I think that's rather revisionist. At a point in time Chrome was way better than not just IE, but way better than Firefox. The performance was leaps and bounds ahead.
>Not because it was a superior product, not because of technology but because everyone was anti IE.
>>>I think that's rather revisionist.
I agree with the sibling comments that remembered the past differently: Back in 2008, Chrome was actually the superior product -- for both users and developers.
- Chrome had a better partitioned process for each tab. IE and Firefox 3.x didn't so they often crashed on buggy web pages or bad Javascript. In Firefox, that would also take down all the other tabs one had open which obviously frustrated users.
- Chrome with V8 had the fastest Javascript engine at the time. This translated to faster UI on Gmail, Google Maps, Google Docs, etc.
- Chrome had a built in PDF viewer which was convenient. In IE, clicking on a pdf link triggered a disruptive "Save file as" prompt or if one had Adobe installed, it would launch Adobe Reader which was a jarring UI experience. (Also add that Chrome included ability to print to PDF. To duplicate that functionality in IE required buying the full Adobe Acrobat Professional for $300 or installing a similar PDF printer driver such as Bullzip.)
- Chrome had very good dev tools included. With Firefox, you had to install the Firebug plugin which was slower and buggier
It's fascinating how Google's recent controversy has caused widespread amnesia of Chrome browser's real technical advantages in 2008.
Chrome had a built in PDF viewer which was convenient. In IE, clicking on a pdf link triggered a disruptive "Save file as" prompt or if one had Adobe installed, it would launch Adobe Reader which was a jarring UI experience&
Good points for the most part, but not that one. A shitty JavaScript .PDF viewer is a much more "jarring UI experience" than launching an external viewer that I intentionally installed for just that purpose.
> - Chrome had very good dev tools included. With Firefox, you had to install the Firebug plugin which was slower and buggier
I remember very well that after I made the switch to Chrome, I still used Firefox for all my debugging purposes and web-development. Firebug was way ahead of Chrome Dev tools.
I remember Chrome being way better than anything else at the time. I switched from Firefox to Chrome during that period because it was just so fast and lightweight in comparison. I think it was also the first time mainstream users had access to features like tabbed browsing, which was truly novel at the time.
Chrome was the first to give each tab its own thread, which helped prevent rogue pages from bringing the whole browser down (not completely, but it was a dramatic improvement).
Firefox had tabs. Chrome's selling point at the time was that its tabs were process-isolated. Crashing one couldn't bring down the others. Which was a common Firefox experience.
I’ve been using both Firefox and Chrome since they came out and they have always felt near each others performance. It would be interesting to see some data on the subject.
One huge advantage Chrome had was it's multi-process model. This was back in the day when stuff like Flash would often nuke your entire Firefox session.
At least on Linux, I've found Chromium to be dramatically more responsive than Firefox every time I've tried switching (since about the time Chromium became usable on X11). Firefox still drops frames for me, which I find to be exceptionally jarring; and in combination with a UI that I'm not really that fond of, a backlog of basic standards compliance issues that I've been burned by as a developer (and as a user), and generally less-useful built-in fine-grained script and cookie controls, it's never really made sense for me to use Firefox.
Now I use Brave, and it's cool, it also encourages you to use interesting stuff like IPFS Companion, which I didn't know existed for Chromium until I switched to Brave.
I think even if Google ruins Chromium, it'll continue in the open somewhere else, and still be better than Firefox at the things that are important to me.
arewefastyet.com used to show benchmark comparisons between Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. It seems to now only show Firefox's performance across a slew of benchmarks. However, the old metrics are still available on the Wayback Machine:
http://web.archive.org/web/20110901000000*/arewefastyet.com
Chrome became as widespread as it did because it was bundled like crapware with installers for various pieces of software and they plastered scare-mongering banners all over their service telling people they had to use Chrome to get the correct experience, or deliberately gimping their own services on other browsers.
Chrome may have been the better browser at release, but simply being better did not get it to where it is.
As someone who kept bouncing between Firefox and Chromium for quite a long time before finally settling with Firefox, I think that's the case only for light workloads with not a lot of tabs open. I was switching from Firefox to Chromium because Firefox was getting slow, but after a while of my normal usage, Chromium wasn't just getting slow - it was getting unusable, so then I switched back to Firefox (and the same cycle repeated after a while). But yeah, right after refreshing the browser profile, fresh Chromium felt a little bit faster than fresh Firefox. I don't think that's the case anymore.
