How has Chrome had such a meteoric rise?

[lxskllr]

On GNU/Linux it's trivial to move the cache to ram. I do it for theoretical speed improvements, but I honestly can't tell the difference between that, and an old spinning platter. If one was really concerned, a ram drive might work on Windows.

 

[nerp]

A user will NEVER reach the write limit on a modern SSD before the drive itself keels over.

Yes. Not sure where this paranoia about wearing out SSDs come from.

 

[Ketchup]

Yes. Not sure where this paranoia about wearing out SSDs come from.

When they first came out - it was pointed out that SSDs operated on Flash memory, which is volatile - some day it will day. The nerds took it, and it exploded into "it will fail in a day if you don't turn off the page file" or something like that. Similar to how Windows 10 exploded into "the data mining OS." And the list goes on and on. New technology = new things to be afraid of.

 

[John Connor]

A user will NEVER reach the write limit on a modern SSD before the drive itself keels over.

Maybe not, but I used to have an old 60GB SSD in this laptop that was reducing in health indicated by Crystaldiskinfo. So I bought a new SSD and cloned just in case.

 

[John Connor]

On GNU/Linux it's trivial to move the cache to ram. I do it for theoretical speed improvements, but I honestly can't tell the difference between that, and an old spinning platter. If one was really concerned, a ram drive might work on Windows.

I used Softperfect RAM disk actually, but I was having issues using system restore and it was due to the RAM disk.

 

[lakedude]

IE sucked for a long time with no spell check. Firefox (or similar) was my choice for years, especially on dialup because adblock and flashblock would save a ton of precious bandwidth. Chrome won me over with speed, easy printing and tabbed browsing. For me it had nothing to do with marketing by Google.

I believe IE is finally a good browser but I avoid it on historical principle. Opera never seems to work properly for me.

 

[mikeymikec]

Google is also master of the noob farm

I think if this was the case, users wouldn't routinely have say 6 duplicates of the same download because they didn't notice the bar at the bottom of the window the first five times around (I see this a lot with customers)

 

[ninaholic37]

I don't know, Chrome has always run like garbage on machines with 1GB RAM for me, or on old Atoms, but then again so does Firefox Australis.

Posted from Firefox 28

 

[sweenish]

IE sucked for a long time with no spell check. Firefox (or similar) was my choice for years, especially on dialup because adblock and flashblock would save a ton of precious bandwidth. Chrome won me over with speed, easy printing and tabbed browsing. For me it had nothing to do with marketing by Google.

I believe IE is finally a good browser but I avoid it on historical principle. Opera never seems to work properly for me.

Used Firefox, switched to Chrome. Cites tabbed browsing as a reason for switching.

 

[Miramonti]

Firefox is great at developing. Primarily, they develop hostility with it's user base with every update, as they always seem to break a handful of extensions each a time, causing extension developers to flee in masses.

 

[mikeymikec]

I don't know, Chrome has always run like garbage on machines with 1GB RAM for me, or on old Atoms, but then again so does Firefox Australis.

I don't consider myself to be an "oodles of RAM" proponent, but these days 1GB RAM isn't really enough for any Internet-connected device. There's been a few XP machines I upgraded to >1GB RAM for even the basic Internet uses in the last say 3 years.

I've got an appointment today to upgrade a Win7 box from 4 to 8GB RAM because it has an odd tendency to use about 300MB more RAM than I would expect a clean Win7 64 install with MSE to use (I think it must be something bloaty about Acer's installation routine, but I've cleaned it up as far as I can, short of doing a wipe-clean install on it), and using even IE on it for say about 20 minutes of browsing with two tabs is enough to cause it to run low on RAM to the point of programs stopping responding correctly.

 

[John Connor]

these days 1GB RAM isn't really enough for any Internet-connected device.

I have a netbook running XP with 1GB of RAM using Pale Moon and I can surf the net just fine...

 

[VirtualLarry]

but these days 1GB RAM isn't really enough for any Internet-connected device.

My Win8.1 7" tablets with 1GB RAM and 16GB eMMC still surf the internet just fine, with Firefox 32-bit. Sure, Newegg takes some time to load, and it might be paging out parts of the page, due to the OS itself taking up 500-600MB of that RAM, but it ... works?

 

[JimmiG]

My Win8.1 7" tablets with 1GB RAM and 16GB eMMC still surf the internet just fine, with Firefox 32-bit. Sure, Newegg takes some time to load, and it might be paging out parts of the page, due to the OS itself taking up 500-600MB of that RAM, but it ... works?

I have an 8" Win10 tablet with 1GB of RAM and it runs any of the big browsers just fine if you keep the number of tabs reasonable and don't run too many applications at the same time.
However I much prefer Edge on those kinds of machines - zooming works much better and smoother, and the scrolling is much, much smoother.

As for Firefox, its development stagnated just as Chrome started becoming popular. They still haven't made it multi-threaded after all these years, its security model is lackluster and outdated, add-ons are a minefield of security and stability issues. Regular users might not care about under the hood stuff, but they do care if their browser crashes or pages scroll at 0.2 FPS. It does look like development has started to pick up the pace again, so hopefully it will be brought from the 2008 era to 2016 soon.

 

[SPBHM]

Chrome was actually always pretty good, and they advertised it effectively, people loved Google and why not use their browser... lots of people that would be stuck on IE forever got it, and they also managed to get a lot of Firefox users;
MS has failed to deliver a browser that people like to use as usual, and Firefox didn't do enough,

 

[sweenish]

Now that Vivaldi has left beta, I'd think it's worth taking a look at.

There are a few basic things missing, though. Easier access to the Chrome Web Store for extensions, and Alt+Enter being the biggest ones I can think of right now.

I prefer it FF, at least. I have to keep Chrome around for GPM downloads.

 

[lupi]

Ditched ie when you could no longer sync bookmarks between computers.

 

[John Connor]

I ditched IE in 2004. LOL Back then I used the Mozilla browser. Then Firefox, and now that FireFox looks like absolute garbage I'm using Pale Moon which at this point is a grand experiment if you ask me. Moon Child needs to change that god awful user agent which seems to be the stem of issues with websites that sniff your UA and fail to work correctly with PM.

 

[JimmiG]

Now that Vivaldi has left beta, I'd think it's worth taking a look at.

There are a few basic things missing, though. Easier access to the Chrome Web Store for extensions, and Alt+Enter being the biggest ones I can think of right now.

I prefer it FF, at least. I have to keep Chrome around for GPM downloads.

Vivaldi is advertised as this "power user" browser, but I mostly find it cluttered and slow (~0.5 seconds to open a new tab). Also many basic keyboard shortcuts are missing or different, and there doesn't seem to be a way to configure them.

 

[sweenish]

I don't find it cluttered, as you can generally hide most of the excess you don't like.

I did mention at least one missing keyboard shortcut, so I don't disagree with that.

I behaves better than FF on my laptop. And it doesn't kill my battery like Chrome. And it's still early days for the browser. I'm not about to write it off without going through a couple upgrades.

When the W10 Anniversary update drops, I may very well just switch to Edge. Once it has extensions, I may not need an alternative.

 

[Magic Carpet]

I may very well just switch to Edge. Once it has extensions, I may not need an alternative.

IE is pretty good, once we have extensions I will probably switch to it full-time as well.

My internal testing keeps revealing that IE is quite efficient at using computer resources (i.e. longer battery life). Especially when it comes to GPU-assisted video playback. Edge has picked up where IE11 left it off :thumbsup:

Having said that, Chrome is still pretty good and is my main browser for the time being.

 

[SPBHM]

IE is pretty good, once we have extensions I will probably switch to it full-time as well.

My internal testing keeps revealing that IE is quite efficient at using computer resources (i.e. longer battery life). Especially when it comes to GPU-assisted video playback. Edge has picked up where IE11 left it off :thumbsup:

Having said that, Chrome is still pretty good and is my main browser for the time being.

edge does give me the best results in terms of CPU usage for videos, but still doesn't feel quite as smooth as chrome for general browsing for me, and yes, the biggest problem is lack of extensions, I just can't use a web browser like that anymore, but I would surely give it a chance if it had extensions.

 

[quikah]

The problem with chrome video is that Google is pushing vp9, but there is almost no hardware decode for it. So the CPU needs to do all the work. Don't understand the smoothness comparison, edge is amazing in that area. The scrolling is perfect. Needs ad block though I notice it getting bogged down more than chrome/Firefox with ads.

 

[Steltek]

Now that Vivaldi has left beta, I'd think it's worth taking a look at.

There are a few basic things missing, though. Easier access to the Chrome Web Store for extensions, and Alt+Enter being the biggest ones I can think of right now.

I prefer it FF, at least. I have to keep Chrome around for GPM downloads.

Yeah, I have to agree that Vivaldi looks like a good middle ground between Firefox and Chrome. At least Vivaldi is somewhat configurable in terms of its user interface, which was one of the things I never liked about Chrome.

It still remains to be seen though, for me at least, as to whether it shares Chrome's propensity to cause sleep problems on my machines. That, and the availability of some extensions I use daily, will determine whether I switch to it or not.

Of course, when Mozilla gets through finally destroying Firefox, it will be a moot point anyway.

 

[Magic Carpet]

edge does give me the best results in terms of CPU usage for videos, but still doesn't feel quite as smooth as chrome for general browsing for me, and yes, the biggest problem is lack of extensions, I just can't use a web browser like that anymore, but I would surely give it a chance if it had extensions.

Yeah, extensions are essential. Can't browse without a set of script/ad/flash blocking layer, at all these days. The Edge interface doesn't also appeal to me much though, wish it had looked more like IE11 or Chrome.

The problem with chrome video is that Google is pushing vp9, but there is almost no hardware decode for it. So the CPU needs to do all the work.

Exactly. Pretty much everything that I watch with Chrome, my CPU has to do all the hard work. A bit annoying, especially when chrome://gpu ticks all the right boxes.

Graphics Feature Status
Canvas: Hardware accelerated
Flash: Hardware accelerated
Flash Stage3D: Hardware accelerated
Flash Stage3D Baseline profile: Hardware accelerated
Compositing: Hardware accelerated
Multiple Raster Threads: Enabled
Rasterization: Hardware accelerated
Video Decode: Hardware accelerated
Video Encode: Hardware accelerated
WebGL: Hardware accelerated

And yet, Video decoding engine never puts my GPU to any significant use (monitoring with GPU-Z).