urbanriot It’s funny, Firefox was the king for a while because they were the slimmest browser but then they started adding all that extra crap and along comes Chrome, this slim and sexy browser and they absolutely destroyed Firefox. Not only was Chrome faster, it was lighter on battery life.
Wasn’t Opera even slimmer at the time? Their old Presto engine was a solid, little performer. I think that’s why it was the browser engine used on some early smart TVs. It’s a shame that Presto ended up being abandoned. Now all the browsers are basically Firefox’s engine, or Chromium (I think Apple still uses WebKit, which has a lot in common with Blink that is used by Chromium).
I also vaguely remember that software bundling was a big reason why Chrome became popular. I could be misremembering, but I think Firefox was occasionally bundled with some software installers (I’m thinking CCleaner). Eventually, more and more software installers changed to including a Chrome install. That hurt Firefox.
And I think it tough on these smaller competitors. Firefox is dependent on Google for money (e.g., search agreements). I think some of that bloat (I think Pocket) might have to do with alternate ways of raising funds.
I would also assume that it’s difficult, from an engineering perspective, to compete with Google on speed. So you need to differentiate yourself somehow. And one person’s feature is another person’s bloat.
I use Vivaldi now, and their niche is having built-in features. But, on their forums, you still see a lot of users saying they should abandon features and focus on speed. So, it’s tough to win.
urbanriot I’m thinking some of you might be surprised at how much faster an alternative browser can be on some web sites, especially sites with more interactive multimedia stuff going on, and especially those sites when you have a lot of tabs in the mix.
Do you have any insight on how much these alternates are making changes to the Chromium code? Most of these alternates are just Chromium+other stuff. So I’m curious how they manage to differentiate themselves on performance.
