>As someone who lived through those days, that is just straight up not true.
As someone else who lived through those days, you're either misremembering or lying to yourself. As an end user, chrome was just better by any metric end users cared about. The fact that you're mentioning a bunch of stuff unrelated to things that end users care about leads me to believe that you aren't able to think objectively about that.
Please name a metric or set of metrics? Because when we talk about metrics, these are measurable data points. Chrome has better Javascript performance, this is a measurable datapoint, and they definitely did technically win here. That was essentially the only metric that they won on.
If the metric is mindshare, end user engagement, or anything "feely", of course they were ahead... that's the end result of Marketing. That's what Marketing does. They had front-and-center advertising on the most visited website in the world, with branding from the (at the time) most valuable tech company in the world.
FWIW, these are moving targets, browser teams across the board are constantly working on engine-side performance to make up for the complete lack of care from front-end developers as the JS community continues to churn through hype cycles, so that we aren't destroying batteries on dominant web devices (mobile phones and laptops). Mozilla has been maintaining public repeatable benchmarks for a very long time and continues to do so, although there isn't enough data available to go back in time ~10 years: https://arewefastyet.com/
It was such a better end user experience, I can't believe you're arguing otherwise. I appreciate what Mozilla does, but their history includes multiple periods of being a worse browsing experience than their competitors. You don't need marketing to tell you that it's a better experience when you could run them side by side and notice that one would crash far more often than the other, and one would struggle with lots of tabs and the other wouldn't, one would render pages faster and more accurately than the other.
Again, you obviously aren't able to objectively talk about end user experience for some reason and need to be honest with yourself about that. You should load up a VM with XP or Vista and Firefox 3.0 and refamiliarize yourself with the time period you claim to have lived through.
I'm arguing because I have used /both/ Chrome and Firefox in parallel since the initial release of both pieces of software, including regularly benchmarking them. In the sum totality of the data I have seen, there have been many moments of back and forth where one was "better" than the other, but in the end they are roughly equivalent. When Chrome /first/ released, it had a huge performance advantage explicitly due to V8 and how heavy JS usage was on the web (which has only gotten heavier over time). After that advantage was mostly nullified by the rewrite of the JS engine in Firefox, the performance differential was around a maximum of 5-10% at any given time in one direction or another as both teams worked on improving performance.
> You don't need marketing to tell you that it's a better experience when you could run them side by side and notice that one would crash far more often than the other, and one would struggle with lots of tabs and the other wouldn't, one would render pages faster and more accurately than the other.
As mentioned, I have run them side by side daily for a decade+, including for many long stretches of times both the stable and nightly builds of both. I /still/ to this day, use both browsers every single day. I have not seen anything which would make me believe that one is more stable than the other, or that absent the performance gains on heavy JS sites (early SPAs), that one had a particular advantage in tab-count/memory footprint compared to the other.
Almost all the performance differences were deeply tied to the JS engine, and actually still are (but now wasm too).
> Again, you obviously aren't able to objectively talk about end user experience for some reason and need to be honest with yourself about that. You should load up a VM with XP or Vista and Firefox 3.0 and refamiliarize yourself with the time period you claim to have lived through.
I might do that over the weekend for kicks and grins. I assure you, I am being honest and fairly objective.
It's funny how everyone is so certain I'm wrong, but provided no evidence, other than to point out things that are based /exactly/ on the one major technical win I acknowledged in my original comment and have completely ignored the very public benchmarking efforts that have gone on the entire lifecycle of Chrome.
I don't think you're wrong, but I think you may have misread the original post, which pointed out that Chrome was better than Firefox for years. You agree that Chrome had a huge performance advantage in 2008 and that this advantage persisted until Firefox released either JaegerMonkey, in 2011, or IonMonkey, in 2013; it's not clear which you're writing about. You also agree that Chrome had a stability and security advantage due to isolating each tab in its own process, which Firefox also didn't get for years.
You're replying to a post which claimed that Chrome was better than Firefox for years, with a rebuttal that claims Chrome was better than Firefox for years, but then Firefox improved. That doesn't change anything! Those early years from 2008 onward were critical for early adoption and gave Chrome inertia which it was able to ride to market dominance. I don't think any of your posts, while correct, have addressed that initial argument.
It was much faster than Firefox, that's why I switched. It could handle more tabs. It isolated tabs so if one crashed it didn't crash the whole browser. Memory usage was lower. I wouldn't call any of those "marketing" and "mindshare".
> It was much faster than Firefox, that's why I switched.
This was pretty much entirely because of the JS performance advantage from V8 near the beginning.
> It could handle more tabs.
This was pretty much entirely because of the JS performance advantage from V8 near the beginning.
> It isolated tabs so if one crashed it didn't crash the whole browser.
This is definitely a win for Chrome and something we eventually saw Firefox adopt, but many many years later.
> Memory usage was lower.
This was a combination of factors, but heavily related to the improved JS performance due to V8. A big piece was also that XUL was a pig.
Thanks for pointing out some specific things, but while they affect specific perceptions, underneath the covers most of this had to do with the combination of improved JS performance in Chrome + a heavy reliance on JS for web.
Link Prefetching was in Firefox 1.0 and DNS Prefetching was added in Firefox 3.5. Both were supported in the first release of Chrome, but DNS Prefetching hadn't ratified as a standard yet. The first stable release of Chrome was on December 11th, 2008. Firefox 1.0 came out on November 9th, 2004 and Firefox 3.5 came out on June 30th, 2009. Firefox 2 (October 24, 2006) already had support for the control headers for DNS Prefetching, but the standard wasn't ratified until later, which is when Firefox brought it into support.
That's not to say that Chrome didn't have different approaches to predicting and triggering prefetching compared to Firefox, and that in some ways those methods were better, but both Link Prefetching and DNS Prefetching were ideas before Chrome exists, Link Prefetching was ratifed and in Firefox before Chrome existed, and DNS Prefetching was shipped in Firefox as soon as the standard was ratified (Chrome shipped it in the first release before the standards process had concluded).
The point is that "the Chrome experience was significantly better" was obviously true for a great many users. It doesn't matter what exact optimizations it boils down to.
As someone else who lived through those days, you're either misremembering or lying to yourself. As an end user, chrome was just better by any metric end users cared about. The fact that you're mentioning a bunch of stuff unrelated to things that end users care about leads me to believe that you aren't able to think objectively about that.