>Chrome ate everyone's lunch because everyone was using google to search for stuff, and they could advertise their browser on their home page or together with their search results.

That and it was such a better browsing experience. Firefox was not good compared to Chrome for years. I'm sure they are feature parity now, but for years the Chrome experience was significantly better.

> That and it was such a better browsing experience. Firefox was not good compared to Chrome for years. I'm sure they are feature parity now, but for years the Chrome experience was significantly better.

As someone who lived through those days, that is just straight up not true. The only measurable advantage that Chrome had over Firefox was in Javascript performance, because V8 was superior to the JS engine built into Gecko before the SpiderMonkey project started.

Chrome won off mindshare, not off technical superiority. Everyone /assumes/ technical superiority because it's Google, but that's just not accurate. At best, you could count in Chrome's favor their early support for "web standards", because most of those standards were invented at Google, stuck into Chrome, and then only afterwards standardized so that others could make use of them. While the Chrome team at Google has done good work and an immense amount of work, they didn't start from nothing, Blink is a derivative of WebKit and didn't even diverge with the fork until 2013. Webkit itself didn't exist until 2001, when it was forked by Apple from KHTML (developed by the KDE team as a community project).

The story of Chrome is the story of "embrace, extend, extinguish" from the Microsoft playbook, done by an even more powerful and influential technology giant being played out. It is not the story of technological superiority, nor was there any strong technical reason why Google couldn't have contributed their work into the open without creating their own browser. Even with Chrome, other than the development of V8, they contributed all of their work back to WebKit until 2013 when they forked.

No surprise that Google regularly makes changes in its applications which advantage Chrome, penalize competing browsers, and still advertise Chrome on the front page of google.com, the most valuable ad real estate that exists anywhere.

As someone else who lived through those days, I have to disagree.

First, JavaScript performance was not an afterthought, it was a big deal.

Second, Chrome's sandbox was massively superior from a security point of view. In a world full of viruses, that was a big deal.

I personally recommended Chrome to family and friends. I did so because I didn't want to be tech support for their virus problems. But what I sold them on was the speed.

> First, JavaScript performance was not an afterthought, it was a big deal.

It's a /very/ big deal. It's not a mistake that V8 was chosen to build Node.JS on top of. Javascript performance continues to dominate the overall performance of browsers on the modern web as front-end developers utilize more and more JS weight in their pages and SPAs become even more commonplace.

Don't mistake my comment as saying that the win for Javascript performance wasn't a big win. V8 completely upended the expectations of both web developers and engine teams about what was not only expected but was what feasible when it came to JS performance. V8 is great, but it didn't need a new browser to ship it, which was my larger point.

> Second, Chrome's sandbox was massively superior from a security point of view. In a world full of viruses, that was a big deal.

Chrome's sandbox is not particularly better than Firefox's sandbox today. Both browsers invented new security concepts over the last decade+ as browsers have become larger, more integral to people's day to day workflows, and more security-sensitive. A modern browser in 2025 is easily as complex as a modern OS in 2025 with similar security implications.

When Chrome first came out, it had one major improvement over Firefox (and both were better than any alternatives for security) which was to run tab contexts in separate processes rather than separate threads. This opened up all sorts of opportunities and benefits, which Chrome capitalized on, proving this approach to be correct, and later Mozilla adopted it in Firefox as well. From a security perspective, the main benefit was to prevent different sites from sharing process memory context, in the event that the site was malicious and exploiting a browser bug to access process memory.

The modern Chrome sandbox (and Firefox sandbox) is magnitudes more advanced and complex than the sandboxing that Chrome initially shipped with, and at least to my recollection there was not a significant difference in security surface area between the two other than tab isolation at Chrome launch, which I don't really count as a "sandbox".

On performance, you're acknowledging my point without recognizing how important it was for switching back in 2008. Using the web, particularly JavaScript heavy parts of the web like Google's business suite, Chrome was a significantly better experience than Firefox. It was a real reason to switch. (I'll return to V8 shortly.)

On the sandbox, I think that you are confusing the Chrome Sandbox (released in 2008) with the Privacy Sandbox (released in 2019). At the release of Chrome, it was a significant security improvement over existing browsers. You might not call their process isolation a sandbox, but they certainly did. See https://blog.chromium.org/2008/10/new-approach-to-browser-se... to verify.

True, security and sandboxing have improved greatly in the decades since. But the current quality of Firefox is irrelevant to people's reasons to switch back then.

Now let's go back to why Chrome was developed. As articles like https://www.computerworld.com/article/1501244/the-real-reaso... demonstrate, Google's reasoning was widely understood at the time. Google wanted complex web applications to run better. And Google also wanted people to not fear for the security of their web applications. So they focused on performance and security.

What Google didn't care about was creating a monopoly. Sure, they could have released V8 without a browser attached. But that wouldn't have changed the consumer experience in the way that Google cared about. That said, they had every reason to pull V8 out of Chrome and release it independently. They were as surprised as anyone when someone chose to create node.js out of it. Their actual goal was to hope that other browsers would use a better JS engine after one was shown to them. Or, if they failed to use it directly, they'd study it and copy its good tricks.

Now you claim that the fact that V8 could have been shipped on its own was part of some larger point. I have absolutely no idea what larger point that might be. But there was a significant period of time where Chrome had V8 and everything else was comparatively slow. Which speaks directly to my point that consumers had very good technical reasons to switch to Chrome.

>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.

The ability to have 20-50 tabs open without slowing the computer to a crawl was the reason I switched, and was highly publicized at the time.

You don't need a "set of metrics", you need to do a good job on the one thing people actually care about enough to switch.

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.

No, it was not just JS. They were the first to do a ton of other optimizations such as prefetching. https://www.igvita.com/2012/06/04/chrome-networking-dns-pref...

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.

This is completely wrong. Chrome won initially because it was a much better browser in terms of user experience. I remember the original discussions around it, they innovated a bunch of features like processes-per-tab so if one tab crashed you wouldn't have to restart the whole browser.

It also had a much cleaner UI - that's why it was called "Chrome" in the first place, because it only had the chrome. You can see that these were true innovations because everyone else copied them.

Chrome also ate everybody's lunch because it's the default browser on the most common networked computing devices in the world (android phones).