On Mon, Jan 11, 2016 at 1:21 PM, Nikos Roussos comzeradd@fedoraproject.org wrote:
A few reasons, in my own personally believed order of popularity for Chrome:
- Media "just works". Netflix, amazon video/music, spotify, etc.
Netflix "just works" on Firefox too (due to EME support). Spotify is flash. If you install flash-plugin it works on Firefox too.
Having to install flash is a terrible thing these days. Also, Firefox as shipped in Fedora out-of-the-box doesn't work for this because Fedora out-of-the-box doesn't have the codecs. Chrome bundles them, so end users that don't care get them and "it works".
(I realize Chrome has flash built-in in some form, but at least it isn't separate.)
- Per process tabs mean one tab crashing doesn't take down the whole
browser
That's already the case with Firefox too. It's just not yet enabled by default on the stable version. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis
So for 90% of browser users, it isn't the case yet.
- Tight integration into the Google ecosystem.
That's true. But that's an anti-feature. I don't think it's a nice user experience to distribute them a browser that tries to force them to create a Google account (that's Chrome's default first tab).
Depends on what the user is looking for.
- For a while, it was much faster than Firefox for typical javascript
heavy sites, etc. I believe Firefox has caught up for the most part.
That's old news. At the moment even Edge is probably faster than Chrome.
I said that.
Look, the original poster asked why Chrome/chromium were popular. These are some of the reasons why. It wasn't a comparison to Firefox or any other browser. I'm also not defending Chrome or any other browser for that matter.
josh