Yeah, you still regularly see people claiming that Chrome's JavaScript engine is so much better than the competition, when in reality things have been neck-on-neck for years already. I think last time Chrome really had a major advantage was in 2012.
Similarly, Opera. People will still tell you with absolute confidence that Opera is terrible compared to Chrome. It's been a Chrome-clone since 2013. You'd think people would fact-check their opinions somewhen within almost 4 years, but unfortunately they don't.
Right, but in my opinion lately they have gotten a lot of better, but their userbase isn't following suit.
Right now their only slight fault is probably their dev tools aren't as sharp as Chrome, but performance wise it starts, and works equally or better than Chrome.
This does not changed the fact that chrome crushed the competition just like gmail crushed others. It took a very long time others to keep up and they are still behind in most cases. IMHO v8 deserves all the credit for the advance of JavaScript performance race.
Except Chrome wasn't some brand new project. It was Webkit which was KHTML and dated back to the mid 90s. They just wrote their, uh, chrome layer and js engine a half decade later which were, and still are, reaping tangible benefits.
I mean, they did a lot of improvements over time. ASM.js which became WASM, with fast bindings, Webrender, new JS engine, the memshrink project are ones that jump out at me. From the wpt.fyi interop stats year over yearit's pretty clear they are constantly working on implementing new specs.
But IMO everyone is chasing Chrome or just using their engine now. Their engineering team is apparently 10x that of Mozilla.
And, back when Chrome was rolling out they used their dominant position online very aggressively. Google sites worked best in Chrome, period. Chrome was pushed on google. Google tech demos, similar to Microsoft ones, worked best in or only in Chrome. Android was a big Chrome advantage too. Chrome was heavily advertised, pushed as an install bundle in things like Adobe.. I'm not disagreeing Mozilla made some poor decisions but I don't think they had much of a chance regardless.
I remember the launch of Chrome. It wasn't that better. The process isolation was nice (especially for flash) but not earth shattering. Their marketing was good however (see the linked comics).
The V8 javascript engine was the real deal however. It forced Mozilla to significantly invest in its own javascript engine.
Exactly. It's a decade behind us now, so presumably many posters here never even experienced it, but it's hard to convey just how much of an innovation Chrome was when it landed in the browser world of the late aughts. We'd been subjected, at that point, to almost 15 years of perpetual bloat and decay by Netscape and then Microsoft.
Chrome wasn't just faster, it was viscerally faster (V8 in particular was just completely without peer at the time). It was cleaner, without all the buttons and features adorning its competitors.
We all swapped instantly. Really it was amazing. But that was 11 years ago, Chrome has grown the warts IE used to have, and Firefox has largely caught up on the features geeks care about.
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.
Can we all say hype? Chrome hasn't changed anything yet. More importantly, it comes with one unique and great advance - the fact that each tab is a separate process.
V8, beyond the hype, doesn't seem to do any better than the upcoming javascript engines from Apple and Mozilla. It may be an order of magnitude better than what is currently production, but it's in the same ballpark as what Firefox and Safari will have soon.
Chrome is wonderful and will probably be my default browser for a while, but it's evolutionary, not revolutionary (except for the per-tab processes). It will push the web forward faster as Google has some great minds working on it and it is very nicely polished and efficient. It just isn't game-changing or revolutionary - it's a nice evolutionary step that's a wonderful program to use.
Maybe in the middle part of that period. I'm saying that when it first appeared, it wasn't clearly superior. I'd argue it's also not clearly superior anymore.
To bring my own experience to it, I stuck with Firefox all throughout that period and never had significant bugs, slowdowns or crashes. Though I will admit that there was a period when Chrome felt noticeably smoother.
Having sort of "grown up" as a web dev with the way things are now (IE in the lead, followed by a smaller, but significant firefox, a few safari users and this thing no one ever heard of called opera) it's been easy to be cynical about progress in the browser world.
What's so exciting about Chrome is that it validates what had seemed like (to me at least) a lot of wishful thinking about "javascript applications" and really full-featured, browser-based UIs.
Plus, having such a big user of bleeding-edge javascript techniques driving the innovation can't be a bad thing.
Chrome when it released was faster than Firefox, but it wasn't "better".
It ate far more RAM than either Firefox or IE did (and still does), back when RAM capacities were still practically limited, and Chrome was (and is) rendering the internet in Chrome ways much like IE did in Trident ways and Firefox has in Gecko ways. Chrome also had and still has its own UI paradigms, including no title bar, menu bar, nor status bar, and an omnibar instead of an address bar.
What really made Chrome the victor was they kept improving things common people care about, particularly in JavaScript and therefore JavaShit execution, while Mozilla got lazy on "winning" the war and Google dollars and IE was too late in getting back into the game.
When Chrome came out everyone was excited about how each tab was a separate process, and how fast the JavaScript was compared to Firefox/IE/Safari. Apparently none of that matters anymore? It's all just 'boilerplate?'
It’s also that Chrome is derived from an open source core which allows companies like Microsoft to use their engine to compete with them. So it is better than the IE days in that way.
Similarly, Opera. People will still tell you with absolute confidence that Opera is terrible compared to Chrome. It's been a Chrome-clone since 2013. You'd think people would fact-check their opinions somewhen within almost 4 years, but unfortunately they don't.
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