Google made something better than what existed with Chrome, it was obvious it would capture the market significantly especially among more technical people.
I don't think the fact that Chrome is (was) better is the question, it's a question of how they got here.
Google took tons of money and threw it into Chrome and therefore developed something better. It's better because Google put more money into it than anyone else would have because, in the absence of considering using it to enshrine their search and ad revenue, it wouldn't make sense.
It was only true that Chrome was significantly superior (performance-wise, anyway) for a little while. Firefox had to play catch up and it took several years. It was (mostly) called the "electrolysis" (a.k.a., "e10s") project. It was considered complete by 2018, and had already offered significant performance and stability improvements for years before then.
I wouldn't be surprised if Chrome still performs better on Google-owned web sites, for obvious reasons. But, nobody is really going to notice a difference between Firefox and Chrome when visiting, e.g., your bank's web site.
So, it's been somewhere between six and eight years that Firefox has had comparable performance, comparable web dev tools, and way cooler extensions. I'm sure plenty of people will reply that this isn't true and there was some website just this week that FORCES them to stay with Chrome because they noticed a jitter once, but people on the internet are top-tier experts at rationalizing and I don't buy it.
We could've all jumped on board with Firefox when the e10s project landed, but nobody did because it was just slightly less convenient to switch than to not. I hope it was worth it for them.
> I wouldn't be surprised if Chrome still performs better on Google-owned web sites, for obvious reasons.
Most websites (except for those doing some really fancy stuff with new experimental web apis) tend to work just fine in Firefox. Google's sites are the only ones I regularly encounter that perform terribly and leak memory continuously.
Chrome had better stability (not sure about performance) for nearly a decade - far more than "a little while". I gave Mozilla 3-4 years to catch up before finally switching to Chrome.
Even once e10s supposedly fixed their problems another 4 years down the road, I didn't see any reason to rush back. I've switched to another Chromium browser, but I'd rather try a new engine entirely like Ladybird than switch back to Mozilla, until they prove they're not going to let the browser stagnate for so long again.
This is the double standard I'm talking about. First, I honestly don't even believe your claim that Chrome was more stable than Firefox for a decade.
But, even so, you basically admit in the second paragraph that they're probably both fine, but you won't switch back to Mozilla "until they prove they're not going to let the browser stagnate for so long again." What the heck kind of test is that? And how long, exactly, will that take for you? If they "stagnated" for a decade, according to you, is it going to take another decade to prove they won't let it stagnate? Two decades, maybe? What does "stagnate" even mean? To me, it looks like Chrome is stagnating- what have they done lately that's innovative and actually good for users? Breaking a bunch of extensions and removing the ability to block ads? How many years does Chrome have to start behaving itself before you'll switch back to it after all of this? Ah, right- you won't switch away from it; you're probably only concerned about Firefox stagnating.
The truth is that you'll always make an excuse to not switch away from Chrome (and yeah, a browser that uses the Chromium guts is effectively the same thing when it comes to the monopoly on web standards).
The one that is the worst for me is Google Cloud console. It takes tens of seconds to update page state when trying to create or edit resources in Firefox, especially anything in Compute Engine. Chrome feels reasonably snappy, at least as good as AWS's console. I'm not sure who is to blame for that but I use `chrome-new` to log into Google Cloud when I need to.
Imagine browsing the web without an adblock. A single ad can consume 1GB in 5 minutes on my mobile phone. The CPU will be super slow. We often underestimate the loss of performance that ads represent.
I don't think the fact that Chrome is (was) better is the question, it's a question of how they got here.
Google took tons of money and threw it into Chrome and therefore developed something better. It's better because Google put more money into it than anyone else would have because, in the absence of considering using it to enshrine their search and ad revenue, it wouldn't make sense.
Isn't this part of the antitrust test?