On: Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO

[xandrius]

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.

[BeetleB → xandrius]

> 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.

[VCFundedGenYer → BeetleB]

I was also a power FF user at that time. It was not fast. Not at all.

Chrome was simply touted as an insanely fast browser. At the time, Firefox was an absolute dog when it came to performance and heaviness.

That was enough to win - Chrome kneecapped Firefox over that metric alone.

[BeetleB → VCFundedGenYer]

> I was also a power FF user at that time. It was not fast. Not at all.

For me, the speed improvement in Chrome was marginal. Perhaps my PC at the time was simply too slow to notice the difference.

[Izkata → BeetleB]

Two vague memories here: I think most of the Firefox slowness was caused by addons (both loading them at startup and adding to page latency), and Chrome's fast startup that caught casual users' eye was from completing things in the background that Firefox did before presenting the user with a UI.

[BeetleB → Izkata]

Oh yes. Addons did slow things down. I think that's why I was skeptical about speed comparisons. When I ran FF on a brand new profile, it didn't feel that much slower than Chrome.

The thing is - I was happy to sacrifice speed to get the features in the addons.

[dartharva → BeetleB]

3. For a significant period of time (that continues to this day) websites were made using only Chrome as the target platform, turning Firefox into an eternal second fiddle that would occasionally break important/work websites.

[joquarky → dartharva]

And before that, it was IE

And before that it was Netscape

All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.

[brigandish → BeetleB]

> 2. It was occasionally faster, and more stable.

That is ahead for the majority of people.