this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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Is it?
It’s popular because for 15 years it’s been fast, easy, better than the built in IE and legacy Edge and tech savvy people like us have been singing its praises since what? 2010? 2012? When did Firefox become slow and bloated?
People don’t care unless there is a big enough difference in experience. And so far, Chrome hasn’t fallen off a cliff when it comes to speed or rendering. If anything, the question should be why do people still bother to download Chrome when Edge is basically the same browser now?
Firefox fixed its issues a few years back and is now a great browser again. Honestly, you can’t go wrong with the big three on desktop or mobile. But privacy isn’t going to make most people switch anything unless the privacy violations are beyond the pale. And I don’t think Chrome’s are yet. Maybe if they go through with that change to kneecap extensions and gimp adblocking that might change.
I think it's important to not just consider the browser chrome currently is, but the company that owns it, and the power they wield through it.
I get that sentiment, but that is obviously not the sentiment that regular users have. Any admins can tell you that users don’t care about the greater good, they care about experience. And right now, Chrome’s experience hasn’t gotten bad enough where users care.
They got rid of extensions on mobile years ago. From a features point of view that's enough for me to never use Chrome on mobile or desktop. Having Firefox sync between my three devices, and having adblock on mobile, is such a QOL improvement.
My guess is because of its relation to Internet Explorer. They're not the same browser, but they're made by the same company, and both have the blue "e" logo.
It also doesn't help that Edge started out running on Microsoft's own proprietary engine, EdgeHTML, which is a version of the MSHTML engine used for Internet Explorer. It wouldn't complete it's transition to a Chromium-based engine until 2021, six years after the browser originally launched with Windows 10.