Turns out people do actually care about performance and responsiveness.
Google had the advantage of plastering Chrome all over google.com when people performed searches. That's how it got installed everywhere.
Here's an anecdote for you. I worked at a computer store when Chrome was released. People would come in all the time, and they had no idea they had installed Chrome on their computer. They had no idea that it had taken over as the default browser. They didn't know they weren't using IE. Chrome had a super basic installer that asked one question, and it was linked right from Google's home page. I interacted with average computer users hundreds of times every month.
That's how I believe it became the dominant browser. Average people don't care that one browser is slightly faster than the other or has an omnibar.
If what you are saying was true, then Firefox should have dominated over IE. Did they take over a large share of the market? Yes, after fighting and fighting for years on end. Chrome just came out, and after putting it on their home page, suddenly their marketshare skyrocketed. I believe that if Google had to put it on a different URL, it would not have gotten the adoption it has now.
Techies installed it because of how much faster it was. Then they installed it on all of their parents/grandparents/siblings computers.
I jumped from Firefox to Chrome with no hesitation when I saw Chrome blazing through multiple tabs without any slowdown. At the time Firefox was crawling on like a snail. Now, years later, I jumped from Chromium to Firefox because I could no longer use the browser to preserve control over certain web pages I needed to use.
No it wasn't.
Firefox has always been significantly better at memory usage than Chrome. Here is a benchmark from 2012 [0] and Firefox's memory usage only went down after that [1]. On the other hand Chrome is infamous for its extravagant RAM usage ([2] and million other web search results). Only in the last few years Google have started to pay attention to Chrome's memory use.
[0] Chrome was light years ahead of Firefox in both cpu and memory use for years
[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink
[2] https://lifehacker.com/why-chrome-uses-so-much-freaking-ram-...
That, and aggressive bundleware campaign in early-mid 2010s.
Google paid above market rates for authors of popular Windows freeware like CCleaner, Adobe Flash etc. [0]. They even tried to bribe VLC at some point [1].
I'm always baffled to see commenters in HN were aware of Google Search banners but not this bundleware business. I guess it's due to people here having disproportionately high use of macOS and Linux compared to rest of the world.
ALSO, it's mostly that people switched from IE to chrome, as opposed to switching from firefox to chrome.
Here's one from 6 weeks ago.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=chrome83...
Like, 10+ years ago...?
> Google is destroying Mozilla. Their monopoly is making the web worse.
What in the heck are you talking about. Google doesn't directly make money from Chrome - it's free!
In fact, Mozilla's bills are being paid in large by Google paying for them to use google.com as the default browser.
Mozilla has always struggled to make money. This is not some new phenomenon with the company, and certainly is not because of Google making a good browser.
> Google shouldn't have been allowed to do that. It's very anti-competitive for them to have a browser that defaults to Google search and disables plugins that support adblocking.
I mean... what? They shouldn't have been allowed to do that... because why? Because a browser defaults to a specific search engine?
C'mon now. Google built a great browser that users loved, and they flocked to it. It was faster than all the competitors at the time - including firefox - and had much better word-of-mouth traction. Firefox always had a "techie expert" connotation back in the day, and it bit them in the butt when it came to the average joe deciding which browser to use.
End of story.
There's no sinister anti-competition plot here. For heaven's sake, Google pays loads of Mozilla's bills, and collaborates with them on loooooads of projects!
I appreciate the breath of fresh air Chrome brought in when it entered the market but: every percentage point Chrome takes in the market is a dollar Google doesn't have to pay for search traffic acquisition. Google absolutely profits from the chrome userbase. In the same manner, Android is valuable as a means of avoiding paying Apple for defaults on iOS.
Chrome has always represented a threat to Mozilla's business model, even though it was seemingly more and more profitable with less and less market share (shades of "The Producers"). It'll be interesting to see how 2021 shakes out; Yahoo! outbidding Google for default search engine momentarily put to rest the idea that Mozilla was an antimonopoly figleaf funded by Google. However, the minute Mozilla legally could, they flipped back to Google, and, frankly, that undercuts their bargaining position with Google. And with Yahoo.
> It was faster than all the competitors at the time - including firefox - and had much better word-of-mouth traction. Firefox always had a "techie expert" connotation back in the day, and it bit them in the butt when it came to the average joe deciding which browser to use.
Given how strongly Mozilla's fate is tied to market share, it seems like they should be leaning harder on advertising. I'm told Mozilla has a huge marketing department but IDK what they do TBH.
Google shouldn't have been allowed to do that. It's very anti-competitive for them to have a browser that defaults to Google search and disables plugins that support adblocking.
Google is destroying Mozilla. Their monopoly is making the web worse.