11 ms·

I remember in 2010 when Chrome made the web so much better for everyone. All the early adopters were singing its praise and encouraging friends and family to us

by gardnr 18d ago

I remember in 2010 when Chrome made the web so much better for everyone. All the early adopters were singing its praise and encouraging friends and family to use it. Now, I encourage people to use anything but Chrome. Firefox is really great these days.

gitowiec 18d ago
I will keep the same
sirfz 18d ago
Firefox was amazing even when Chrome was released
- insanitybit 18d ago
  No need to be revisionist. Chrome brought amazing work to the table. The multiprocess, sandboxed system was incredible - it's not to say that Chrome was the first (IE did it earlier) but it was certainly way ahead of Firefox for a long time. Chrome is the reason we have Seccomp V2 on Linux. Chrome made "software is always up to date" the standard. Before Chrome, Blackhole and PoisonIvy absolutely ruined people's computers - click to play Java, click to play and sandboxed Flash, etc, were massive improvements to every day user security, probably some of the biggest security improvements to computers in my lifetime. Firefox took a long time to catch up and their CEO was utterly incompetent, which seriously harmed Mozilla.
  - ashleyn 18d ago
    I remember for a while that Firefox had a single process architecture for all tabs. This often frustrated me as one bad tab could just crash the whole browser while Chrome used separate processes for each tab, prompting me to switch to Chrome for a bit. Firefox caught up ages after chrome, and now I went back to them over the manifest v2 stuff.
    - thaumaturgy 18d ago
      Indeed. Around that era I had a fun little "crashmybrowser.com" toy site that had a few different JS tricks you could click that would absolutely wedge your browser (any browser, at the time). This had come after years of my being vocally annoyed that there weren't better guardrails around Javascript. Each of the functions was based on a real-world failure case. Chrome was the first browser to be immune to all of those functions. Mozilla really screwed the pooch not long after. Their biggest single misstep was forcing automatic updates in corporate networks. At the time, they still had pretty good adoption in the kinds of environments that had a couple of people somewhere deciding what everyone was allowed to run on the company computers. Chrome had already moved to forced updates, so these environments went to Firefox. When Firefox decided to follow Chrome, they no longer had that differentiation, and corporate IT had to choose between two browsers that both had automatic updates, but one of them had frequent memory and performance problems. I've happily returned to Firefox a few years ago and don't have Chrome installed on any device I control.
  - SXX 18d ago
    > Firefox took a long time to catch up and their CEO was utterly incompetent, which seriously harmed Mozilla. This is basically whole history of Mozilla and to be honest most of open source projects that dont have BDFL type of leadership.
    - hagbard_c 18d ago
      It is especially true for projects like Firefox which have access to massive funding since these attract the sort of people who consider those funds 'wasted' because they can be used to do so much for 'the common good'. Mitchell Baker - the utterly incompetent CEO - considered Firefox an afterthought because what the world needed was more NGO activism and what she needed was 400% more money for herself [1]. Wikipedia/Wikimedia is another example of a project with massive funding with similar problems even though the latter has a (not so) BDFL. [1] https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html
      - SXX 18d ago
        Wikimedia might be not perfect, but Wikipedia is still one of the most visited websites in the world and source of a lot of humanity knowledge in general. Firefox on other hand is just something only nerds like us care about and only alive because Alphabet / Google is scared of antitrust legal action possibility.
        jimmydorry 18d ago
        And wikipedia runs off a tiny tiny fraction of what they raise. Almost all of the good on wikipedia comes in-spite of the organisation that owns it. Without the community pouring hundreds of thousands of hours into the project (unpaid) a year, wikipedia would be dead immediately. And if there was ever a time in its life that the project needed good leadership and innovative thinking, it would be now when AI is seriously threatening its survival. If people stop going to the site and instead go to the chat bots that scrape the site, there will be less and less incentive for the power users to continue maintaining wikipedia.
  - wtallis 18d ago
    Chrome's multiprocess sandboxing wasn't unambiguously good. It carried a steep cost in overhead. Back when Chrome was new, you could run Firefox with a decent selection of add-ons to get security benefits of similar magnitude through different mechanisms. The NoScript extension was at the forefront, providing a lot of functionality way beyond just blocking JavaScript per domain. And Firefox with extensions always had better privacy controls.
    - burnte 18d ago
      > Chrome's multiprocess sandboxing wasn't unambiguously good. It carried a steep cost in overhead. This is true, but this is why we create faster and faster PCs, so our software can do more. The cost was because you were getting new safety features. Want the app to be fast, able to show you lots of tabs with no delay? That takes RAM and CPU. The CPU and RAM are there to be used for features the user wants. It's actually 100% ok if a computer has to work really hard to run an app as long as that app is designed well, it means the user is making it do lots of useful work. That's what the computer is there for.
      - wtallis 18d ago
        The "Just buy a new computer" excuse doesn't actually make the tradeoff no longer a tradeoff. The cost is still real, you're just putting a price tag on it (then ignoring the price, along with any alternative tradeoffs).
        burnte 17d ago
        > The "Just buy a new computer" excuse doesn't actually make the tradeoff no longer a tradeoff. I think you accidentally responded to the wrong comment, I didn't make any excuses or debate tradeoffs. I said "things have costs".
    - insanitybit 18d ago
      I doubt there are many things in this universe that are unambiguously good, but Chrome's sandboxing is certainly as close as anything. You can make your arguments about noscript if you'd like (I have a great respect for the project) but I think it was essentially irrelevant to user security at the time, real users were really harmed by malware that exploited Firefox, Java, and Flash, and Chrome killed every one of those attack paths in virtually no time at all. Computers were far more dangerous before Chrome. You watch old TV shows and it's a joke that people would visit a site and get hacked - that's unrecognizable today, it simply doesn't happen. It used to, Chrome changed that.
- bdcravens 18d ago
  It was good, but slow by comparison at the time.
- xandrius 18d ago
  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 18d ago
    > 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.
    - brigandish 18d ago
      > 2. It was occasionally faster, and more stable. That is ahead for the majority of people.
    - dartharva 18d ago
      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 17d ago
        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.
    - VCFundedGenYer 17d ago
      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.
- sunaookami 18d ago
  No it really wasn't. It took Firefox multiple years of catching up, releasing multiprocess architecture, 64-bit binaries (!), ... It took until Firefox 58 (2018) until they finally cought up. There was this huge period of nothingness around 2014 when they focussed on other weird stuff like FirefoxOS that everyone saw from miles away that it will flop.
  - inglor 18d ago
    Fun fact - FirefoxOS only flopped in Mozilla, it went on to be the insanely successful KaiOS based on the source code. KaiOS has over 100M active users. This indicates there was actually a lot of technical merit in it and the problem was with the GTM and leadership.
    - doublepg23 18d ago
      TBF KaiOS had a measure of success but it is now on life support. The fact is Android could be scaled down way better than KaiOS could be scaled up. (and you could just wait for the perf/$ to continue to decrease).
    - VCFundedGenYer 17d ago
      I seriously doubt that "100m active users" metric. I haven't even heard of this OS, and if it truly had that many users, we would at least hear SOMETHING about it in the tech world (we do not).
      - inglor 17d ago
        Doubting things and skepticism are great. The 100m number is off common device profiling trackers (statcounter etc) but the number is also mentioned in several other sources. You have not heard of it because it primarily targets feature phones and primarily in emerging markets. If you are not in the market for a feature phone in India or building software for one it makes total sense you're blissfully unaware. (And as the other comment mentioned, after a very successful run as a FirefoxOS fork - Android caught up )
- fhn 18d ago
  It was certainly better than IE but Chrome definitely surpassed Firefox and is still better except for blocking addons
- VCFundedGenYer 17d ago
  No, it wasn't. I was there. At the time, Firefox's old engine was getting quite tired. It was single core, no sandboxing, a lot of cruft under the hood. Extensions had deep integration which would weigh it down. Load times were really rough, and things needed rewriting. The Firefox you see now is part of the 2017 Quantum rebuild. that said, Quantum wasn't great either (because it jettisoned a LOT of great extensions), but it was necessary for survival. They did work on it and things got better over time, but there are still scars from that rug pull that was the extensions fiasco. I wish they had a better solution. RIP Tab Mix Plus.
Gibbon1 18d ago
I remember when my friends were singing the praises of Chrome and Gmail and I was telling them it's a trap. Google has consistently sad they want to stop exposing url's. That's 100% them wanting to prevent people from bypassing them when accessing the web.
burnte 18d ago
Yep, Chrome was great but the past few years they're obviously moving the wrong way. I'm completely off of Chrome, back to Firefox and Brave.
testing22321 18d ago
Funny enough I never left Firefox. It’s always been great.
- raddan 18d ago
  Ditto.
- wingworks 18d ago
  Were you a Mac/Windows or Linux user? Personally I was an early adopter of Firefox and it worked great on Windows, but on Mac for a long stretch of time it was significantly slower than other Mac first browsers. Firefox also has this weird non-standard (for Mac) scrolling for the longest time, and the UI was dated. Most of these things were not true on the Windows side. At least not to the same degree.
  - stackghost 18d ago
    >Firefox also has this weird non-standard (for Mac) scrolling Hasn't been the case since at least 2017.
GeekyBear 18d ago
I remember Google buying Chrome market share by tricking users into installing Chrome when they didn't pay attention while clicking next through the installers for more popular software.
- izacus 18d ago
  [flagged]
  - reitzensteinm 18d ago
    https://www.ghacks.net/2012/02/26/avast-7-will-install-google-chrome-if-you-do-not-pay-attention/ https://www.ghacks.net/2012/02/26/avast-7-will-install-googl... https://searchengineland.com/google-chrome-page-will-have-pagerank-reduced-due-to-sponsored-posts-106551 https://searchengineland.com/google-chrome-page-will-have-pa... https://community.adobe.com/questions-638/adobe-flash-installer-continues-to-shove-unwelcome-stuff-down-our-throats-692160 https://community.adobe.com/questions-638/adobe-flash-instal... https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/wdsi/filesubmission https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/wdsi/filesubmission https://www.findmysoft.com/news/google-gets-pushy-with-chrome-bundles-it-with-realplayer/ https://www.findmysoft.com/news/google-gets-pushy-with-chrom... Etc. This stuff was very real and is a ten second search away, maybe try that before accusing parent of having a faulty memory because it doesn’t agree with yours.
    - izacus 18d ago
      Just because they advertised the browser, it didn't mean it wasn't actually better no matter how much you hate that fact. It's really disgusting to see such misinformation spread because you hate what actually happened.
      - Izkata 17d ago
        Those weren't advertisements. The browser was packaged with other software and automatically installed if you didn't catch it and prevent it. I'm pretty sure it also made itself the default browser during the installation without user interaction. There are screenshots of the installers in those links.
BeetleB 18d ago
I remember those days. I still used FF even back then. Stability was an occasional issue with FF, but feature-wise Chrome was always better.
protimewaster 18d ago
Is 2010 when people started to like it? I remember, in 2008, being in a computer science course at university when Chrome launched. It was not liked at that time, at least within the computer users I knew. I remember it being mostly described as "that awful browser that Google made".
jonas21 18d ago
The webRequest extension API -- the one that uBlock Origin uses and was removed in Manifest v3 -- was not added until 2012. All of the things that made Chrome great for the web in 2010 are still there. It's strange how we can kind of misremember things to fit whatever narrative we currently believe.
- cedilla 18d ago
  It's only strange because you interpreted "Chrome made the web so much better for everyone" as "Chrome had a webRequest API", which is probably not what the original poster meant.
  - jonas21 18d ago
    The article we're discussing is about how extensions that didn't upgrade to Manifest v3, including uBlock Origin, are now being removed from the Chrome web store. uBlock Origin didn't migrate to v3 because they use the webRequest API and didn't want to switch to the less-powerful replacement, declarativeNetRequest (uBlock Origin Lite uses the new API and is available in the store). Based on this context, it seems reasonable to assume that one of the reasons the person I replied to believes Chrome isn't making the web better any more is due to the removal of uBlock Origin. And this is due to the removal of the webRequest API.
- selcuka 18d ago
  > All of the things that made Chrome great for the web in 2010 are still there Something that was great in 2010 may not look great in 2026. It's been 16 years. The Internet has moved on. Blocking ads is the norm now, and they are removing that functionality.
6510 18d ago
It was astonishing how you fell for it back then. In a company that size, you move around a few buttons and hundreds of millions come out. You delete some feature and poof BILLIONS are made. Who care if it upsets some % of the user base? It's billions with a B! It was also astonishing to see HN cheer on the Great Firewall of the USA and make excuses for it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35408837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35408837 Here google has inserted it self between you and the www. It has ruled it self judge and executioner without any disclosure or accountability while simultaneously receiving your entire browser history in real time. When they pull the plug on some website because they don't like the content it is immediately replaced by a scary red screen lying about malware that doesn't have a skip button. There use to be a button in the firefox settings to disable it but hey! Even when they reinstate it, say a week later, your website is pretty much officially dead already. Customers should take their business to someone who doesn't install malware on their computer. If my business was to sell ads and I could simply disable your means to not view my ads I wouldn't be able to explain it to my investors. They would be like, Billions with a B! it would be hard for them to listen to the positive side of disabling my product. But lets take it to a vote... A - Billions B - not Billions
andai 18d ago
Was that before Google removed "don't be evil" ? Good thing they weren't doing anything sketchy before that ;)
Gud 18d ago
No it didn’t? People(web devs) jumped to Chrome because Google advertised it heavily. I never did because I remember internet explorer and lack of transparent PNG support.

by gardnr 18d ago

gitowiec 18d ago

I will keep the same

sirfz 18d ago

Firefox was amazing even when Chrome was released

insanitybit 18d ago
No need to be revisionist. Chrome brought amazing work to the table. The multiprocess, sandboxed system was incredible - it's not to say that Chrome was the first (IE did it earlier) but it was certainly way ahead of Firefox for a long time. Chrome is the reason we have Seccomp V2 on Linux. Chrome made "software is always up to date" the standard. Before Chrome, Blackhole and PoisonIvy absolutely ruined people's computers - click to play Java, click to play and sandboxed Flash, etc, were massive improvements to every day user security, probably some of the biggest security improvements to computers in my lifetime. Firefox took a long time to catch up and their CEO was utterly incompetent, which seriously harmed Mozilla.
- ashleyn 18d ago
  I remember for a while that Firefox had a single process architecture for all tabs. This often frustrated me as one bad tab could just crash the whole browser while Chrome used separate processes for each tab, prompting me to switch to Chrome for a bit. Firefox caught up ages after chrome, and now I went back to them over the manifest v2 stuff.
  - thaumaturgy 18d ago
    Indeed. Around that era I had a fun little "crashmybrowser.com" toy site that had a few different JS tricks you could click that would absolutely wedge your browser (any browser, at the time). This had come after years of my being vocally annoyed that there weren't better guardrails around Javascript. Each of the functions was based on a real-world failure case. Chrome was the first browser to be immune to all of those functions. Mozilla really screwed the pooch not long after. Their biggest single misstep was forcing automatic updates in corporate networks. At the time, they still had pretty good adoption in the kinds of environments that had a couple of people somewhere deciding what everyone was allowed to run on the company computers. Chrome had already moved to forced updates, so these environments went to Firefox. When Firefox decided to follow Chrome, they no longer had that differentiation, and corporate IT had to choose between two browsers that both had automatic updates, but one of them had frequent memory and performance problems. I've happily returned to Firefox a few years ago and don't have Chrome installed on any device I control.
- SXX 18d ago
  > Firefox took a long time to catch up and their CEO was utterly incompetent, which seriously harmed Mozilla. This is basically whole history of Mozilla and to be honest most of open source projects that dont have BDFL type of leadership.
  - hagbard_c 18d ago
    It is especially true for projects like Firefox which have access to massive funding since these attract the sort of people who consider those funds 'wasted' because they can be used to do so much for 'the common good'. Mitchell Baker - the utterly incompetent CEO - considered Firefox an afterthought because what the world needed was more NGO activism and what she needed was 400% more money for herself [1]. Wikipedia/Wikimedia is another example of a project with massive funding with similar problems even though the latter has a (not so) BDFL. [1] https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html
    - SXX 18d ago
      Wikimedia might be not perfect, but Wikipedia is still one of the most visited websites in the world and source of a lot of humanity knowledge in general. Firefox on other hand is just something only nerds like us care about and only alive because Alphabet / Google is scared of antitrust legal action possibility.
      - jimmydorry 18d ago
        And wikipedia runs off a tiny tiny fraction of what they raise. Almost all of the good on wikipedia comes in-spite of the organisation that owns it. Without the community pouring hundreds of thousands of hours into the project (unpaid) a year, wikipedia would be dead immediately. And if there was ever a time in its life that the project needed good leadership and innovative thinking, it would be now when AI is seriously threatening its survival. If people stop going to the site and instead go to the chat bots that scrape the site, there will be less and less incentive for the power users to continue maintaining wikipedia.
- wtallis 18d ago
  Chrome's multiprocess sandboxing wasn't unambiguously good. It carried a steep cost in overhead. Back when Chrome was new, you could run Firefox with a decent selection of add-ons to get security benefits of similar magnitude through different mechanisms. The NoScript extension was at the forefront, providing a lot of functionality way beyond just blocking JavaScript per domain. And Firefox with extensions always had better privacy controls.
  - burnte 18d ago
    > Chrome's multiprocess sandboxing wasn't unambiguously good. It carried a steep cost in overhead. This is true, but this is why we create faster and faster PCs, so our software can do more. The cost was because you were getting new safety features. Want the app to be fast, able to show you lots of tabs with no delay? That takes RAM and CPU. The CPU and RAM are there to be used for features the user wants. It's actually 100% ok if a computer has to work really hard to run an app as long as that app is designed well, it means the user is making it do lots of useful work. That's what the computer is there for.
    - wtallis 18d ago
      The "Just buy a new computer" excuse doesn't actually make the tradeoff no longer a tradeoff. The cost is still real, you're just putting a price tag on it (then ignoring the price, along with any alternative tradeoffs).
      - burnte 17d ago
        > The "Just buy a new computer" excuse doesn't actually make the tradeoff no longer a tradeoff. I think you accidentally responded to the wrong comment, I didn't make any excuses or debate tradeoffs. I said "things have costs".
  - insanitybit 18d ago
    I doubt there are many things in this universe that are unambiguously good, but Chrome's sandboxing is certainly as close as anything. You can make your arguments about noscript if you'd like (I have a great respect for the project) but I think it was essentially irrelevant to user security at the time, real users were really harmed by malware that exploited Firefox, Java, and Flash, and Chrome killed every one of those attack paths in virtually no time at all. Computers were far more dangerous before Chrome. You watch old TV shows and it's a joke that people would visit a site and get hacked - that's unrecognizable today, it simply doesn't happen. It used to, Chrome changed that.
bdcravens 18d ago
It was good, but slow by comparison at the time.
xandrius 18d ago
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 18d ago
  > 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.
  - brigandish 18d ago
    > 2. It was occasionally faster, and more stable. That is ahead for the majority of people.
  - dartharva 18d ago
    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 17d ago
      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.
  - VCFundedGenYer 17d ago
    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.
sunaookami 18d ago
No it really wasn't. It took Firefox multiple years of catching up, releasing multiprocess architecture, 64-bit binaries (!), ... It took until Firefox 58 (2018) until they finally cought up. There was this huge period of nothingness around 2014 when they focussed on other weird stuff like FirefoxOS that everyone saw from miles away that it will flop.
- inglor 18d ago
  Fun fact - FirefoxOS only flopped in Mozilla, it went on to be the insanely successful KaiOS based on the source code. KaiOS has over 100M active users. This indicates there was actually a lot of technical merit in it and the problem was with the GTM and leadership.
  - doublepg23 18d ago
    TBF KaiOS had a measure of success but it is now on life support. The fact is Android could be scaled down way better than KaiOS could be scaled up. (and you could just wait for the perf/$ to continue to decrease).
  - VCFundedGenYer 17d ago
    I seriously doubt that "100m active users" metric. I haven't even heard of this OS, and if it truly had that many users, we would at least hear SOMETHING about it in the tech world (we do not).
    - inglor 17d ago
      Doubting things and skepticism are great. The 100m number is off common device profiling trackers (statcounter etc) but the number is also mentioned in several other sources. You have not heard of it because it primarily targets feature phones and primarily in emerging markets. If you are not in the market for a feature phone in India or building software for one it makes total sense you're blissfully unaware. (And as the other comment mentioned, after a very successful run as a FirefoxOS fork - Android caught up )
fhn 18d ago
It was certainly better than IE but Chrome definitely surpassed Firefox and is still better except for blocking addons
VCFundedGenYer 17d ago
No, it wasn't. I was there. At the time, Firefox's old engine was getting quite tired. It was single core, no sandboxing, a lot of cruft under the hood. Extensions had deep integration which would weigh it down. Load times were really rough, and things needed rewriting. The Firefox you see now is part of the 2017 Quantum rebuild. that said, Quantum wasn't great either (because it jettisoned a LOT of great extensions), but it was necessary for survival. They did work on it and things got better over time, but there are still scars from that rug pull that was the extensions fiasco. I wish they had a better solution. RIP Tab Mix Plus.

Gibbon1 18d ago

I remember when my friends were singing the praises of Chrome and Gmail and I was telling them it's a trap. Google has consistently sad they want to stop exposing url's. That's 100% them wanting to prevent people from bypassing them when accessing the web.

burnte 18d ago

Yep, Chrome was great but the past few years they're obviously moving the wrong way. I'm completely off of Chrome, back to Firefox and Brave.

testing22321 18d ago

Funny enough I never left Firefox. It’s always been great.

raddan 18d ago
Ditto.
wingworks 18d ago
Were you a Mac/Windows or Linux user? Personally I was an early adopter of Firefox and it worked great on Windows, but on Mac for a long stretch of time it was significantly slower than other Mac first browsers. Firefox also has this weird non-standard (for Mac) scrolling for the longest time, and the UI was dated. Most of these things were not true on the Windows side. At least not to the same degree.
- stackghost 18d ago
  >Firefox also has this weird non-standard (for Mac) scrolling Hasn't been the case since at least 2017.

GeekyBear 18d ago

I remember Google buying Chrome market share by tricking users into installing Chrome when they didn't pay attention while clicking next through the installers for more popular software.

izacus 18d ago
[flagged]
- reitzensteinm 18d ago
  https://www.ghacks.net/2012/02/26/avast-7-will-install-google-chrome-if-you-do-not-pay-attention/ https://www.ghacks.net/2012/02/26/avast-7-will-install-googl... https://searchengineland.com/google-chrome-page-will-have-pagerank-reduced-due-to-sponsored-posts-106551 https://searchengineland.com/google-chrome-page-will-have-pa... https://community.adobe.com/questions-638/adobe-flash-installer-continues-to-shove-unwelcome-stuff-down-our-throats-692160 https://community.adobe.com/questions-638/adobe-flash-instal... https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/wdsi/filesubmission https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/wdsi/filesubmission https://www.findmysoft.com/news/google-gets-pushy-with-chrome-bundles-it-with-realplayer/ https://www.findmysoft.com/news/google-gets-pushy-with-chrom... Etc. This stuff was very real and is a ten second search away, maybe try that before accusing parent of having a faulty memory because it doesn’t agree with yours.
  - izacus 18d ago
    Just because they advertised the browser, it didn't mean it wasn't actually better no matter how much you hate that fact. It's really disgusting to see such misinformation spread because you hate what actually happened.
    - Izkata 17d ago
      Those weren't advertisements. The browser was packaged with other software and automatically installed if you didn't catch it and prevent it. I'm pretty sure it also made itself the default browser during the installation without user interaction. There are screenshots of the installers in those links.

BeetleB 18d ago

I remember those days. I still used FF even back then. Stability was an occasional issue with FF, but feature-wise Chrome was always better.

protimewaster 18d ago

Is 2010 when people started to like it? I remember, in 2008, being in a computer science course at university when Chrome launched. It was not liked at that time, at least within the computer users I knew. I remember it being mostly described as "that awful browser that Google made".

jonas21 18d ago

The webRequest extension API -- the one that uBlock Origin uses and was removed in Manifest v3 -- was not added until 2012. All of the things that made Chrome great for the web in 2010 are still there. It's strange how we can kind of misremember things to fit whatever narrative we currently believe.

cedilla 18d ago
It's only strange because you interpreted "Chrome made the web so much better for everyone" as "Chrome had a webRequest API", which is probably not what the original poster meant.
- jonas21 18d ago
  The article we're discussing is about how extensions that didn't upgrade to Manifest v3, including uBlock Origin, are now being removed from the Chrome web store. uBlock Origin didn't migrate to v3 because they use the webRequest API and didn't want to switch to the less-powerful replacement, declarativeNetRequest (uBlock Origin Lite uses the new API and is available in the store). Based on this context, it seems reasonable to assume that one of the reasons the person I replied to believes Chrome isn't making the web better any more is due to the removal of uBlock Origin. And this is due to the removal of the webRequest API.
selcuka 18d ago
> All of the things that made Chrome great for the web in 2010 are still there Something that was great in 2010 may not look great in 2026. It's been 16 years. The Internet has moved on. Blocking ads is the norm now, and they are removing that functionality.

6510 18d ago

It was astonishing how you fell for it back then. In a company that size, you move around a few buttons and hundreds of millions come out. You delete some feature and poof BILLIONS are made. Who care if it upsets some % of the user base? It's billions with a B! It was also astonishing to see HN cheer on the Great Firewall of the USA and make excuses for it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35408837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35408837 Here google has inserted it self between you and the www. It has ruled it self judge and executioner without any disclosure or accountability while simultaneously receiving your entire browser history in real time. When they pull the plug on some website because they don't like the content it is immediately replaced by a scary red screen lying about malware that doesn't have a skip button. There use to be a button in the firefox settings to disable it but hey! Even when they reinstate it, say a week later, your website is pretty much officially dead already. Customers should take their business to someone who doesn't install malware on their computer. If my business was to sell ads and I could simply disable your means to not view my ads I wouldn't be able to explain it to my investors. They would be like, Billions with a B! it would be hard for them to listen to the positive side of disabling my product. But lets take it to a vote... A - Billions B - not Billions

andai 18d ago

Was that before Google removed "don't be evil" ? Good thing they weren't doing anything sketchy before that ;)

Gud 18d ago

No it didn’t? People(web devs) jumped to Chrome because Google advertised it heavily. I never did because I remember internet explorer and lack of transparent PNG support.