Comment by jlokier

> - but it wasn't obviously better than Firefox.

Ah, but Chrome was obviously better than Firefox.

When Chrome was released, the advertising I recall focused on one killer feature that Firefox didn't get for many years after that: Speed.

Chrome's JIT JavaScript was so much faster than everyone else's interpreted JavaScript that you could run a materially different kind of software in the browser. It was like the difference between a slow interpreted language and a fast compiled one. Chrome's rendering was also fast.

There was even a cartoon explaining how the new JavaScript engine worked.

Chrome felt like the next generation of browser.

I say this as someone who remained a fan and user of Firefox throughout. I stuck with Firefox through its relatively slow years.

Firefox caught up, but it took years. It got its own JIT JavaScript, but there were a few years after that where Firefox's rendering was relatively slow by the new standards. However, Firefox has excellent performance all round by now.

I was disappointed when Chrome came out that JIT JavaScript could even be a marketable feature and wasn't already the default in the best open source browsers, because it seemed like such an obvious thing to do for many years prior, and not particularly difficult. I guess market forces resulted in nobody deciding to do it in Firefox, or any other open source browser, until competition made it a necessity. I was quite surprised, because Firefox seemed like the product of passionate technology nerds, and performance JITs are very fun and satisfying things to make, with visible results.