I'm a Firefox user and contributor, but I'm happy to agree that Chrome advanced (and continues to advance) the state of the art in all sorts of ways.

But that still doesn't explain why Google thinks that building a web browser is an important business for Google to be in, especially at an annual cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. To answer that question, you do need to look at how it intersects with Google's other businesses and revenue streams.

…and with a bigger marketing budget than pretty much any other browser (even if you discount all the marketing on Google IP that isn't for sale to start with). If it were just about pushing the browser market forward, it long ago reached a point of having enough marketshare to do that. If they were to target specific countries where, e.g., IE6 remains a major browser, that'd be pushing the market forward. But they aren't.

The browser is the operating environment one develops GUI applications for now. (A situation akin to developing apps for windows 3 running on DOS). I think any company would like to own the delivery platform, I'm sure Google loves Chrome.

As to why Google and why Chrome, it makes a ton of sense, c. 2004, 2005, when Google was butting heads with Microsoft that they would formulate plans to undermine Microsoft's platform dominance. The OS being the vulnerable foundation of the MS pyramid.

It still impresses me how much Microsoft got snookered software delivery-wise in so many arenas by Google.

Maybe your memory is failing you, but FF and Safari were still great browsers when Chrome first came out. Chrome took over slowly because of constant improvement, it wasn't much different except for some technical details and clean UI.

Firefox was great, but the performance was sub-par around version 3, and the time between releases was measured in years, not weeks. Chrome definitely gave Mozilla a nice kick in the backside, which I am very thankful for. These days Firefox is now close to, if not faster and less memory hungry than Chrome.

  > Firefox was great, but the performance was sub-par around version 3

Before Chrome, Firefox's performance was sub-par compared to... what? Definitely not to Safari, Chrome, or IE.

The main knock on Firefox at that time was that it was too memory-hungry. That was always somewhat of an inaccurate rap. Not totally undeserved, but not totally deserved either.

  > Chrome definitely gave Mozilla a nice kick in the backside, which I am very thankful for. These days Firefox is now close to, if not faster and less memory hungry than Chrome.

Heck yes to all of that.

> Heck yes to all of that.

The performance improvements have been great, but I have to admit the UI changes are highly concerning to me. Fortunately the FF extension APIs are the best around, so now I just can't use Firefox without "Classic Theme Restorer".

I personally never minded Australis, since I've been used to it via Thunderbird (which rolled it out first). That said, it really doesn't affect me that much since I use Tree View Tabs anyway (and I don't use the menu enough to really care beyond having nice big buttons to click on when my morning coffee hasn't kicked in yet).

There's nothing wrong with my memory. In fact, I remember (as an OS X user) running a Windows VM specifically so that I could use Chrome; it performed so much better that it was actually worth the emulation overhead to run it in a VM.

FF and Safari were okay, but at the time Chrome was a revelation.

For simple pages Chrome was faster. But the tradeoff was that you didn't get things like MathML- which was important to- maybe- three of us. And iirc, SVG was better on FF (I did physics tutorial and animation stuff- I told people to use FF).

Also, I still prefer video on FF. Chrome is choppier with a lousy connection or hardware. But Chrome is quicker to load a simple site which makes it overall a better experience for passive web browsing. (But to be fair my FF is loaded with add-ons so that may slow it down a bit).

You should restart FF with addons disabled (Help > Restart with Add-ons Disabled) and then compare the two. If you want a "passive web browsing experience" on FF, you could create a separate profile.

Or you know, use Chrome. That way, I don't have to consider what type of "web browsing experience" I need to have today.

I have installed lots of extensions on FF because I find them to be useful. If I were to use Chrome as my primary browser and wanted the same features that my current FF setup gives me, then I would have to install extensions. But the extensions would slow Chrome down and then I would be back to square one. So "just use Chrome" is not a solution.

Maybe not for everyone. I find myself alone amongst many because I hate tools. The need for a tool means there is some problem that has to be solved. For instance, I much prefer languages that don't necessitate an IDE. I'd much rather program in Ruby, Python, Javascript, or anything else I can do competently in vi, with a 5 line .vimrc file. Even when in vi I only use like 5 commands. I find other ways to be effective. I can boot up Eclipse or IntelliJ or whatever and get the job done, but certainly there has to be a better way?

I installed Chrome because its fast. I liked it for web development because it had "Firebug" essentially built in. I eventually peeked back at Firefox to see if was doing anything interesting on the development side, but by that point much preferred the overall speed and simplicity of Chrome that I simply haven't bothered to go back.

Compared to IE, developing for both platforms rarely requires you to even check Firefox for correctness or performance once you get around the quirks or use more recently developed JS libraries.

I think the only extension I installed for Chrome was TamperMonkey. And a couple of things developed for work purposes.

That's what I do. I use chrome for a lot of stuff, but if I'm browsing video or or doing web development stuff I use FF.

And people here have told me that I'd like the Chrome dev tools better, but although I tried I was too lazy to completely switch so I just use FF and Firebug.

I was one of the users who thought MathML was important. Until I don't. MathML itself is a terrible idea as no one can write a formula like that. Most mathematicians and physicists are already familiar with LaTeX, but the standards body have to invent an much more verbose language that only machines can read.

I'm happy with MathJax.

MathML was important, because the only alternative was webEQ or other things that turned the equations into pictures.

I would write equations in the openoffice equation editor and run an awk script on them. Tedious, but I'm not repulsed by such things.

Safari and Firefox were (and are) pretty darn good. Given that Chrome used Safari's rendering engine, I wouldn't expect otherwise.

The state of the browser market provided Google the opportunity to be successful with controlling more of the distribution channel. Its clear corporate strategy that when you depend on a small number of others to deliver your product (search), you are in a weaker strategic position. Google offering a high quality browser helps reduce risk. The same goes for Android with mobile search, maps, etc.

It can be both. The opportunity was there because browsers weren't good. The incentive to make Chrome was that it improved both Google's defensive position (Microsoft couldn't make Bing #1 through force) & offensive position. (Google can tie search & Chrome together)