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.