Neither would have Chrome to be fair. I remember being a PC user in the late '00s and Chrome ads and downloads links where absolutely everywhere. On Google, on Youtube, on GMail, on any kind of SW installer for Windows would come with a pre-ticked checkbox that would shove Chrome down your throat and then also set itself as the default browser on your system, like ad/-spyware. Naughty-naughty.

It was impossible to escape Chrome not getting on your Windows machine back then, it was like a disease. Sure, it was also hip and cool back then, like all brand new products launched by Google back then that generated hype and curiosity getting people to talk about it and recommend it further, but it wouldn't have reached such insane popularity on pure merit and word of mouth alone.

Chrome gained traction because IE was really, really bad. Now it has mindshare and you might could argue that Google maintains this mindshare with malpractice.

The damage was done, people learned to "download the internet" from google first. And if they forgot, all Google services kept pushing them till they did.

They all had checkboxes for Chrome and other ad-ware. If you didn't pay attention to unchecked them during installation you'd find your default browser changed and other crap. Those who did "tech-support" for family members remember.

Average joe: next next next done.

Don't ever fantasize about average users back then doing research if there would be a better web browser and then going ahead to download and install chrome on their own.

"What is a web browser?"

Eventually the Google Toolbar itself would just auto-upgrade to Chrome as well.

Anecdotally, my father liked the Google toolbar for giving a separate search box in IE, but disliked Chrome and was confused when Chrome auto-installed and the Google Toolbar partly became a big ad for "congrats, you can use Chrome now", and that was one of his reasons to (finally) switch to Firefox for good (he used both IE and Firefox for a long time prior).

I remember that I had to specifically uncheck this during installation of freeware back then. People I helped with their computer had no idea where chrome came from, the internet changed on a sudden day. They believably told they didn't download it. Most likely it came with some freeware they did download. For some it could be that they __did download it__ in fact by being tricked into it by weasel wording from google. There was a real strong push, I remember the chrome ads and links to chrome where pushed everywhere in google's services.

Aside, ask a friend what the internet is and they point to chrome. We keep overestimating the average Joe. Young people are not necessarily any wiser, to the contrary I would say.

We live in the 1950's, I work for Maddison Street and build a massive ad campaign putting ads everywhere you look about smoking, saying how it's so cool and beneficial for your health and how all people should do it if they wanna be cool and healthy. After a while, consumers already happy with breathable atmospheric air become smokers en-masses, voluntarily, putting toxic fumes in their lungs to look cool as advertised.

Who's responsible here?

But Chrome was just better than Firefox when it launched so it accelerated the IE decline.

This feels exactly like the whole Mac M1 thing. Every techie person seems to think that the M1 was going to cause all sorts of people to switch to Macs. Guess what? Nobody gives a shit about a 5% faster processor except for power users.

Regular people don't care about Chrome being "better," either and that's not how it got market dominance.

IE was awful, and Firefox was…perfectly cromulent. Chrome was so much better than any of the competition.

- They found the internet had gotten a new icon and had no idea how it got there. (bundling with popular software)

- They were instructed by google.

That is how chrome came to top. See other comments for more context.

The fact is, browsers aren't a product, they're a platform feature. Users have zero incentive to ever switch from whatever their OS came bundled with, unless you make a massive advertising push. The fact that Google managed to get people to switch to a non-platform browser at all is a shocking achievement.

Would you rather everyone still be using IE? Because that's exactly what would have happened otherwise.

Chrome copied lots of stuff from Opera, and Opera had 2.5% of marketshare. Firefox (who I personally didn't enjoy as much as Opera) had benefited from a grasroots campaign had taken years to get 35% of marketshare. Both were nobrainers compared to how broken IE was, and they were on the market years before chrome.

So.. Yeah. Chrome was a good product. But competitors had showed that being a good browser without insane advertising was never going to be enough.

It definitely wasn't better or faster after it forced your system to start heavily using a swap file on spinning rust storage.

That's not to say IE was better than Chrome. I just don't think it appearing on the desktop was a deliberate decision for many. I'd be surprised if many even realized they had installed it.

One especially awesome feature was a built in pdf creator. You did not have to download cutePDF or whatever.

It was also more reliable and crashed less, and probably other things I forget.

Upon its release it also predictably had compatibility problems, leading Google to implement a wrapper around the IE engine. Firefox had compatibility issues as well. I'm not trying to say one was better than the other. I think people tend to forget the environment Chrome was released into.

Do while IE wasn't great, it was far more stable for me. I favored Firefox, but it was in a bit of tumult at the time. I'm sure Chrome was a better experience for others. I think at the time Google was still basking in its adulation from tech enthusiasts, papering over Chrome's flaws. That was back when people got excited for new Google products and trusted them to not be evil.

As a bonus fun fact, Chrome created a massive headache for Selenium because Firefox's internals where called "Chrome" and "chrome://" was a URL scheme. Selenium used those URLs and got stuck with loads of support requests from the ensuing confusion. Everyone thought Chrome was just an internal project name and that Google would surely pick something that didn't conflict with another browser.

Google paid vendors so that Chrome installed and made itself the default without users even knowing what had happened.

The "purposely mis-function" thing isn't a mis-characterisation either. It became fairly well documented over time.

It was just soooo much better than the competition. I mean, Firefox was better than IE6, but that was not a high bar to pass in the first place. The thing that won over developers IMO was the developer tools: Firebug was slow as molasses and an utter memory hog. And that didn't change for many years - but by the time Firefox caught up, it was too late.

While there was for sure a long period of time where Chrome was significantly faster than Firefox, there was never a time where Firefox was particularly bad. Firefox always oscillated between "really good" and "totally ok".

I’ll agree with you that Chrome really changed the web development experience with incredible tooling compared to what you could get back then but this had no impact on most users experience.

I totally remember Chrome being the fastest/snappiest browser, especially the first versions but Firefox has never been slow.

Yes, but guess what the developers started pushing onto their friends who asked for a browser? The one they were personally using.

Word-of-mouth is insanely powerful and FF alienated way too many of the key people.

I was a Firefox user at the time (was using it when it was Firebird). People were already starting to shift away from IE towards Firefox at the time. A sequence of events where a person's computer was infect with malware, they asked a computer savvy friend for help, the friend "fixed" it, installed Firefox and told them to stop using IE is how most people switched browsers in those days. But Firefox was a slog and Chrome was a breath of fresh air when it was first released. So the sequence was tweaked to "install Chrome and tell you to stop using IE".

Chrome became what it is because Microsoft had tried to neuter the internet because they saw the web app potential and understood that it could undermine Windows market share. And when they realized that there was no stopping the internet, they spent several years incompetently trying to improve IE (and eventually Edge) before eventually going the "can't beat em, join em" route.

However, Google was smart enough to know that being superior doesn't count. Firefox was not horribly slow, the leap from firefox over IE was massive. Chrome over firefox wasn't quite the same leap.

The average user has been pushed aggressively, they weren't going to do research on web browsers when they even didn't know what a web browser is. Google knew that.

Chrome didn’t. It was noticeably faster and more reliable.

Switching browsers isn’t something that people generally do lightly. You lose them, you lose them for a decade+.

That and Mozilla behaviour hasn’t been great over the past several years; like, forced advertising extensions, crypto, more advertising to turn off on a fresh install than _google_…

Manifest v3 will probably be the straw that forces me to switch back again, but reluctantly.

Aggressive marketing is not malpractice.

Huh what? IME, it's many MANY miles better in user experience than Cisco Webex and Skype for Business, these were absolute clusterfucks, unlike Zoom it doesn't do very weird hacks in the installer that led to security issues [1], and unlike Slack it has absolutely zero problems scaling to hundreds-of-users videocalls. Haven't experienced using landline telephony gateways with it yet, but I'll be glad to get rid of Cisco Jabber as well. Sorry to say it but Cisco's stuff is stuck many years in the past, their focus was on insanely expensive telephony systems and fancy conference room setups for too long. If there's one company that deserves disruption, it's them.

The point that competitors can rightfully complain about is the seamless integration with the rest of Office 365 products (create/provision Teams meetings from Outlook directly, and streaming Powerpoint presentations directly to clients as files instead of screengrabbing)... but hey, again, the UX is so much better.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/16/users-of-...

And you want to talk about user experience…if you go afk, you stop receiving all new messages…that is until you move your mouse again. Dark mode can’t be synced to the system on Mac. Native notifications weren’t a thing on Mac until like a year ago. Performance is horrid. Click anything, change channels, press any button and you’re waiting hundreds of milliseconds if not seconds! The only cure for that is using a souped up M1/2 processor. The list goes on. Teams might be better than webex or Skype but that bar is loooooooow.

Which... makes sense? Nothing worse than a colleague going for lunch and not setting afk/dnd, so a constant "bleep" notification sound.

> Dark mode can’t be synced to the system on Mac. Native notifications weren’t a thing on Mac until like a year ago.

Valid points, although I did like the separate notifications - I used Focus Mode of macOS to silence everything else but still Teams notifications got through.

> Click anything, change channels, press any button and you’re waiting hundreds of milliseconds if not seconds! The only cure for that is using a souped up M1/2 processor.

Common problem for Electron apps, an issue it shares with Slack, or most modern web apps in general (if I were to guess, I'd blame ReactJS for that trend with all its encapsulation)... both keep zero local state it seems and request the actual content from scratch every time you change the current view or its scope. Damn annoying.

Makes absolutely zero sense. You set yourself away, or the system sets you as away and messages come in silently. In its current state, you get ZERO messages, even if your screen is open to the Teams chat where the messages are coming in. Moving your mouse after any period when you're away makes your computer look like a VCR fast forwarding through a movie. That's stupid. AND it was added within the last 6-9 months. To save bandwidth? Probably to monitor workers.

> Common problem for Electron apps, an issue it shares with Slack, or most modern web apps in general (if I were to guess, I'd blame ReactJS for that trend with all its encapsulation)... both keep zero local state it seems and request the actual content from scratch every time you change the current view or its scope. Damn annoying.

Slack, discord, matrix clients (I use element and neochat) are a dream in comparison. I realize I'm probably in the minority but I feel those milliseconds hard and it's a tough pill to swallow when one of the most responsive electron based apps happens to be made by the same corporation...If I could use Teams chat in vscode lol...of course I'm being facetious but god damn Microsoft could use some cross-pollination right now.

The latter option needs a time threshold and risks either annoyed coworkers or the system going off unintentionally while watching a youtube video. For the former, I'm one of those people who constantly forget to remove AFK when they are back from whatever. I'm rarely looking at the small blip in the top right corner of Teams to notice that.

> To save bandwidth? Probably to monitor workers.

Employers these days have far better tools to monitor their slaves.

> of course I'm being facetious but god damn Microsoft could use some cross-pollination right now.

You're not alone. It seems the only ones getting this somewhat right are AWS and Apple. Everyone else is just working in silos - and even though Apple is infamous for that, they still manage to deliver seamlessly integrated solutions and uniform design/UX.

I've also not found an option to only enable the sound for people calling while disabling it for random chat messages.

As to the away thing, I've noticed that it will set itself to away if the pc session is locked. Not sure if it's the locking itself that triggers it, or just a timeout. But when I get back on the PC, it'll stay in away mode as long as I don't interact with the Teams app.

Also, the whole indicator thing is an absolute joke. I've been multiple times on calls with people who appeared as offline for the entire duration of the call.

Shared files are added to a team directory, which is okay I guess. If you upload a second file with the same name, it asks you if you want to create a copy (temp(1).txt). If you do it again, you'll get 2 popups (temp.txt already exists, then temp(1).txt already exists). If you do it again, you get three.

... like, I get that it can make sense to integrate long term storage, but can you maybe not break the entire use-case for why we were using an ephemeral chat the first place?

It is the Skype For Business, but just rebranded. You can still see some cruft where certain dialog boxes still refer to it as Skype for Business.

Meh:

Typing anything complicated is a weird mix of WYSIWYG and knock-off markdown, which causes confusion and frustration. Codeblocks and snippets in particular.

Random delays in getting rid of an indicator as there are weird, in-built checks and timers, forcing more clicks.

Bugs out messages, not able to send or receive (anecdotally only colleagues had this).

The weird split between Teams and Chats tab, which has practically no similarity to its competitors. The Teams tab feels clunky as a result compared to the Chats tab.

The Teams tab was randomly decided to scroll bottom-to-top, while the Chats tab is still top-to-bottom.

..and more. Making something better than Skype, Cisco and other stuff isn't that difficult given the underlying tech has drastically improved. Even so Teams routinely messes up trivial things over weird business decisions, and tries to shoehorn features that have been solved since the times of Teamspeak/Ventrilo/etc.

It's not terrible, but it's apparent Teams isn't that great and routinely emphasizes the wishes of management types over the wishes of end-users. No self-respecting developer would encourage one-click calls without the ability to turn it off. Voice channels solved that issue decades ago.

- Every idea is worth implementing

- Get it into the hands of people ASAP

- Hopefully we can make it performant later

So all in all a typical Microsoft product. But not bad by any stretch of the imagination.

And yeah…it’s bundled with Office 365 “for free”…Apple also bundles a lot of free stuff with your Mac purchase…is that abusing your market penetration or just reaping the benefits of it?

Zoom just works better for me than either, but I'd prefer Webex to Teams. My last Teams meeting with a customer I had to apologize 3 times then send a zoom because Teams simply refused to authenticate me or when it let me in, my video was not working.

Yes, except that it has a killer feature: absolute integration with office365. Whether that's a good thing or not is up to you, but for companies that is a very big factor.

I don't have any conferencing app installed aside from Teams. I join the others in the browser.

Maybe so but I think Slack is still hot garbage.

And I say this as someone that runs Linux at home and doesn't touch MS dev tooling or languages. Including VS code.

There are much to be done on that front. Divest Facebook into different entities (ig, WhatsApp, Facebook, Oculus), Amazon (AWS, marketplace, Twitch, whole foods, etc...), Microsoft (azure, office, teams, etc..).

This will foster competition and fairness. They have too much power now.

But I find Teams much better than Google Meet, Webex, Zoom, and many of the other usual competitors.

It's stable, the video and audio quality is good, it has very good virtual background support that works well, it can easily record calls, etc.

What Teams is very bad at is being a Slack competitor. My last employer used Teams for video calls and Slack for workplace chatting.

Do we have data on loss of productivity for companies that migrated away from Teams? If it’s so bad how are consumer companies of Teams making it justifiable for loss of productivity to shareholders?

What I’m getting at is that it’s a more complex equation than just laziness being a parameter. Cost and ROI are the other two (among more likely).

> Do we have data on loss of productivity for companies that migrated away from Teams?

   "We have no time for that. MS recommends Teams and it comes for free"

I will tell you a dirty secret. Most company os images only ship with the default MS browser. I had colleagues using Internet Explorer or later Edge when Firefox and Chrome had already run out of sight. Had to help them over Skype or Teams.

"just laziness being a parameter." Competence is an other one indeed. Many sysadmins will follow MS like it is a cult. If MS blesses Skype for business, it will be Skype for business. If MS bundles Teams, it will be Teams.

If its just Microsoft, though, then no, because everyone else is bundling software but they’re only chasing Microsoft.

And yet no one sees enough value in Slack to pay for it. I type this on a mac, which has built in notes, but I pay for my own notes solution. My company uses Zoom DESPITE paying for gsuite. If Slack offered enough value people would pay for it. Unfortunately Slack's just not that good.

I LOVE Slack. Great integrations, fast, solid apps, UX. it makes Teams look third rate by comparison.

We’ve nearly completely done away with email, thanks to Slack. Most of our suppliers use it, so we can chat live to them in Slack rather than email.

Cheap admins, not lazy.

IT Admins often have their hands tied by corporate bureaucracy that makes a DMV jealous.

We aren't lazy, its just a hard sell to buy/manage an additional product when this fully integrated one is essentially free with 365.

Your welcome to come speak to my C's instead if you want?