alone, it's super helpful.
  - VohuMana 3y ago
    At the time for me I had been running Firefox for years but it was kinda slow and an absolute memory hog, I don’t remember specifics but I remember having to constantly close it on my 4gb ram computer. When Chrome came out it’s big thing from what I remember was it was fast and lightweight. I remember installing it and it was night and day, I could have multiple tabs open with out my computer paging memory to disk and everything felt so snappy. With all that said I think somewhere around 2015 or 2016 I switched back to Firefox because Chrome had become a CPU and memory hog while Firefox had stepped up its game and was a lot faster and more lightweight than Chrome.
acheron 3y ago
Google leveraged their search monopoly to push “switch to Chrome” messages, mainly.
AlexandrB 3y ago
In addition to actual advantages others have mentioned, google paid to bundle Chrome with things like Java upgrades (IIRC) and SourceForge downloads. I suspect this had as much impact on moving the needed for "normies" as any actual benefits.
prepend 3y ago
Every time you visited a google property with Firefox you had this banner that said “the web is better with chrome” (or something) and had a download button. Every single person I set up with Firefox (parents, non tech savvy fiends) ended up replacing it with chrome. When I asked they said it was because “google said it was better.”
BiteCode_dev 3y ago
Google home page, the most visited site in the world, had an ad spot for chrome inviting you to install it. Not the search result page, no. The home page, the empty white one with only one field. This spot has never been available for any non google product, BTW.
rthomas6 3y ago
Part of the answer is that people now are forgetting just how much goodwill Google had with the tech folks around the time Google came out with Chrome. It was open source! You could easily run it without Google! It was a titan squaring up against Internet Explorer, that did horrible things like not follow web standards or invent its own. And it was really really good. It took a handful of years for tech folks to see Google (and Chrome) the way they do now. Here is the most voted HN post from the time of Chrome's release: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=291946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=291946
- eieio 3y ago
  Linking to that thread is super helpful, thanks! This feels largely correct to me and I was in the same camp at the time re: Google sentiment. “Google kills products” has been a meme for so long that I had kinda forgotten.
- libraryatnight 3y ago
  It's one of my great regrets that I believed for any second that Google was different and the "Don't be evil." was a real promise. It felt like the internet coming from the status quo, but the status quo was just absorbing the internet.
onthecanposting 3y ago
Google has more revenue and it engaged in aggressive anticompetitive practices, like breaking compatibility with competing browsers on its own popular web properties. I assume there is some relationship between Google and the US security machine that gives this situation a pass.
omoikane 3y ago
Chrome has a lot of little things that makes it feel smoother for me, e.g. the browser launches a little bit faster, closing multiple tabs is accessible in one menu click (compared to a second level menu in Firefox), easier access to create and switch between profiles, incognito window that is visually distinct from a regular window, etc. None of the little things are absolute must-haves, but the little things do add up.
xctr94 3y ago
Lots of good reasons already mentioned, but there were 2 killer reasons for me: developer tools and extensions. I really wanted to stick with Firefox, but as someone working on the web, it was an appalling experience. And then Chrome just kept getting better and better extensions that I couldn’t find elsewhere. Obviously Firefox becoming much slower and heavier over time, whilst introducing anti-features didn’t help either. I despise Google now, so I don’t use Chrome anymore. But I’m not going back to Firefox either. The trust battery towards Mozilla never got back from zero.
- pseudalopex 3y ago
  Some developers preferred Chrome's developer tools. Some preferred Firebug. What better and better extensions were Chrome only before Chrome overtook Firefox?
  - xctr94 3y ago
    I did say “then Chrome…”. Over time I found more and more extensions being Chrome-only. This before the manifest harmonization, of course. A quick example that comes to mind is The Great Suspender (the tracking-free community edition). Firefox’s alternatives were really not very good. (I’m not sure how it is now.)
    - pseudalopex 3y ago
      Saying then Chrome did not communicate it wasn't supposed to answer how Chrome overtook Firefox. What was really not very good about Firefox's alternatives to The Great Suspender? I read some opinions now. All but 1 recommended alternatives even in Chrome because The Great Suspender could lose tabs if the browser crashed. And tabs suspended with it couldn't be restored without it. The other preferred The Great Suspender because it let them activate a tab without loading it. But the question was why Chrome beat out Firefox the way that it did. I think Chrome overtook Firefox before Chrome extensions overtook Firefox extensions.
      - xctr94 3y ago

by eieio 3y ago

flashback2199 3y ago

It was a lot faster for me than Firefox at the beginning, I remember that. It also looked a lot nicer; the UI was super slick at the time. I remember it being a pretty easy and obvious switch for me at the time.

eieio 3y ago
Alright yeah, speed makes sense. I had forgotten about the UI! Kinda remembering now how they pushed the tabs up into the window chrome next to the close/minimize buttons which let them really shrink down the size of the top bar back when browsers typically spent a ton of vertical space on ~stuff. I bet having a single bar instead of separate URL / search bars was nifty too. I guess Chrome's launch is also from a different era where sentiment around Google was much closer to uniformly positive which I'm sure helped.
- pxoe 3y ago
  yep, having just two bars - tabs + window buttons, and omnibox + browser buttons (which were also condensed just to 'page' and 'settings'), was kinda huge. at that time, (when browsers like firefox 3 and ie8 were around), browsers were still having bars on top of bars on top of bars: window bar, on top of a file menu, on top of address bar (with a split search bar), and they'd throw in a bookmarks bar in too by default (which chrome had turned off by default), and that's beside toolbars which were still a thing (and were not a thing at all in chrome). all that would come up at a total of 3 to 5 bars, which was a lot. particularly the combining of window title bar and tabs bar into one (along with putting tabs up top, and forgoing window title and file menu along the way), was a big thing. which seems to have influenced all the other browsers later on. (see firefox 4, opera 10, ie9 which all did kind of a spin on that, with ie9 surprisingly going even further and putting both address bar and tabs bar on a single bar) it kinda changed everything, with its approach to simplicity. i'd argue that even now chrome remains one of simpler browsers among those popular ones out today (compare to firefox, opera, vivaldi, edge, etc. which all seem to have features piling up and just popping out at you). but it is also getting crowded as well, in that button zone around main menu. if I could hide those (given that they're also redunant, cause most of those things are in main menu anyway), i wouldn't miss them at all.
pohuing 3y ago
Didn't Google also bug you to try Chrome?
mort96 3y ago
I still use Firefox, I find its UI prettier than Chrome's these days... but I wish it handled many tabs better. Google's solution of squishing the tabs until only the favicons are visible seems so obviously better than the horizontal scroll with wide tabs Firefox does.
- MayeulC 3y ago
  To each their own, I find Chrome's solution unusable past 20 tabs or so. Tab Groups and/or Tree-style tabs are pretty much required for working with hundreds of tabs, though.
  - mort96 3y ago
    So you agree that Chrome's solution is better out of the box than Firefox's, right? Since Firefox's tab bar is even more unusable past 20 tabs or so. Many of us don't have enough horizontal space on all their machines to comfortably waste a bunch of it on a tree style tabs sidebar.
    - MayeulC 3y ago
      This is not what I said at all. I performed a test again. This is on a 1920x1080p screen, which is pretty standard. Firefox progressively shrinks tabs, until there are 21 or so. Then, you can scroll the tab bar left and right with the scrollwheel. Chrome continues shrinking tabs, until there are 90 or so. Then you can switch tabs with the scrollwheel or with the drop-down arrow on the right. However, it will fail to display some of the most recently opened tabs in the tab bar. My workflow usually consists in opening a new tab for a new activity, for instance search the web for a product category. Then open multiple tabs from here, and multiple other tabs from each, while searching more and more precise information (like spec sheets, or digging into some documentation). I progressively walk back, closing the tabs as I am done researching a topic. This process is very analogous to a mind map (and it's a representation I wish was available in browsers, together with annotations, a bit like pearltrees). Tree-style tabs come close enough, as you can collapse a group or close it at once. The reason why Firefox's approach work is analogous to the principle of locality[1]: data that needs to be frequently accessed tends to be close together (in time and space). By opening new tabs close to the current one (middle-click a link or the new tab button), they stay close to each other, and scrolling the tab bar allows to shift your context window. It works quite well. Now, Firefox has one big advantage compared to Chrome: its address bar is very effective for jumping to an open tab far away (or some matching browser history/bookmarks). Chrome probably has a conflict of interest here where they want you to search the web first. If you want to jump back to a topic 40 tabs to the left, you don't have to scroll, just type in some keywords in the address bar. Lastly, and that works with both browsers (still thanks to this locality principle), you can shift-select multiple tabs to move them to a new window to form a "tab group" substitute. Though in practice, I just tend to use private windows. > Many of us don't have enough horizontal space on all their machines to comfortably waste a bunch of it on a tree style tabs sidebar. Now, I find this argument to be weak. The only screen I have trouble using it is my vertical 1360x768p screen (so 768 horizontal pixels). Most screens will otherwise fit this quite comfortably, and have more horizontal than vertical real estate. The Tree Style Tab extension, by default, is toggled with F1, so I just hide it on that screen, and bring it up when needed. Thinking about this, some auto-hiding panel could work very well here. I am conceding the fact that my initial reply was exaggerated. After testing this again, Chromium's usability threshold is more around 30 tabs. And given the RAM chromium requires for maintaining numerous tabs, I am wondering if it isn't by design. To summarize, well, it probably depends on what you are used to... You wouldn't catch me dead on either hill though. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locality_of_reference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locality_of_reference

zeroonetwothree 3y ago

Chrome was much better back when it first came out. After that I guess inertia and no obvious reason to switch.

eieio 3y ago
Do you remember what you found better about it? Speed? the UI? Definitely believe that it was better (people switched to it fast!) but I'm curious about the details.
- mdaniel 3y ago
  It had, and to this very second continues to have, world-class dev-tools. Which is doubly ironic because I believe that the dev-tools are an independent open source repo from Chromium itself but what I can't say with certainty is how many hooks are required into Chromium itself that would prevent adoption by Firefox I can't recall so much from the early days but modern Chromium releases are packed with "shiny new toys" that the web-dev crews love. I deeeeeeeeeply appreciate that saying such a thing further entrenches the "Chromium is eating the world" perspective, but I'm just pointing out that web-devs love shiny toys and Chromium seems to ship them on the regular So, too, do they ship an unholy number of C++ footguns, but omelet-breaking-eggs-etc-etc :-/
  - amon22 3y ago
    I did some experiments with webauth a couple months ago and I was pleasantly surprised that chrome has an authenticator emulator built into dev tools! I mainly use firefox but I had to install chromium for this feature alone, it's super helpful.
- VohuMana 3y ago
  At the time for me I had been running Firefox for years but it was kinda slow and an absolute memory hog, I don’t remember specifics but I remember having to constantly close it on my 4gb ram computer. When Chrome came out it’s big thing from what I remember was it was fast and lightweight. I remember installing it and it was night and day, I could have multiple tabs open with out my computer paging memory to disk and everything felt so snappy. With all that said I think somewhere around 2015 or 2016 I switched back to Firefox because Chrome had become a CPU and memory hog while Firefox had stepped up its game and was a lot faster and more lightweight than Chrome.

acheron 3y ago

Google leveraged their search monopoly to push “switch to Chrome” messages, mainly.

AlexandrB 3y ago

In addition to actual advantages others have mentioned, google paid to bundle Chrome with things like Java upgrades (IIRC) and SourceForge downloads. I suspect this had as much impact on moving the needed for "normies" as any actual benefits.

prepend 3y ago

Every time you visited a google property with Firefox you had this banner that said “the web is better with chrome” (or something) and had a download button. Every single person I set up with Firefox (parents, non tech savvy fiends) ended up replacing it with chrome. When I asked they said it was because “google said it was better.”

BiteCode_dev 3y ago

Google home page, the most visited site in the world, had an ad spot for chrome inviting you to install it. Not the search result page, no. The home page, the empty white one with only one field. This spot has never been available for any non google product, BTW.

rthomas6 3y ago

Part of the answer is that people now are forgetting just how much goodwill Google had with the tech folks around the time Google came out with Chrome. It was open source! You could easily run it without Google! It was a titan squaring up against Internet Explorer, that did horrible things like not follow web standards or invent its own. And it was really really good. It took a handful of years for tech folks to see Google (and Chrome) the way they do now. Here is the most voted HN post from the time of Chrome's release: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=291946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=291946

eieio 3y ago
Linking to that thread is super helpful, thanks! This feels largely correct to me and I was in the same camp at the time re: Google sentiment. “Google kills products” has been a meme for so long that I had kinda forgotten.
libraryatnight 3y ago
It's one of my great regrets that I believed for any second that Google was different and the "Don't be evil." was a real promise. It felt like the internet coming from the status quo, but the status quo was just absorbing the internet.

onthecanposting 3y ago

Google has more revenue and it engaged in aggressive anticompetitive practices, like breaking compatibility with competing browsers on its own popular web properties. I assume there is some relationship between Google and the US security machine that gives this situation a pass.

omoikane 3y ago

Chrome has a lot of little things that makes it feel smoother for me, e.g. the browser launches a little bit faster, closing multiple tabs is accessible in one menu click (compared to a second level menu in Firefox), easier access to create and switch between profiles, incognito window that is visually distinct from a regular window, etc. None of the little things are absolute must-haves, but the little things do add up.

xctr94 3y ago

Lots of good reasons already mentioned, but there were 2 killer reasons for me: developer tools and extensions. I really wanted to stick with Firefox, but as someone working on the web, it was an appalling experience. And then Chrome just kept getting better and better extensions that I couldn’t find elsewhere. Obviously Firefox becoming much slower and heavier over time, whilst introducing anti-features didn’t help either. I despise Google now, so I don’t use Chrome anymore. But I’m not going back to Firefox either. The trust battery towards Mozilla never got back from zero.

pseudalopex 3y ago
Some developers preferred Chrome's developer tools. Some preferred Firebug. What better and better extensions were Chrome only before Chrome overtook Firefox?
- xctr94 3y ago
  I did say “then Chrome…”. Over time I found more and more extensions being Chrome-only. This before the manifest harmonization, of course. A quick example that comes to mind is The Great Suspender (the tracking-free community edition). Firefox’s alternatives were really not very good. (I’m not sure how it is now.)
  - pseudalopex 3y ago
    Saying then Chrome did not communicate it wasn't supposed to answer how Chrome overtook Firefox. What was really not very good about Firefox's alternatives to The Great Suspender? I read some opinions now. All but 1 recommended alternatives even in Chrome because The Great Suspender could lose tabs if the browser crashed. And tabs suspended with it couldn't be restored without it. The other preferred The Great Suspender because it let them activate a tab without loading it. But the question was why Chrome beat out Firefox the way that it did. I think Chrome overtook Firefox before Chrome extensions overtook Firefox extensions.
    - xctr94 3y ago