this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2024
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The silver lining here is that you'd hope that more people will simply adopt Firefox. It's user share has been too low for too long given how great it is
Their user share was pretty okay for a while, but bombed when Chrome first released because it was much more performant. Unfortunately, that stigma never quite fell off and they lost a huge opportunity to overtake the market.
How was it more performant? As I remember it, Chrome was loading websites not noticeably faster than Firefox, as website loading speed depended and still depends mainly on your internet connection and hardware anyway.
As I remember it, Chrome exploded because it was pushed onto users at every possible opportunity while Firefox depended (and still depends) on users actively looking for it.
Used Google or Google products? Get ads for Chrome. Wanted to download Google Earth? You had to activly uncheck a box such that Chrome wasn't going to be installed as well. Meanwhile no ads and not the same amount of exposure for Firefox.
That way they achieved a critical mass and snowballing did the rest. There were so many users using it that it was considered a good choice just because it was used by many people.
Regarding the performance aspect, if there even was a noticeable difference, it was worse than Firefox. Where else did the "Chrome eating RAM" memes come from?
I think you are misremembering. Chrome won at the start because it was fast as fuck and Firefox was not. Firefox caught back up in the 2016 time frame iirc and they've been back and forth ever since.
Ironically chrome was named so as a goal was to reduce the chrome of the UI and focus on the web content, something recent versions of chrome and Firefox have abandoned in favor of massive swaths of whitespace and giant chrome buttons (on Firefox you can enable "unsupported" compact mode to reclaim some of the space if you're on a laptop)
agreed. chrome was bare ones and super fast when it was released. over the last two years it's a fucking monster memory hog
I've been a loyal Firefox user for almost as long as Firefox has existed. So I'm probably a bit biased. However, when I used other browsers, and if it wes just to try them out, I didn't notice any benefits in terms of loading websites and executing their scripts. This includes Chrome. In benchmarks there are obviously differences visible, but to me as a user they didn't matter. I wasn't so short on time that I needed those microseconds. So I really don't get how performance could be an argument in this.