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Comment by RyanMcGreal | Hacker News Reader

>Certainly, Google Chrome is now growing at a much faster pace than Firefox is.

I get tired of seeing this repeated ad nauseam. It's easy to grow fast from zero; Firefox grew fast from zero. It's a lot harder to grow fast from double-digit penetration.

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While you're technically correct, the difference here is that the growth Google sees could easily be sustained. Google can expose more users in a few hours to Chrome(for free via a well placed link on their search homepage) than Mozilla could ever hope to reach in half a year without a massive advertising budget.

Combine that with the positive 'word of mouth' I've encountered so far from non-technical types and it's possible we haven't seen the knee of the curve yet in adoption growth.

Google then is not going to be taking most of it's users from FF but from those swayed most by ads on Google, probably IE users?

At least I'm sure that Google Chrome's increase in market share doesn't necessitate a reduction for FF (though some reduction is almost certain).

Don't forget that Google actively advertises Chrome (e.g. on the London Underground), so there's even more exposure than Firefox could dream of.

Right now, Chrome is visibly faster for me. I keep hearing about fantastic new improvements to the Firefox JS engine and other components but in practice they don't seem to have amounted to much.

... (Hmm, before making that assertion I'd better test it, test test test)...

Well, perhaps I should amend that to "up until very recently, Chrome was visibly faster". As it happens I just went from Firefox 3.5 to 3.6 on this machine yesterday, and a deliberately-subjective performance test I just ran has Chrome and Firefox a lot closer to indistinguishable difference. (As an end user, I don't care about 10% differences on this or that benchmark.) I had been using Chrome for the last two weeks, but I have very badly missed NoScript and right click -> "Block images from this server". (Stupid flabby stomach ads.) Now I think I'm headed back.

But I suppose I can salvage my thesis by saying that at least until recently Chrome had a significant advantage over Firefox. If Firefox's performance catches up, that may staunch the bleeding, because if Chrome isn't much faster, why switch? Firefox definitely has more features, and nobody really cares about HTML5 right now; by the time they do FF will be there.

On both my home Ubuntu system and my work Windows XP system, Firefox and Chrome are about the same speed and the same memory footprint. However, I can't deny that Chrome subjectively feels snappier to use.

Chrome subjectively feels snappier

Right, and why would anything else matter for a web browser?

Addons.

Being able to parse the whole web, not just a subset.

Sorry, I meant why would any other kind of speed matter?

Certainly it was easy for firefox to grow fast as netscape had died and ie, well, it's ie. They were right time right place.

For chrome to come along and take a large fraction of firefox users is an entirely different situation. If your claim is that it's easy to grow fast from zero as a proportion of the global internet users then the data from other browsers adoption rates does not support that conclusion.

How was it easy for Firefox to grow? When I first started using Mozilla and Pheonix then some of the most pressing bugs involved top 100 sites that simply didn't work, often not because of anything that Mozilla did wrong, just sites that actively ignored them. Chrome doesn't face anything like that now because of what Mozilla have achieved, both in the marketplace and in the standards bodies.

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