The primary reason for Chrome’s success was literal billions of dollars in pervasive advertising (I remember years of Chrome TV ads and billboards), ads plastered all over Google’s products saying “better in Chrome”, and product bundling into many many pieces of software a user might download (e.g. Acrobat[1]). That’s not to say that it wasn’t a technically good product, but it wasn’t so much better than the competition that it would have got to the market share it has on its own merits.
Honestly I feel like I am in a parallel universe with ideas like this.
Chrome was dramatically faster than anything else (thanks to v8 which was a total revolution for js engines) and each tab crashed separately, with far better security than other browsers of the time. On Windows (and initially it was only on Windows) this was a big deal and so it displaced a huge proportion of the tech aware userbase very fast, permeating out from there.
The billboards were a thing but not what drove initial adoption to critical mass.
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?
[1] https://www.labnol.org/software/chrome-with-adobe-reader/201...