[viraptor]

Ehh... UI was comparable. Chrome was a bit faster.

For the ads, see some snapshots of what that campaign looked like at the time https://searchengineland.com/googles-jaw-dropping-sponsored-... It was a massive push of basically spammy links all over the internet.

To be clear, I'm sure some people switched for the features. But given the scale of the sponsored push to every internet user, we can't really say features were the reason for most people. There's no way to run the experiment the other way.

[paldepind2]

Thanks for the link. That certainly shows that Google was sponsoring an aggressive and fairly ugly ad campaign.

> UI was comparable.

They were not at all comparable. Here is an image of what Firefox looked like when Chrome was released [1]. Here is an image of what Chrome looked like at release [2]. Barring some design tweaks Chrome looks roughly like any modern browser whereas Firefox looks ancient by modern standards. It has the app menu, no integration with window decoration, a separate search box, tabs below the address bar, etc. Lots of things that Firefox would copy over the coming years. There's a reason Chrome was named after its Chrome–the UI was a huge selling point.

1: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/25581533/141687681... 2: https://blogoscoped.com/files/google-chrome-browsing/search-...

[viraptor]

The bookmarks could be turned off in FF and many other things changed with extensions. Overall... I can see how someone could say they're different, but it's a "meh" for me. Yeah, they're different but not in a meaningful way for me.