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Comment by eitland | Hacker News Reader

> Remember that decade where Firefox shed market share to Chrome for being too "slow" and "bloated"?

Except it wasn't. I used Firefox a lot on Windows and Linux and didn't have the slightest problems.

The only reason I see why Chrome took over was a rather insane push, about the same level of intensity as IE6, from Google, using everything:

- artificially reducing performance of Firefox on key Google properties (Google Calendar, YouTube)

- bundling Chrome with Adobe

- ad campaigns on the front of Google where no one else has been allowed to serve ads (this alone must have been worth billions)

- lies ("switch to a better browser" they wrote even when I was using Firefox)

Google needs to be punished - big time - for this abuse.

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Firefox was slower than other browsers at the time. A lot slower, and buggier. There are plenty of benchmarks. I’m a Firefox user now, but before Quantum I didn’t touch it because it really was terribly dated.

We might have different usage patterns.

I regularly ran it with multiple extensions and 400 - 600 open tabs and didn't feel Chrome was better.

And I'm the kind of person who can start a 2 hour troubleshooting session over a few tens of milliseconds unexpected lag.

Edit: maybe Chrome was hopeless with multiple tabs or maybe one of the older memory saver extensions was so much better it made up for it, or maybe it just matched my hardware/SW at the time extremely well (high end HP laptops with Windows or Linux), or maybe it was just a feeling, I don't know. But I know I spent a significant part of my work day in the browsers and Firefox felt significantly better even when I wanted to try the then new and cool Chrome.

Edit 2, since I see this thread still has activity:

I should point out that by "better" I don't mean that Firefox was necessarily faster but

- it was equally fast (for my usage),

- handled 400-600 tabs effortlessly even back then

- had a number of great extensions and themes that significantly improved ones life (subscribe to pages that didn't offer any feeds? I had an extension that polled pages at configurable intervals and ran a smart diff checker on it that gave me a notice if some change had crossed a configurable threshold. Need access to docs while offline or just tired of spending your data quota or waiting for the train ro exit the tunnel? There was an extension that let me download pages recursively, configurable with domain, path and how many steps. It would deduplicate the downloaded pages and rewrite all links from absolute to relative and it "just worked" for everything I needed it for.)

By comparison, extensions in old Firefox was Hitachi or Milwaukee and new extensions are somewhere between Fisher Price and Black and Decker. Yes, you could absolutely hurt yourself on the old ones, they were tools, not toys.)

> plenty of benchmarks

What kind of benchmarks? Microbenchmarks that test specific JIT capabilities or something that better represents the average user experience.

I've been a consistent Firefox user since the days of 3.5, and only Firefox at that. Before Quantum it was noticeably slower than the competition; even Internet Explorer, let alone the people I saw using Chrome on comparable hardware.

I am a Firefox user NOW, but before Quantum it WAS dog slow compared to Chrome.

They keep doing it: https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1625756307297914883

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