this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2024
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I think the author understates how much better Chrome was than everything else from the time it launched to the time Firefox went multiprocess. It was about a five year period.
Now I think most people just see no reason to switch. Better adblocking might motivate a few.
Yep. I actually switched to chrome back then specifically because it was faster than Firefox (which I had been using), and each tab was its own process so if one bogged down, timed out, or crashed I could just close it without losing everything. And then they made it a bloated mess and I went back to Firefox when they got their act together and opening the browser didn't tank ram usage. There was a point where people switched to chrome because there were benefits. And now the whole browser infrastructure is just kind of garbage because Google investors need more money.
I don't think it was being turned into a bloated mess, as much as that it always was pretty slow, until Google started investing a lot in JS performance with the release of Chrome, and showed how fast it could be.
(Well, and as a result, websites started becoming more demanding, which did make browsers that didn't keep up slow down more.)
Compared to the resources it used to take chrome is absolutely a resource hog and that's why I describe it as bloated. I wasn't describing Firefox as bloated. But I agree with you that it was slow and a bit clunky back then which is part of the reason I moved away from it.
Oh sorry, yeah I misread (and almost did it again just now) - I thought you mentioned that they made Firefox a bloated mess back when you switched to Chrome. Apologies!
No worries. No it just got slow and I had problems with crashing but that could even have been windows at the time (the problems with freezing were definitely probably related to the Internet quality).