6 ms·

I get your point but I think the browser analogy is wrong. IE had something like 90% market share back in the day because it was bundled with the OS and cost $

I get your point but I think the browser analogy is wrong. IE had something like 90% market share back in the day because it was bundled with the OS and cost $0. Chrome ate everyone's lunch because everyone was using google to search for stuff, and they could advertise their browser on their home page or together with their search results. They also took out ads, in some countries, on billboards, in newspapers and even in cinemas. I'm sure technical people talking to their families had a small effect (though wouldn't they recommend firefox, because FOSS?), but I think that pales in comparison to google being able to advertise chrome on their search page.

deleted 2y ago
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PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
Chrome also ate everybody's lunch because it's the default browser on the most common networked computing devices in the world (android phones).
Suppafly 2y ago
>Chrome ate everyone's lunch because everyone was using google to search for stuff, and they could advertise their browser on their home page or together with their search results. That and it was such a better browsing experience. Firefox was not good compared to Chrome for years. I'm sure they are feature parity now, but for years the Chrome experience was significantly better.
- tristor 2y ago
  > That and it was such a better browsing experience. Firefox was not good compared to Chrome for years. I'm sure they are feature parity now, but for years the Chrome experience was significantly better. As someone who lived through those days, that is just straight up not true. The only measurable advantage that Chrome had over Firefox was in Javascript performance, because V8 was superior to the JS engine built into Gecko before the SpiderMonkey project started. Chrome won off mindshare, not off technical superiority. Everyone /assumes/ technical superiority because it's Google, but that's just not accurate. At best, you could count in Chrome's favor their early support for "web standards", because most of those standards were invented at Google, stuck into Chrome, and then only afterwards standardized so that others could make use of them. While the Chrome team at Google has done good work and an immense amount of work, they didn't start from nothing, Blink is a derivative of WebKit and didn't even diverge with the fork until 2013. Webkit itself didn't exist until 2001, when it was forked by Apple from KHTML (developed by the KDE team as a community project). The story of Chrome is the story of "embrace, extend, extinguish" from the Microsoft playbook, done by an even more powerful and influential technology giant being played out. It is not the story of technological superiority, nor was there any strong technical reason why Google couldn't have contributed their work into the open without creating their own browser. Even with Chrome, other than the development of V8, they contributed all of their work back to WebKit until 2013 when they forked. No surprise that Google regularly makes changes in its applications which advantage Chrome, penalize competing browsers, and still advertise Chrome on the front page of google.com, the most valuable ad real estate that exists anywhere.
  - Suppafly 2y ago
    >As someone who lived through those days, that is just straight up not true. As someone else who lived through those days, you're either misremembering or lying to yourself. As an end user, chrome was just better by any metric end users cared about. The fact that you're mentioning a bunch of stuff unrelated to things that end users care about leads me to believe that you aren't able to think objectively about that.
    - tristor 2y ago
      Please name a metric or set of metrics? Because when we talk about metrics, these are measurable data points. Chrome has better Javascript performance, this is a measurable datapoint, and they definitely did technically win here. That was essentially the only metric that they won on. If the metric is mindshare, end user engagement, or anything "feely", of course they were ahead... that's the end result of Marketing. That's what Marketing does. They had front-and-center advertising on the most visited website in the world, with branding from the (at the time) most valuable tech company in the world. FWIW, these are moving targets, browser teams across the board are constantly working on engine-side performance to make up for the complete lack of care from front-end developers as the JS community continues to churn through hype cycles, so that we aren't destroying batteries on dominant web devices (mobile phones and laptops). Mozilla has been maintaining public repeatable benchmarks for a very long time and continues to do so, although there isn't enough data available to go back in time ~10 years: https://arewefastyet.com/ https://arewefastyet.com/
      - zerd 2y ago
        It was much faster than Firefox, that's why I switched. It could handle more tabs. It isolated tabs so if one crashed it didn't crash the whole browser. Memory usage was lower. I wouldn't call any of those "marketing" and "mindshare".
        tristor 2y ago
        > It was much faster than Firefox, that's why I switched. This was pretty much entirely because of the JS performance advantage from V8 near the beginning. > It could handle more tabs. This was pretty much entirely because of the JS performance advantage from V8 near the beginning. > It isolated tabs so if one crashed it didn't crash the whole browser. This is definitely a win for Chrome and something we eventually saw Firefox adopt, but many many years later. > Memory usage was lower. This was a combination of factors, but heavily related to the improved JS performance due to V8. A big piece was also that XUL was a pig. Thanks for pointing out some specific things, but while they affect specific perceptions, underneath the covers most of this had to do with the combination of improved JS performance in Chrome + a heavy reliance on JS for web.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago

Chrome also ate everybody's lunch because it's the default browser on the most common networked computing devices in the world (android phones).

Suppafly 2y ago

>Chrome ate everyone's lunch because everyone was using google to search for stuff, and they could advertise their browser on their home page or together with their search results. That and it was such a better browsing experience. Firefox was not good compared to Chrome for years. I'm sure they are feature parity now, but for years the Chrome experience was significantly better.

tristor 2y ago
> That and it was such a better browsing experience. Firefox was not good compared to Chrome for years. I'm sure they are feature parity now, but for years the Chrome experience was significantly better. As someone who lived through those days, that is just straight up not true. The only measurable advantage that Chrome had over Firefox was in Javascript performance, because V8 was superior to the JS engine built into Gecko before the SpiderMonkey project started. Chrome won off mindshare, not off technical superiority. Everyone /assumes/ technical superiority because it's Google, but that's just not accurate. At best, you could count in Chrome's favor their early support for "web standards", because most of those standards were invented at Google, stuck into Chrome, and then only afterwards standardized so that others could make use of them. While the Chrome team at Google has done good work and an immense amount of work, they didn't start from nothing, Blink is a derivative of WebKit and didn't even diverge with the fork until 2013. Webkit itself didn't exist until 2001, when it was forked by Apple from KHTML (developed by the KDE team as a community project). The story of Chrome is the story of "embrace, extend, extinguish" from the Microsoft playbook, done by an even more powerful and influential technology giant being played out. It is not the story of technological superiority, nor was there any strong technical reason why Google couldn't have contributed their work into the open without creating their own browser. Even with Chrome, other than the development of V8, they contributed all of their work back to WebKit until 2013 when they forked. No surprise that Google regularly makes changes in its applications which advantage Chrome, penalize competing browsers, and still advertise Chrome on the front page of google.com, the most valuable ad real estate that exists anywhere.
- Suppafly 2y ago
  >As someone who lived through those days, that is just straight up not true. As someone else who lived through those days, you're either misremembering or lying to yourself. As an end user, chrome was just better by any metric end users cared about. The fact that you're mentioning a bunch of stuff unrelated to things that end users care about leads me to believe that you aren't able to think objectively about that.
  - tristor 2y ago
    Please name a metric or set of metrics? Because when we talk about metrics, these are measurable data points. Chrome has better Javascript performance, this is a measurable datapoint, and they definitely did technically win here. That was essentially the only metric that they won on. If the metric is mindshare, end user engagement, or anything "feely", of course they were ahead... that's the end result of Marketing. That's what Marketing does. They had front-and-center advertising on the most visited website in the world, with branding from the (at the time) most valuable tech company in the world. FWIW, these are moving targets, browser teams across the board are constantly working on engine-side performance to make up for the complete lack of care from front-end developers as the JS community continues to churn through hype cycles, so that we aren't destroying batteries on dominant web devices (mobile phones and laptops). Mozilla has been maintaining public repeatable benchmarks for a very long time and continues to do so, although there isn't enough data available to go back in time ~10 years: https://arewefastyet.com/ https://arewefastyet.com/
    - zerd 2y ago
      It was much faster than Firefox, that's why I switched. It could handle more tabs. It isolated tabs so if one crashed it didn't crash the whole browser. Memory usage was lower. I wouldn't call any of those "marketing" and "mindshare".
      - tristor 2y ago
        > It was much faster than Firefox, that's why I switched. This was pretty much entirely because of the JS performance advantage from V8 near the beginning. > It could handle more tabs. This was pretty much entirely because of the JS performance advantage from V8 near the beginning. > It isolated tabs so if one crashed it didn't crash the whole browser. This is definitely a win for Chrome and something we eventually saw Firefox adopt, but many many years later. > Memory usage was lower. This was a combination of factors, but heavily related to the improved JS performance due to V8. A big piece was also that XUL was a pig. Thanks for pointing out some specific things, but while they affect specific perceptions, underneath the covers most of this had to do with the combination of improved JS performance in Chrome + a heavy reliance on JS for web.