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> 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

> 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.
btilly 2y ago
As someone else who lived through those days, I have to disagree. First, JavaScript performance was not an afterthought, it was a big deal. Second, Chrome's sandbox was massively superior from a security point of view. In a world full of viruses, that was a big deal. I personally recommended Chrome to family and friends. I did so because I didn't want to be tech support for their virus problems. But what I sold them on was the speed.
- tristor 2y ago
  > First, JavaScript performance was not an afterthought, it was a big deal. It's a /very/ big deal. It's not a mistake that V8 was chosen to build Node.JS on top of. Javascript performance continues to dominate the overall performance of browsers on the modern web as front-end developers utilize more and more JS weight in their pages and SPAs become even more commonplace. Don't mistake my comment as saying that the win for Javascript performance wasn't a big win. V8 completely upended the expectations of both web developers and engine teams about what was not only expected but was what feasible when it came to JS performance. V8 is great, but it didn't need a new browser to ship it, which was my larger point. > Second, Chrome's sandbox was massively superior from a security point of view. In a world full of viruses, that was a big deal. Chrome's sandbox is not particularly better than Firefox's sandbox today. Both browsers invented new security concepts over the last decade+ as browsers have become larger, more integral to people's day to day workflows, and more security-sensitive. A modern browser in 2025 is easily as complex as a modern OS in 2025 with similar security implications. When Chrome first came out, it had one major improvement over Firefox (and both were better than any alternatives for security) which was to run tab contexts in separate processes rather than separate threads. This opened up all sorts of opportunities and benefits, which Chrome capitalized on, proving this approach to be correct, and later Mozilla adopted it in Firefox as well. From a security perspective, the main benefit was to prevent different sites from sharing process memory context, in the event that the site was malicious and exploiting a browser bug to access process memory. The modern Chrome sandbox (and Firefox sandbox) is magnitudes more advanced and complex than the sandboxing that Chrome initially shipped with, and at least to my recollection there was not a significant difference in security surface area between the two other than tab isolation at Chrome launch, which I don't really count as a "sandbox".
edanm 2y ago
This is completely wrong. Chrome won initially because it was a much better browser in terms of user experience. I remember the original discussions around it, they innovated a bunch of features like processes-per-tab so if one tab crashed you wouldn't have to restart the whole browser. It also had a much cleaner UI - that's why it was called "Chrome" in the first place, because it only had the chrome. You can see that these were true innovations because everyone else copied them.
deanCommie 2y ago
I don't understand why you're arguing with everyone in the comments. The premise was that enthusiasts drove public opinion. I was one of those enthusiasts. I got everyone I know to switch to Chrome. Why? 1. It opened instantly. The others hung. 2. People can't conceive of this now but in that era if a rogue website started going crazy with Javascript it would CRASH THE ENTIRE BROWSER. In chrome it only killed the one tab. That sandboxing was game-changing for the state of the internet back then. 3. It could handle an obscene amount of tabs. The others couldn't. 4. 3 enabled a new mode that essentially didn't exist before - "reopen tabs". Tabbed browsing existed in Firefox but each tab was still so heavy to reopen that essentially nobody would expect to reopen their last tabs. With chrome the default was to reopen where you stopped. 5. Its built-in popup blocker actually worked. Yes, pop-up blockers existed before. And yet websites still found a way to work around it. Chrome's just worked. I don't know why they could do it but others couldn't, but at worst it would pop up a new tab next to your existing one. For others internet browsing was still an experience that ended closing a browser window with "oh shit there's been a porn popup window in the background this entire time". Not so with Chrome. NONE of this came from marketing. ALL of this became apparent within seconds-to-minutes of using it. I only had to lead my friends and family to it, once they started using it they never ent back.

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.

btilly 2y ago

As someone else who lived through those days, I have to disagree. First, JavaScript performance was not an afterthought, it was a big deal. Second, Chrome's sandbox was massively superior from a security point of view. In a world full of viruses, that was a big deal. I personally recommended Chrome to family and friends. I did so because I didn't want to be tech support for their virus problems. But what I sold them on was the speed.

tristor 2y ago
> First, JavaScript performance was not an afterthought, it was a big deal. It's a /very/ big deal. It's not a mistake that V8 was chosen to build Node.JS on top of. Javascript performance continues to dominate the overall performance of browsers on the modern web as front-end developers utilize more and more JS weight in their pages and SPAs become even more commonplace. Don't mistake my comment as saying that the win for Javascript performance wasn't a big win. V8 completely upended the expectations of both web developers and engine teams about what was not only expected but was what feasible when it came to JS performance. V8 is great, but it didn't need a new browser to ship it, which was my larger point. > Second, Chrome's sandbox was massively superior from a security point of view. In a world full of viruses, that was a big deal. Chrome's sandbox is not particularly better than Firefox's sandbox today. Both browsers invented new security concepts over the last decade+ as browsers have become larger, more integral to people's day to day workflows, and more security-sensitive. A modern browser in 2025 is easily as complex as a modern OS in 2025 with similar security implications. When Chrome first came out, it had one major improvement over Firefox (and both were better than any alternatives for security) which was to run tab contexts in separate processes rather than separate threads. This opened up all sorts of opportunities and benefits, which Chrome capitalized on, proving this approach to be correct, and later Mozilla adopted it in Firefox as well. From a security perspective, the main benefit was to prevent different sites from sharing process memory context, in the event that the site was malicious and exploiting a browser bug to access process memory. The modern Chrome sandbox (and Firefox sandbox) is magnitudes more advanced and complex than the sandboxing that Chrome initially shipped with, and at least to my recollection there was not a significant difference in security surface area between the two other than tab isolation at Chrome launch, which I don't really count as a "sandbox".

edanm 2y ago

This is completely wrong. Chrome won initially because it was a much better browser in terms of user experience. I remember the original discussions around it, they innovated a bunch of features like processes-per-tab so if one tab crashed you wouldn't have to restart the whole browser. It also had a much cleaner UI - that's why it was called "Chrome" in the first place, because it only had the chrome. You can see that these were true innovations because everyone else copied them.

deanCommie 2y ago

I don't understand why you're arguing with everyone in the comments. The premise was that enthusiasts drove public opinion. I was one of those enthusiasts. I got everyone I know to switch to Chrome. Why? 1. It opened instantly. The others hung. 2. People can't conceive of this now but in that era if a rogue website started going crazy with Javascript it would CRASH THE ENTIRE BROWSER. In chrome it only killed the one tab. That sandboxing was game-changing for the state of the internet back then. 3. It could handle an obscene amount of tabs. The others couldn't. 4. 3 enabled a new mode that essentially didn't exist before - "reopen tabs". Tabbed browsing existed in Firefox but each tab was still so heavy to reopen that essentially nobody would expect to reopen their last tabs. With chrome the default was to reopen where you stopped. 5. Its built-in popup blocker actually worked. Yes, pop-up blockers existed before. And yet websites still found a way to work around it. Chrome's just worked. I don't know why they could do it but others couldn't, but at worst it would pop up a new tab next to your existing one. For others internet browsing was still an experience that ended closing a browser window with "oh shit there's been a porn popup window in the background this entire time". Not so with Chrome. NONE of this came from marketing. ALL of this became apparent within seconds-to-minutes of using it. I only had to lead my friends and family to it, once they started using it they never ent back.