alt Hacker NewsChrome won because it was more performant (read: only point of interest for Joe Average) and it was modern and cool (read: only point of interest for nerds).
Firefox failed because it stagnated on performance and code quality (read: memory leaks for daaaaaaaaays) and ultimately because Mozilla was corrupted by Mitchell Baker and still is to this very day driving away nerds and engineers by the truckload.
Lest we forget, Internet Explorer lost to Firefox despite bundling with Windows. Edge still loses to Chrome despite bundling with Windows. Safari despite bundling with iOS and MacOS only survives thanks to the Walls of Applestantinope holding against the SelEUk Empire's onslaught.
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Google spent astronomical amounts of money advertising Chrome, including pushing Chrome from literally priceless Web real estate like the Google start page, bundling deals with e.g. Flash, and preinstalls on various desktops and laptops. It really is hard to say what would have happened without that advantage.
Yeah that's last part is funny but pretty true. I had always used Safari (basically since they replaced Internet Explore for Mac with it) but it became much less performant and had many annoyances regression (like the favicons in bookmarks). Still, I kept using it but what make me switch to Chrome a few years ago (about 2) was a bug preventing proper password sync with my iPhone (acquired from a beta testing I believe, some got it successfully resolved by contacting support but I can't be arsed, they should just have a reset everything option, including their cloud thingy).
Hilariously since you can use Chrome password manager on iOS, it became a better solution overall than trying to stick with Apple mess. With it I got support for uBlock Origin (nothing is as good for Safari, and it came to a point where I just couldn't deal with the ads anymore) and a much faster/more modern browser. As a bonus, it syncs everything with my Windows installation much better and I can use my Chrome profile on other computers when I need to. But when uBlock Origin is not supported in Chrome anymore I'll probably revisit the choice for something else.
Apple has completely lost the plot, pushing their half-assed, barely work, cloud stuff while simultaneously raising the price of entry/maintenance of their hardware. This is why I laugh my ass choice when they brag about their privacy bullshit. If they have wanted, they could have very well figured out a sync without relying on any cloud stuff; instead, they push iCloud to make more money (it's a crutch for people with iPhones that have way too little storage and other proper computing device) even though it makes no sense for what was the philosophy of Apple software/hardware previously. They have no competitive advantage in this matter and it often just sucks or doesn't work properly.
Who's IBM now, right ?
But it has been few years since Firefox got the Quantum update, and now much more memory efficient than Chrome.
> Chrome won because it was more performant (read: only point of interest for Joe Average)
It's hard to argue chrome won on merit here when they were using their monopoly to actively sabotage users running firefox on the most popular sites.
> YouTube page load is 5x slower in Firefox and Edge than in Chrome because YouTube's Polymer redesign relies on the deprecated Shadow DOM v0 API only implemented in Chrome
Thanks for the unexpected laugh at the end. Maybe there is a typo in that imaginary world: "Applestantinople". But maybe it is as intended :)