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That's some next level revisionism. When Chrome launched there existed for many years a fast, modern and extremely nice to use browser already.

At that time, Mozilla refused to implement some new CSS standards as they deemed it impossible in their engine. Chrome came along and a year down the road Firefox had got the features for some reason without much trouble. Revisionism is failing to accept that Chrome ate Firefox' lunch within months, for extremely good reasons.

You are talking about a completely different set of events happening years after the events I'm discussing. Both of us are correct, because that's two different topics.

Maybe just quit assuming everyone is clever and just clearly state what, specifically, you are referring to.

Do you mean Firefox? Because when Chrome was released, it was blazingly fast compared to firefox

> a fast, modern and extremely nice to use browser already

That's some revisionist lies. Slow, crashy, a memory pig with a big leak problem, stuck on a single process architecture. It was none of fast or modern. Whether it was extremely nice to use is debatable, but lots of people rapidly voted by switching.

It very regularly crashed and took down the entire process.

It's fine to lament the Chrome monoculture, but we misdiagnosis it if we don't remember the seeds were sown via Mozilla's incompetence. They made it crystal clear they couldn't and wouldn't do better, and the next 5 or more years made that inarguable.

My high school blocked websites with a proxy set in IE. To bypass this we would install Firefox on a flash drive and run Firefox from it. When Chrome came out everybody switched instantly because it worked so much better for our use case. Maybe a regularly installed Firefox could have been competitive, but my first use of Chrome was a night and day difference compared with Firefox.

Also Chrome got its initial market share largely by paying third parties to bundle it in their installers in the mode of Bonzi Buddy and Virtua Girl.

As one would expect of a browser made by the world's largest advertising corporation.

As I remember it, Chrome was way faster than Firefox, but I was in high school and probably stupid. Firefox wouldn't catch up to Chrome until Quantum, which was amazing when it first dropped, but now Firefox is slow again.

No, Chrome was way faster than Firefox. You were not wrong. It grew right alongside HTML5, and Chrome put a lot of effort into V8. Firefox was definitely better than IE or Safari, but Chrome could do everything that Firefox did without the memory usage that Firefox had. It's funny how memory usage is now abysmal on Chrome, too.

> Firefox is slow again

Currently I am feeling this too but only for one site, GitHub. Which is where is spend most time during the day...

Quite sad, I don't know if it's GitHub's fault or not but Firefox needs to figure out what's going wrong here soon or people like me may be literally forced to Chromium.

I've tried Chrome too on that wave of hype, including on some pretty slow machines. Like the Eee PC, and for a few months, not few hours btw. It wasn't perceptibly faster than Firefox, at it had its own slowdowns, just a bit differently. For example as I remember, Chrome often rendered a page visibly faster than FF, but it was actually unusable and frozen static "image" of sorts for a few brief moments, and only then it become active. FF had a slower time rendering, but at all times it was not frozen statically, just some elements were loading. Things like that. In the end, I returned to FF not because Google had some bad rep back then, but purely because Firefox was better and more pleasant to use. I'm still baffled how that "FF - slow!" campaign worked out eventually.

Yes, they were both much of a muchness when taken as a whole, though some people definitely did find that one or the other was notably faster for their typical workloads.

But Chrome won the vast bulk of its market share not because it was technically better in every way, but because they spent much more on marketing at the exact time IE entered terminal decline.

I hope you are talking about Opera?

Opera peaked at 12. I had it installed even till 2016? The later versions completely lost the plot for what a browser is.

Also had safari 5(?) on windows because I liked seeing a progress bar for page load. Which opera 12 also had.

Maybe I just like progress bars.

Both of them, Firefox and Opera were like that for years.

> old enough to have been in the industry when Chrome launched

steady on, youngster

To be fair, that only tells they've been in the industry since at least 2008.

I used NCSA Mosaic before Netscape Navigator, and gopher and wais before all that.

The day Mosaic added an <img></img> tag was the day it all started to go wrong.

There has never been a </img> tag: elements that in DTD days (HTML 2–4) had EMPTY content model, and which these days are called void elements, cannot have an end tag. If you write </img>, it’s a parse error, though in practice all implementations you care about will ignore it.

I'm kind of happy though that <marquee> still works. It's deprecated for a reason, but reminds me of when the web somewhat tried to have a language of common elements rather than being just a sandbox of styles.

Oh yeah, I used Gopher at uni. I think this whole world wide web thing is probably a fad. :P

---old enough to have been in the industry when ChatGPT launched.

Yeah, I still remember 8 bit home computers being sold as "build it yourself" at electronic stores.

> It was such a relief to move away from IE and all the arcane levels of details I had to remember ...

Why hadn't you moved on to Firefox?

Back when Phoenix launched it was not a reliable alternative to IE or Opera, it was more like a sign of protest. You’d use it to tell the world that you didn’t care if most of the internet didn’t work for you, as longs as you where “sticking it to the man”.

I remember developing web pages with the purpose of ensuring they would work in both, so Phoenix was my main driver, but whenever anything was “done” the real work started of also getting it to work in IE, it was always a monumental effort. Sites with buttons for “go here for pheonix/go here for ie” where common. My friends who worked in the windows ecosystem mostly saw Phoenix as some “crazy hipster trend” and didn’t have a care as to if anything they made worked in it or not.

There was half a decade between the Mozilla Browser stopped being called Phoenix and the launch of Chrome. Firefox usage peaked at some 30% of desktops the year after Chrome was released.

It's not like Firefox wasn't a "viable" browser at the time. It was quite mainstream.

Moving from IE to Firefox was a much more memorable experience than going from Firefox to Chrome. But yeah, first Chrome was fast. I’m quite sure any of the today’s browsers would be fast if running in the pre-react world though.

> You’d use it to tell the world that you didn’t care if most of the internet didn’t work for you, as longs as you where “sticking it to the man”.

This is eerily similar to how I feel about using Firefox today. Not that I am sticking it to the man - I just want there to be diversity in the market and not have every viable option be a way for a megacorp to have presence on my computers.

>but whenever anything was “done” the real work started of also getting it to work in IE

due to IE not being a standards compliant browser.

As others noted, Firefox was around for a long time before Chrome and was not called Phoenix all that time, so it sort of seems like you looked at a piece of technology a month after launch, didn't like it, and refused to took at it again for 10 years? I mean that right there is at the level of moral complaints, not just performance or rendering.

> due to IE not being a standards compliant browser.

Yes, but unless you wanted to exclude >90% of users, you could still not ignore it...

I never said one should ignore them, I just implied the post seemed to slam Firefox ("Phoenix") for a situation that was IE's fault.

I’m still using Firefox, I was adding the perspective from back in the start of “why didn’t you just move over from IE” like everyone would just move because an alternative existed. Most didn’t and i get it. I am not the norm. I also ran gentoo back then which is not an option for most computer users.

Also being “technically most standard compliant” doesn’t mean anything to the average user who’s just angry that their browser isn’t showing their MySpace page correctly.

Calm down. Not every bit of real perspective on software short of “Firefox is perfect” is an existential criticism of it existing.

It absolutely was. Phoenix became immediately superior to IE.

Never fell for the Chrome trap.

Seriously never used Chrome?

I never used it as my main browser

I've been using Firefox since I think basically its 0.1 release as Phoenix in 2022 and it already worked great at the time, no need to keep IE around (which I couldn't after switching to Linux in 2003). In fact, for years it was my "always works" fallback because I was using Konqueror otherwise. Firefox had two name changes in quick succession - Phoenix, Firebird, Firefox, but it was already over in 2004 so it's weird to keep calling it Phoenix for the more important time after that. In response to the name changes, there was a funny extension to randomize the name so you got "Firechameleon" and "Hypnodinosaur": https://github.com/miraleung/firesomething-2/blame/master/de...

Phoenix launched right at the peak of IE’s market dominance and that name lasted about a year, so if you are remembering it that way, it was very early. By 2005, Firefox had ~10% global market share; by the time of the first Chrome release in 2008, Firefox had ~25% global market share[0]. So the OP had plenty of time to switch away from IE before Chrome showed up.

In any case, nobody got to quit dealing with the misery of IE6 until some YouTube engineers did a little caper[1] that gave everyone else an excuse that their big brain business bosses would finally listen to.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars#/media/File:Brows...

[1] https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6

Because your clients used IE by default, relied on ActiveX controls, or were forced to by corporate IT policies.

you know we already had firefox back then? anyone with half a brain only used IE for the institutional website with ActiveX that wouldn't work otherwise

You had to make your website work for IE users with weird tricks because among other things it had a different way of rendering CSS.

And Opera! God I miss old Opera.

> I'm old enough to have been in the industry when Chrome launched. It was amazing

Mi was a web dev then too, forced to develop for ie6.

At the time I remember asking why is google making a browser? How do they make money, and in the long term will their browser work for my best interests, or theirs?

So that’s why I’ve always used Firefox.

Google Chrome launch comic for nostalgia: https://scottmccloud.com/googlechrome/

Also good context for why the launch of Chrome was such a big deal.

Obligatory updated comic link: https://contrachrome.com/

A good context for why the market dominance of Chrome is such a big deal.

> Node.js was direct outcome of that revolution

And things went downhill from there...

Yeah, this is one area where I look forward to Rewrite in Go and Rewrite in Rust keep doubling down, unfortunely Rewrite in Java or Rewrite in C# are grandpa technologies and not fashionable.

It’s a shame.

Rust compile times are an issue for agent throughput.

C# can approach Rust speeds with some effort, but generally has faster compile times and is less verbose.

>I'm old enough to have been in the industry when Chrome launched.

So basically not very old. Also Firefox existed long before and had pretty significant marketshare. In some countries it was well above 50%.

I went back to Firefox on desktop and phones when it was clear Chrome was going the way of IE in terms of being too large a market share for it's own good or the good of users and developers. These days its much better than when Chrome first came out, but I also toy with librewolf or other even more user oriented alternate browsers.

> Chrome was fast, did the basic job of correctly rendering pages, and its js runtime was groundbreaking

I think you're misremembering or you didn't try Safari at the time. The first version of Chrome was not very different from Safari which it was just a shell of anyway.

The first Chrome did use a fork of WebCore, the HTML part of WebKit, as its rendering engine, but added its own V8 JavaScript engine. The speed of JavaScript was the main differentiator. And _that_ was very different from Safari, and every other existing browser ... The quote is correct.

V8 kept getting even faster, including adding faster RegExps, which pushed the other browsers to speed up their JS too. Firefox is now using that RegExp implementation too, even if they're not using V8.

WebKit was itself a fork of the KHTML browser engine. And just like WebKit diverged from KHTML, Chrome diverged from WebKit.

My memory as a Mac user switching to Chrome when it came out was that the performance was basically the same as Safari. I'm sure V8 was faster than JavaScriptCore, but the web wasn't nearly as JavaScript-heavy as it is today so it wasn't something you noticed in normal use. Maybe if you were a heavy gmail-in-the-browser user.

The main reason I stuck with Chrome was the tab isolation. WebKit was super crashy back then, with Safari crashing several times a day just browsing the web. In Chrome only one tab would crash instead of the whole browser. This was one of the original selling points in addition to performance.

I switched back to Safari when I got my first Retina MacBook Pro, since Chrome had terrible performance in HiDPI for the first two years of retina Macs.

I hope ladybird will take be the same type of successor to chrome, but this time not in the hands of a corporate organisation.

> "Honestly Opus 5.5 had gotten good enough I've been considering a project to have it build a new browser based on the open source Chrome and keeps the v2 in place."

You wouldn't be worried about vulnerabilities that the vibe coded browser could produce? I use plenty of LLM generated code, but a browser wouldn't be something I'd try on the Web.

So long as you don't distribute it and it doesn't become popular, don't underestimate security through obscurity. Malicious actors won't know about this homebrew browser's (presumably many) hypothetical flaws.

Yeah I use the Xbox edge browser sometimes, even popups break because they’re like wtf is this.

He's describing a chromium fork not a full on vibe coded browser.

That doesn't protect you from browsing banking sites and your potential crypto wallets.

In a way, cryptography is the ultimate security through obscurity.

Well-designed cryptographic systems are designed so that you can understand everything about the system and still not get inside.

It's pretty much the exact opposite of security through obscurity.

Only if you're limited to knowing exactly how the actual cryptography works. If you understand exactly how the key derivation works, and know how that is seeded, then you can very much get inside.

I think they meant it in a tongue-in-cheek way, as in: my private key is "obscure"?

It would be nice benchmark for models. Something like generate web browser from web standards in rust, c, and a language of your choice. An automatic judge would score the results by amount of found vulnerabilities and functionality. We could also see if generating code by LLM in rust makes it safer or if language doesn't matter anymore. And you know that it will work eventually, because AI labs need models capable to write new fully working models themselves to reach AGI or whatever you call it.

You sure you were still using IE when Chrome launched and not some other browser ?

> The death of manifest v2 is the 2nd to last nail.

Yeah. I think Google underestimated how many people they pissed off here. There is a reason I and many other think that Google has to be disbanded.

Either way welcome to the resistance!

> Honestly Opus 5.5 had gotten good enough I've been considering a project to have it build a new browser based on the open source Chrome and keeps the v2 in place. Just customize it specifically for my preferences and call it done. No more unexpected breaking updates. Just a browser that does its job and nothing else.

I mean, helium exists. https://github.com/imputnet/helium