Comment by gardnr
8 hours ago
I remember in 2010 when Chrome made the web so much better for everyone. All the early adopters were singing its praise and encouraging friends and family to use it.
Now, I encourage people to use anything but Chrome. Firefox is really great these days.
I remember Google buying Chrome market share by tricking users into installing Chrome when they didn't pay attention while clicking next through the installers for more popular software.
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https://www.ghacks.net/2012/02/26/avast-7-will-install-googl...
https://searchengineland.com/google-chrome-page-will-have-pa...
https://community.adobe.com/questions-638/adobe-flash-instal...
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/wdsi/filesubmission
https://www.findmysoft.com/news/google-gets-pushy-with-chrom...
Etc. This stuff was very real and is a ten second search away, maybe try that before accusing parent of having a faulty memory because it doesn’t agree with yours.
Both things can be true. Chrome was generally faster [1], and also some of Google's growth tactics were shady [2].
[1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/528214/browser_speed_compari...
[2] https://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/03/google-chrome-bund...
Rewriting history? Google used the most scummy techniques to get Chrome installed, mostly bundled with completely unrelated things.
Your memory seems to be broken
Rewriting history is wrong
I disagree, if you opened enough tabs back then Chrome was unusable.
But if that is your view, you should switch to Brave. 44% less memory use, (1/3) longer battery life, no telemetry and if you block undesirables it is obviously much much faster.
> AnandTech tested median page load time across one hundred top-trafficked websites in WebPageTest using a 50 Mbps cable connection. Brave 1.69 loaded the median page in 2.1 seconds, while Chrome 147 took 6.7 seconds. The 3.2x difference is not engine speed, it is Brave Shields aborting requests for ad networks, analytics SDKs, and third-party fingerprinting scripts
No it didn’t? People(web devs) jumped to Chrome because Google advertised it heavily.
I never did because I remember internet explorer and lack of transparent PNG support.
Firefox was amazing even when Chrome was released
No it really wasn't. It took Firefox multiple years of catching up, releasing multiprocess architecture, 64-bit binaries (!), ... It took until Firefox 58 (2018) until they finally cought up. There was this huge period of nothingness around 2014 when they focussed on other weird stuff like FirefoxOS that everyone saw from miles away that it will flop.
Fun fact - FirefoxOS only flopped in Mozilla, it went on to be the insanely successful KaiOS based on the source code. KaiOS has over 100M active users.
This indicates there was actually a lot of technical merit in it and the problem was with the GTM and leadership.
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It was certainly better than IE but Chrome definitely surpassed Firefox and is still better except for blocking addons
No need to be revisionist. Chrome brought amazing work to the table. The multiprocess, sandboxed system was incredible - it's not to say that Chrome was the first (IE did it earlier) but it was certainly way ahead of Firefox for a long time. Chrome is the reason we have Seccomp V2 on Linux. Chrome made "software is always up to date" the standard. Before Chrome, Blackhole and PoisonIvy absolutely ruined people's computers - click to play Java, click to play and sandboxed Flash, etc, were massive improvements to every day user security, probably some of the biggest security improvements to computers in my lifetime.
Firefox took a long time to catch up and their CEO was utterly incompetent, which seriously harmed Mozilla.
I remember for a while that Firefox had a single process architecture for all tabs. This often frustrated me as one bad tab could just crash the whole browser while Chrome used separate processes for each tab, prompting me to switch to Chrome for a bit. Firefox caught up ages after chrome, and now I went back to them over the manifest v2 stuff.
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Chrome's multiprocess sandboxing wasn't unambiguously good. It carried a steep cost in overhead.
Back when Chrome was new, you could run Firefox with a decent selection of add-ons to get security benefits of similar magnitude through different mechanisms. The NoScript extension was at the forefront, providing a lot of functionality way beyond just blocking JavaScript per domain. And Firefox with extensions always had better privacy controls.
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> Firefox took a long time to catch up and their CEO was utterly incompetent, which seriously harmed Mozilla.
This is basically whole history of Mozilla and to be honest most of open source projects that dont have BDFL type of leadership.
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It was good, but slow by comparison at the time.
It was just less of everything than Chrome. First install experience for an average user was much better in terms of speed and snappiness. That was one of the keys to its success.
> It was just less of everything than Chrome.
This is insane. As a power FF user, I don't think Chrome ever "got ahead". There were 2 reasons for its success (in order):
1. Made by a respected company that was killing everything in those days.
2. It was occasionally faster, and more stable.
Feature-wise - it was always worse.
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Yep, Chrome was great but the past few years they're obviously moving the wrong way. I'm completely off of Chrome, back to Firefox and Brave.
Funny enough I never left Firefox. It’s always been great.
Were you a Mac/Windows or Linux user? Personally I was an early adopter of Firefox and it worked great on Windows, but on Mac for a long stretch of time it was significantly slower than other Mac first browsers. Firefox also has this weird non-standard (for Mac) scrolling for the longest time, and the UI was dated.
Most of these things were not true on the Windows side. At least not to the same degree.
>Firefox also has this weird non-standard (for Mac) scrolling
Hasn't been the case since at least 2017.
Ditto.
Was that before Google removed "don't be evil" ? Good thing they weren't doing anything sketchy before that ;)
Is 2010 when people started to like it? I remember, in 2008, being in a computer science course at university when Chrome launched. It was not liked at that time, at least within the computer users I knew. I remember it being mostly described as "that awful browser that Google made".
I remember those days. I still used FF even back then. Stability was an occasional issue with FF, but feature-wise Chrome was always better.
I remember when my friends were singing the praises of Chrome and Gmail and I was telling them it's a trap.
Google has consistently sad they want to stop exposing url's. That's 100% them wanting to prevent people from bypassing them when accessing the web.
I will keep the same
It was astonishing how you fell for it back then.
In a company that size, you move around a few buttons and hundreds of millions come out. You delete some feature and poof BILLIONS are made. Who care if it upsets some % of the user base? It's billions with a B!
It was also astonishing to see HN cheer on the Great Firewall of the USA and make excuses for it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35408837
Here google has inserted it self between you and the www. It has ruled it self judge and executioner without any disclosure or accountability while simultaneously receiving your entire browser history in real time.
When they pull the plug on some website because they don't like the content it is immediately replaced by a scary red screen lying about malware that doesn't have a skip button. There use to be a button in the firefox settings to disable it but hey! Even when they reinstate it, say a week later, your website is pretty much officially dead already. Customers should take their business to someone who doesn't install malware on their computer.
If my business was to sell ads and I could simply disable your means to not view my ads I wouldn't be able to explain it to my investors. They would be like, Billions with a B! it would be hard for them to listen to the positive side of disabling my product. But lets take it to a vote...
A - Billions
B - not Billions
The webRequest extension API -- the one that uBlock Origin uses and was removed in Manifest v3 -- was not added until 2012.
All of the things that made Chrome great for the web in 2010 are still there.
It's strange how we can kind of misremember things to fit whatever narrative we currently believe.
> All of the things that made Chrome great for the web in 2010 are still there
Something that was great in 2010 may not look great in 2026.
It's been 16 years. The Internet has moved on. Blocking ads is the norm now, and they are removing that functionality.
It's only strange because you interpreted "Chrome made the web so much better for everyone" as "Chrome had a webRequest API", which is probably not what the original poster meant.
The article we're discussing is about how extensions that didn't upgrade to Manifest v3, including uBlock Origin, are now being removed from the Chrome web store.
uBlock Origin didn't migrate to v3 because they use the webRequest API and didn't want to switch to the less-powerful replacement, declarativeNetRequest (uBlock Origin Lite uses the new API and is available in the store).
Based on this context, it seems reasonable to assume that one of the reasons the person I replied to believes Chrome isn't making the web better any more is due to the removal of uBlock Origin. And this is due to the removal of the webRequest API.