> I don't follow these things pretty closely but why is chrome so much more popular than firefox these days amongst non-technical users?

Because every time people go to google.com they see a popup that google works better in Google Chrome.

Firefox should start reporting its user agent as chrome :)

There are people who actually do that because otherwise they get an inferior version of a website even though it works perfectly fine on Firefox as well.

Do you remember when chrome dropped? Gosh it was so blazing fast in comparison to everything else. I think that initial period is why so many regular people use chrome. It hasn't gotten to the point to look anywhere else yet, at least in my opinion. I think the other thing that pushed it this far is just the fact that it's new.

> Gosh it was so blazing fast in comparison to everything else.

It was dead slow, actually, unless you were running a modern (i.e. very fast) multicore PC and with a very small number of tabs. For example, when trying Chrome out soon after release, it managed to grind my PC to a halt because I dared open something like 5 tabs (whereas Opera was happily running double to triple digits). Back in 2008 multicore CPUs weren't as widespread as they are today, so for the most common cases Chrome was just slow, context switching PCs into the ground.

> I think that initial period is why so many regular people use chrome.

Regular people don't simply install new browsers, it's the people familiar with computers (like the family geek, or the guy maintaining PCs for a living) who push them unto regular people. Anecdotally it went something like this: technically inclined people were supporting Firefox (because it wasn't IE and because of A LOT of marketing) despite it being a crappy browser and there being better alternatives. Now, Firefox was not slow per se, but if definitely FELT slow, so when Chrome was launched the same people who had popularized Firefox started promoting the new shiny trinket. Everybody kept saying "it's so fast!" - well, it certainly FELT faster than Firefox, at least when it came to the UI, and that was enough to switch.

> I think the other thing that pushed it this far is just the fact that it's new.

I think so too. Shiny new things have the side effect of attracting the enthusiastic bandwagon jumping types, and enthusiasm can be contagious.

PROTIP from UI and UX theory:

There's no useful distinction between "Felt slow" and "Is slow" in getting users to adopt a product.

If your UI feels clunky because you open a window and paint it white before filling in the UI itself, stop painting it white.

> It was dead slow, actually, unless you were running a modern (i.e. very fast) multicore PC and with a very small number of tabs.

I totally dispute that. I had a very modest PC at the time and I remember vividly using Chrome for the first time, noticing how much better it performed compared to firefox, especially if you had many tabs open.

I remember other people telling me it was much faster. I don't remember it actually being much faster, but I switched anyway because of horrific memory leak problems with firefox.

I'm back to firefox now.

> noticing how much better it performed compared to firefox

Given that I used Opera's performance as a basis for my statement I guess your comment, instead of being a glowing praise of Chrome, simply reflects very poorly on Firefox.

At the end of the day, Chrome ended up using too many system resources to be a viable option for me at the time. People accused me on occasion of being an Opera fanboy, but, objectively, it was hard to justify why Chrome would need more resources than Opera while delivering significantly less features.

The same thing happened when Phoenix dropped. Over the years though it packed on the pounds though and started to look more like Navigator. Chrome's waist line has been expanding as well.

I don't have a good answer to your question, but for me it was actually performance. And this is particularly baffling, since Firefox seems to do extremely well in all benchmarks, often beating out Chrome.

But, as a quick test, I closed Chrome, and it was up again instantly (say 500ms). I did the same with Firefox (after a generous warmup / caching session), and got 4 to 6 seconds each time. Clicking links and page loading feels similar; on Chrome I don't notice it, on Firefox I always do. Am I the only one that feels this way?

> Clicking links and page loading feels similar; on Chrome I don't notice it, on Firefox I always do.

Because Chrome, by default, enables prefetching [0] (it loads links before you decide to click on them). Firefox will never do that due to obvious privacy concerns.

It's the usual "principle vs convenience" thing, where most people choose the latter.

[0] https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/1385029?hl=en

Actually http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.prefetch-next says

> Link prefetching is when a webpage hints to the browser that certain pages are likely to be visited, so the browser downloads them immediately so they can be displayed immediately when the user requests it. This preference controls whether link prefetching is enabled.

> Possible values and their effects

> true

> Enable link prefetching. (Default)

You can check the value in your Firefox with about:config and searching for network.prefetch-next

My one is "false" and it's shown in bold face, meaning that I changed it to that value. Privacy concerns and also legal concerns: what if a site links another site that the legislation of your country (or the country you're travelling to) doesn't allow you to access? At least I get some hints of where I'm heading to if I'm loading pages myself.

How does prefetching affect things like the not-yet-viewed website's stats? Since it is a Google browser and Google Analytics is so dominate, is it to Google's advantage to do this for reasons other than convenience to the user? (Inflated stats for the prefetched website even though the user never viewed it?)

Google Analytics checks the visibilityState of a loaded page and does not fire the GA tag if the page is prerender.

> Am I the only one that feels this way?

Nope. I really want to like Firefox but its performance is just so much worse across the board than Chrome.

Another example is video playback: Firefox, when viewing video, heats up my laptop to the point where the fans kick in at full blast. Chrome stays nice and cool on the same material. The difference in battery life is noticeable too.

Sorry Firefox, you need to do better.

For VP8 and VP9, Firefox and Chrome use the same video decoding backends, so it's likely not video decoding that is causing the problem. For H.264, Firefox uses the OS-provided codecs; I'm not sure what Chrome does, but in any case that's the only possible solution for Firefox due to patent issues.

If it's making that much of a difference in heat, it's probably using a software renderer instead of passing the decoding to the GPU. Check (Menu)->Help->Troubleshooting Information and see if it says "Supports Hardware H264 Decoding: No;". If you can't fix it, I recommend using an extension that adds video URLs to your VLC playlist. VLC supports playing YouTube URLs natively.

I'm on Linux and I don't feel any noticeable speed difference using FF vs Chrome (startup time doesn't bother me at all, my browser is always running and I rarely restart my machine). I've been using FF since the early days and never found enough reason to switch to any other browser and I'm quiet happy with the improvements that have been coming to FF lately and what the future holds.

I think for me it's specifically UI performance. Opening a new tab in Chrome is instantaneous. In Firefox there's a slight but noticeable stutter that annoys me just enough to avoid using it.

Session restore can make firefox take a lot longer to start. It's possible your profile has a very old session with a lot of tab history. Maybe try unpinning and closing all your tabs (there should be a 'bookmark all tabs' you can use to get them back later), and then exit firefox. This should prune all that tab data and history (session restore saves a pretty considerable amount of back and cookie history for each tab.)

> but why is chrome so much more popular than firefox these days amongst non-technical users?

Google aggressively pushed Chrome on web users.

Banner messages claiming the users browser was out of date (it wasn't, they just weren't using Chrome), or that this website works better on Chrome.

Redesigning their web services to be coincidentally worse on Firefox.

The numerous and excessive ways it was bundled with various other application installers. Most users don't customise and application install, they just stick with the defaults and the result was, they ended up with Chrome as the default browser.

What happened is tighter integration with google services and every time you go to google.com, there's a prompt to download Chrome.

And they made a pretty solid browser. Tight integration with Windows didn't cause a similar spike for IE 11.

Whilst Microsoft eventually started advertising Explorer as a response, Chrome was the first browser I'd ever seen advertised on billboard posters (liberally plastered all over London at least) and in non-technical magazines and newspapers.

I can't speak for anyone else, but for me personally, the deep integration with Google is a feature for me. Almost everything I do is on Google (email, domains, drive, Cell Carrier), so having the deep integration with Google on Chrome makes my life that much more convenient.

I got into chrome as a teenager, though, when my dad switched from firefox to chrome due to Chrome being apparently faster than firefox at its debut.

FF has memory and rendering problems

Firefox worked to close all memory leaks a few years ago. New ones are treated as bugs and fixed quickly. They even got aggressive about limiting memory that addons use. You can check about:performance to keep an eye on them.

For me personally, Chrome is WAY worse in memory usage than Firefox