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.
that's a fair point, I more wish to counter the idea that Firefox was a better or even equal product at the time. Chrome was a clearly superior product to Firefox.
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 started becoming really popular when Firefox started becoming terrible around 10 years ago. Chrome was much faster and had better features. Firefox was bloated and slow and was pretty much resting on its laurels. These days it has inertia on its side, not that it's necessarily better anymore (I would argue Firefox is better now)
The irony was how ages ago everyone was waiting for a browser to come along and unseat IE, which was not a good browser.
Now Chrome works well enough as a browser and has so much market share that it exerts too much control over its users and the Web, and it's unlikely that anything will be capable of obsoleting it in the near future.
I'd like to know how much of an impact that had, but nonetheless Chrome is technically in many areas the best browser today and Mozilla, being the clear market leader at one point, could have done a lot more to prevent that.
Firefox was in need of technical improvements for some time, but they only started acting when Chrome already had a noticeable market share and that's not how you stay at the top.
That's a testament to how bad browsers were/are compared to Chrome.
Chrome was a ground-up project, written by highly-paid Googlers, while other browsers were sitting on old codebases built up by many average employees and unpaid volunteers over a decade+.
Chrome was also, at that time, allowed to be a pure browser for browsing the web while other browsers were trying to get you to sign up for toolbars (essentially more ad real estate for them) or use their homepage (more ad spots) and were pushing out updates constantly (an excuse to show you more ads in the updater progress window!)
What you say is probably true for IE, AOL browser, etc., but Chrome (when it came out) was really just a better browser. It was significantly faster than any browser of its time, the new interface to increase vertical space was wonderful, the auto-update was a great feature, the tab sandboxing was great. I had been using Firefox for a long long time before I jumped ship to Chrome.
But now I'll try Firefox again because of this post. :)
Chrome is definitely a good browser. It helped evolve the web. But, I don't think that Chrome today is much ahead of other browsers aside from compatibility.
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.
IE was a majority browser while being bad. Chrome is the best browser available (for average joe at least). No plea to use another browser will be heard, until there is an as-good or better alternative.
Firefox was better than IE, but eventually, Chrome became better than Firefox for a majority of people. Silent auto-update, anti-phishing, sandboxing, extensions that "just worked". It also came with it's own flash plug-in, which was great for non-technical people back when Flash was relevant.
Chrome did a lot of things right and for a while, it was the browser I installed on friends and family PCs because it was trouble free and I knew they would always have the latest version installed automatically.
No, Chrome was a revelation when it came out. It was way faster than Firefox and it had many great features we now take for granted, like isolated tabs, popup blocking etc.
Do you really, honestly thing that is why it came to dominance? There's billions of computer users out there, and the majority of them are not techie nerds. They don't know or care what browser they are using. They just want to click the internet icon. You think all those people were sitting around, opening up task manager, and comparing the results with all of their tabs open? They are all used to the internet being slow. They don't know what part is being slow.
If what you are saying was true, then Firefox should have dominated over IE. Did they take over a large share of the market? Yes, after fighting and fighting for years on end. Chrome just came out, and after putting it on their home page, suddenly their marketshare skyrocketed. I believe that if Google had to put it on a different URL, it would not have gotten the adoption it has now.
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