Totally agreed. I remember the first couple years of Chrome, and I didn't work at a tech company at the time, but everyone did work in front of a computer.

It was remarkable how quickly Chrome spread among the employees. Nothing to do with advertising -- just that it was so much faster and the whole app never crashed.

Whenever you heard someone cursing because their browser had crashed and they lost their tabs and immediate work, someone in the next cubicle would go, "why aren't you using Chrome?"

It really was that simple. It was all word of mouth.

Also because Firefox had become bloated and clunky at that point, Chrome was much more lightweight and zippy. It was Mozilla’s complacency that ceded their position as the alternate browser.

Firefox wasn't "bloated", it had a whole ecosystem of browser extensions that HN types loved which by the nature of the extension model ran synchronously with the UI and often stepped on each other's toes, broke on updates, and led to terrible memory leaks.

They were then screamed at for being insufficiently "complacent" when they tried to fix those issues by changing the extension model.

Wasn’t FF getting long in the tooth by 2008, slow and dated? I didn’t have any extensions besides uBlock and Firebug and it didn’t feel as fast as it used to be. Wasn’t that the whole point of project Electrolysis?

Firebug was one of the worst offenders, despite being a very nice tool.