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Comment by Yizahi | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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