Do you really, honestly thing that is why it came to dominance? There's billions of computer users out there, and the majority of them are not techie nerds. They don't know or care what browser they are using. They just want to click the internet icon. You think all those people were sitting around, opening up task manager, and comparing the results with all of their tabs open? They are all used to the internet being slow. They don't know what part is being slow.

If what you are saying was true, then Firefox should have dominated over IE. Did they take over a large share of the market? Yes, after fighting and fighting for years on end. Chrome just came out, and after putting it on their home page, suddenly their marketshare skyrocketed. I believe that if Google had to put it on a different URL, it would not have gotten the adoption it has now.

Yes it was. I don't really see the difference anymore, on any practical level. However, Chrome has been removing useful features and not fixing usability bugs while just being more and more invasive, privacy-wise.

I jumped from Firefox to Chrome with no hesitation when I saw Chrome blazing through multiple tabs without any slowdown. At the time Firefox was crawling on like a snail. Now, years later, I jumped from Chromium to Firefox because I could no longer use the browser to preserve control over certain web pages I needed to use.

> Chrome was light years ahead of Firefox in both cpu and memory use for years

No it wasn't.

Firefox has always been significantly better at memory usage than Chrome. Here is a benchmark from 2012 [0] and Firefox's memory usage only went down after that [1]. On the other hand Chrome is infamous for its extravagant RAM usage ([2] and million other web search results). Only in the last few years Google have started to pay attention to Chrome's memory use.

[0] Chrome was light years ahead of Firefox in both cpu and memory use for years

[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink

[2] https://lifehacker.com/why-chrome-uses-so-much-freaking-ram-...

That has not been my experience. Quite the contrary, Chrome never worked as good as Firefox in any of the OSX or linux laptops I owned. The only thing about Firefox is occasionally websites being broken due to Chrome-only support.

That's just like... your opinion man. I never found Chrome to be vastly superior to Firefox. Sometimes it seemed faster, and other times it was a total hog. It's been back and forth like that ever since it came out.

Here's an anecdote for you. I worked at a computer store when Chrome was released. People would come in all the time, and they had no idea they had installed Chrome on their computer. They had no idea that it had taken over as the default browser. They didn't know they weren't using IE. Chrome had a super basic installer that asked one question, and it was linked right from Google's home page. I interacted with average computer users hundreds of times every month.

That's how I believe it became the dominant browser. Average people don't care that one browser is slightly faster than the other or has an omnibar.

This, exactly this.

Chrome still beats Firefox in most benmarks, often by 20-25%

Here's one from 6 weeks ago.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=chrome83...