Chrome was better than Firefox; it was massively better than anything else. And it had the omnibar. I now find Firefox the fastest, but it seems that it varies from person-to-person/machine-to-machine and Chrome is entrenched.

That's just like... your opinion man. I never found Chrome to be vastly superior to Firefox. Sometimes it seemed faster, and other times it was a total hog. It's been back and forth like that ever since it came out.

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.

This, exactly this.

That is patently false. Chrome was light years ahead of Firefox in both cpu and memory use for years.

Do you really, honestly thing that is why it came to dominance? There's billions of computer users out there, and the majority of them are not techie nerds. They don't know or care what browser they are using. They just want to click the internet icon. You think all those people were sitting around, opening up task manager, and comparing the results with all of their tabs open? They are all used to the internet being slow. They don't know what part is being slow.

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.

Yes.

Techies installed it because of how much faster it was. Then they installed it on all of their parents/grandparents/siblings computers.

Yes it was. I don't really see the difference anymore, on any practical level. However, Chrome has been removing useful features and not fixing usability bugs while just being more and more invasive, privacy-wise.

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.

> Chrome was light years ahead of Firefox in both cpu and memory use for years

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 has not been my experience. Quite the contrary, Chrome never worked as good as Firefox in any of the OSX or linux laptops I owned. The only thing about Firefox is occasionally websites being broken due to Chrome-only support.

> Google had the advantage of plastering Chrome all over google.com when people performed searches. That's how it got installed everywhere.

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.

[0] https://imgur.com/gallery/WWZxj

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15280808

You're changing tenses from "was" to "is". Yes, firefox is good today. But, back in the day when people had to think hard about which browser to use, it wasn't as good.

ALSO, it's mostly that people switched from IE to chrome, as opposed to switching from firefox to chrome.

Chrome still beats Firefox in most benmarks, often by 20-25%

Here's one from 6 weeks ago.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=chrome83...

Firefox was a mess for a long time. It's not the speed that mattered but the stability. Chrome isolated everything into separated threads and processes. One tab couldn't kill the whole browser. Firefox didn't and initially even the UI was in the same thread as the webpage javascript. Doing the switch required having all extensions rewritten so they lost market share in the process (but had no choice by then).