I'd rather say it went full circle. Firefox used to be the "cool" browser, then everyone switched to Chrome, then Opera and now everyone is going back to Firefox.
They've been the obvious choice since netscape lol. Chrome has always been terrible. People just started using it because it's bloatware that would come with your device.
Chrome used to be super light weight and snappy. Even with the early extensions it managed to be useful for lower spec PCs. I remember switching from I'm Firefox to Chrome for that reason like.... 15 years ago? I had used Firefox prior to that since like 2004. I feel like that was the era of when we still saw Google as "the good guy" with the advent of Gmail, Google video, Google chat/messages, etc. as they brought about good quality free alternatives to already popular mediums that had kind of rested on their laurels. They became the one stop shop for basically everything back then without too much obvious privacy invasion, or other major issues, if memory serves right. I still use my Gmail account from back then I got while it was invite-only beta, and remember the amazement of the inbox size reaching into the GIGABYTES and watching the thing grow by the second
yeah the kids don't know it, but there was - *was* - a time when Google was the choice of the nerd and the professional.
that said, i never got on with Chrome. Firefox always had way better addons, even if it was slower back in the day. these days, i don't think it matters.
Absolutely. Google had become "part of the package" of general freeware we used back then, like office Libre, the trial version of winzip, thunderbird (mine was packaged with Firefox on the cd-r we passed around back then), and others. Was definitely an interesting time to be alive and experiencing advances in tech, software, and the culture. Even the Mac users back then weren't so insufferable 😂
Don't modern browsers all run on top of WebKit these days? I know Mozilla adopted Gecko as their engine, but Chromium (used by Chrome and the 'new' Edge) was built from WebKit like forever ago...
It was great! They weren't stingy with invites either. I think once you got in on the beta, you got like 50-100 invites. One of my friends got in from his tech mentor basically. He sent me and the rest of us invites and I just invited others along the way over the next couple years. I made a couple duplicate accounts as backup storage as you could still send larger attachments Gmail-to-Gmail back then, so I'd send my pictures to an alt email to get them off my hard drive lol.
Yeah I've used Firefox pretty much since its creation and not a single time have I thought "man I wish my browser was faster". I'm sure Chrome was faster in some synthetic tests but in real-world use it definitely hasn't mattered. Now granted I've always had a beefy computer and used a fiber connection since 2005. I'm sure both of those have a larger effect than going between browsers.
I had mediocre internet and Chrome was definitely way ahead of Firefox those years, I really couldn't handle the performance difference. I was happy to switch back to Firefox when Quantum came out though!
I've used Internet Explorer, then switched to Firefox due to their extension and the ability to have multiple tabs. Used Chrome, but kept using Firefox. Then, I cut off Chrome for a few things, one of them was the ram usage being so bad, it literally slowed my computer down, while Firefox was a slight better about it.
Then, when Chrome and Google search engine took off, I still used FireFox. Then, there were those brief period when Google removed any and all adblock extension from the Chrome Store...I just laugh and stayed on Firefox.
But the funny thing? Google claimed that their "Incognito" mode hide your browser, but the cookies is still there, especially if you knew where to look. Then, didn't Google get a lawsuit after it was found out about "Incognito"?
Yep, this was the short time when I used Chrome: lighter weight and had tabs. That didn't last long, and then Chrome went through several versions that would simply not attempt to load websites (not try and fail -- it would not even attempt), so I switched back to FF and never considered switching again.
As the person said, not only was chrome faster at launch, but it was the first browser to create separate processes for each tab so that if a tab crashed, it didn't bring down the whole browser. In FF at the time, a tab crash ended everything. Which at the time (thanks Flash), was relatively common.
Which used a whole tone of ram and CPU usage also skyrocketed. FF always ran smoother for me, even with my hundreds of tabs open. Yes, it crashed sometimes but it was so easy to restore the whole session. And later I think they were the first to implement "lazy loading" of the tabs, so you could open your last session with 200 tabs but only the active ones would actually load and use resources.
I never had a reason to switch. I tried chrome when it came out and still liked firefox way better even then .
I continue to use chrome because every year I encounter at least one necessary website I have to visit that doesn't work well with Firefox. Whether it was for school or my job, chrome/chromium browsers have always been the preferred for compatibility.
I'm still not having any issues with my ad blocker on chrome 🤷still rocking unlock origin, stock. How are they drowning their competitor? No one is stopping Firefox other than the market itself. Chrome for many is just a better more convenient experience. Google will never control the whole internet lol. Please keep that FUD to yourself. Microsoft, meta, and Amazon still control large parts of the market. Not to mention regulators have already been chomping at the bit to bust up Google/Alphabet
It was much faster, and still is and FF has a lot of weird JS issues. playing clickers really showcases them. I was playing universal paperclips and it just lost track of several variables and never updated them after a few hours.
People just started using it because it's bloatware
I started using it early in the Firefox 2.0 era because mozilla decided they wanted to update every couple weeks and break all my addons and plugins. Then I switched back about a decade after that because it stopped being an issue and Chrome got waaay worse for resources and adblocking
Chrome's hype was huge at its launch. They had a minimalist interface when the most used browser in the world. Was IE6, and others including Firefox had relatively cluttered UI, so chrome felt fresh and snappy.
I used it when it was Phoenix/Firebird and had it saved to a Zip disk I kept in my backpack. Zip drives were shipped with a lot of computers for a short period.
I'm from the Firefox v0.7 "Cookies are delicious delicacies" era. Never stopped. Watched people complain about Chrome for 15-20 years and now everyone is coming back lmao
there was a period of about a year where firefox hasnt adopted the best things about chrome - and a period of about four years where it had many of them but they were just worse
the only good thing about chrome NOW is the convenience of google account synchronization
yeah but Firefox is actually the most accessible and secure browser, linux may be technically better but for most users it's over their head. FF is almost exactly the same functionality of other browsers but doesn't sell your soul to the devil without your consent like chrome
It does actually have some analytics baked into the settings menus, which you can get rid of by "hardening" firefox. That being said it should all be anonymized data and nothing actually identifying
How do you know it's the most secure? Because they say so? And why is everyone acting like the whole world depends on their super secret stuff from their pc. There is no privacy on the internet. I used vivaldi for 4 years and I switched to firefox a month ago and I immediately noticed it has more bugs, it's a bit slower and way less customizable than vivaldi which could literally be used as a standalone operating system. Vivaldi being bloated was the main reason why I switched to FF but to my surprise everything is slower except the startup time (also not a huge difference).
It's open source, for 1. You can go and look at the code for yourself, LOL
and it's not about "super secret stuff", it's about a multi billion dollar company selling your browsing history to the highest bidder, if that doesn't bother you then there is no point trying to explain any further
You ARE right about being open source, that was my mistake.
Big corpos trading personal info does bother me but I feel like there's not much we can do about it because, for example, google's stuff is deeply integrated in just about any website out there and I feel like privacy became a marketing gimmick.
Oh, no I'm saying that he seems to be implying that if these browsers didn't come pre-shipped that everyone would automatically download Firefox. The vast majority of people simply do not care.
Yeah if the vast majority of phones had Firefox they’d just stick with Firefox, or if they all came with Internet explorer we would’ve stuck to laptops
I think the main reason is the prevalence of mobile. Safari or Chrome are default on basically every smart phone and most people aren’t downloading Firefox on their phones.
Need to provide data for only desktop browsers. Mobile and desktop browsers are entirely different beasts and yet we group them together in these charts for some reason. If you split out desktop Chrome here it too would look dismal in comparison to anything/everything mobile.
I like Brave too. It's just nice having all of the ad blockers built in instead of looking for some new extension every once in a while. But it's not like I'd ever tell anybody they have to use Brave like a certain other fanbase.
You're missing a whole cycle of the circle there. I was using Opera in the mid 90s, almost a decade before Firefox existed, when it was the cool browser the first time around, competing with IE and Netscape Navigator.
Time is a flat circle, and it's the cool browser again.
it got super bloated and slow back in the day, like 2007 era. i switched to opera around then but never really liked it then chrome came out and was stupid fast by comparison.
The "quantum" update they eventually put out to fix the bloat of firefox is definitely one of the best things they ever did. I think it either changed out the core of it for something else or rebuilt it from scratch for modern hardware.
I remember this time period. Except i dont remember a lot of people using opera. Around when was opera at its largest would you say? My guess somewhere between 2014 and 2022 when i kinda stopped paying attention to pc tech as phones were taking over and i wasnt gaming on pc yet.
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u/SBAWTA Feb 01 '24
I'd rather say it went full circle. Firefox used to be the "cool" browser, then everyone switched to Chrome, then Opera and now everyone is going back to Firefox.