[meestaahjoshee]

firefox definitely had tabbed browsing and private mode before chrome was released.

pretty sure opera had tabbed browsing as well.

i just recall chrome being very minimal, clean and fast when it was first released. plus as kreeben said, Google was pretty revered at the time.

[Huffers2]

You're right. Opera had tabbed browsing before Firefox existed, and Firefox had tabbed browsing before Chrome existed.

[wavefunction]

I could be wrong but it looks like Opera introduced tabs in 2009 with v10.5 while Firefox's first release was in 2002. Unless we're referring to different things.

[xorcist]

That's not right. Opera had tabs in version 4, released in early 2000.

Some people apparently think tabs has to be drag-and-droppable, which Opera had in 2003, in order to be called tabs: https://allthatiswrong.wordpress.com/2011/01/14/opera-did-no...

[meekaaku]

No. Opera from early 2000s atleast had tabbed browsing. It also had gestures, paste-and-go, open non-hyper plaintext links in tab etc.

[robotresearcher]

Chrome made a big thing at launch about their process isolation of tabs. Was that their innovation?

[figassis]

What chrome sold was speed. Most of their ads were all about how fast websites would open. And tabs was cherry on top. I know that’s what made me jump from IE. I remember I have a Sony vaio desktop then and IE would weigh it down to a crawl, then I install chrome and that just made me swear to never use IE again.

[rishav_sharan]

I remember switching to Chrome just because of the minimalist UI. I don't know if Chrome was faster at that time, but it felt faster and leaner than anything else. I switched back to Firefox when I realized that there were everal extensions I didn't want to part with. And then back to Chrome again after a few years when Firefox upgraded their UI to make everything bigger and bulbous.

[tapoxi]

Process isolation of tabs, speed (V8), incognito mode, silent updates. Most of this they covered in the announcement comic.

[jhanschoo]

Chrome's process isolation meant that one terrible website would not crash or lag the whole browser, as was the case with Firefox.