Google Chrome
1 HN recommender · recommended in 6 months, 2010–2021
2:10 · 9.3M views · May 4, 2010
Google's 2010 Chrome ad filmed web page rendering with a high-speed camera, comparing it with a potato gun, a pirate ship and lightning. It presented browser speed as Chrome's key selling point.
HN cites it as an example of Chrome's speed-focused marketing and of how fast Chrome seemed at launch compared with other browsers.
6 comments from Hacker News
welp, i'm back after using nowmov. thanks to nowmov i found one of the coolest youtube videos i've seen in a while this video Google Chrome speed tests
There's an implicit assumption in most of these discussions that beating Google Search is a matter of money and scale, and while there are some evidence for that (e.g. unreasonable effectiveness of having lots of data), it is not a certain conclusion, it is only a conclusion if your goal is to beat Google by making an incrementally better classical search engine. It is indeed hard to beat something by offering something "about the same", when the cost for the consumer is already effectively zero from a monetary perspective. But this doesn't rule out someone coming up with a disruptive, radically better search. Take this as a thought experiment, somewhere out there, is another Albert Einstein, working on his magnum opus, an AGI based search engine. He has a mind blowing advancement in AGI, like GR was in Physics, that will completely eclipse classical search AND deep learning approaches AND he knows it. Demos shown to investors are mind blowing, and he quickly raises enough funds to launch a competitor. There is whisper and talk all around the valley. Google tries to make an acquisition, but he and his investors turn it down, because they can see how valuable the tech is. By the time Google realizes their offer should have been much bigger, it's getting traction and taking off like a rocket ship. Now Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba, Amazon, Microsoft, are all looking to acquire it. Yes, there are arguments that being the "default" is hard to dislodge. But Chrome dislodged IE. Google S
It's good to see Mozilla's ramped up PR, but given how deeply entrenched Chrome is, I doubt it will be enough. That is why we developers, if we support Firefox's/Mozilla's mission, must make it our goal to spread the word. I'm setting a personal goal to let 5 (non-tech) people (mostly in my family) know about this. I've only seen tech articles/blog posts for Mozilla's PR, so while that is great, they may need to expand their efforts to include the general public. Chrome did speed-test television ads [0] like, Is Chrome faster than a potato cannon? that were appealing to a general audience. Not suggesting Mozilla do this. Perhaps reaching out to universities and school districts to adopt Firefox as their default browser? At my university if you went on a public computer all it had on the desktop was Chrome, so guess what people are going to use, not only on school computers but on their personal devices? The same is true for my high school. I commend Mozilla for their giant task at hand, taking on such a technological behemoth that has uncountable benefits when it comes to advertising their browser. [0] this video
I was replying to the parent comment above mine stating that Google came late to the browser game just as they did with the search game and if part of what initially made Google appealing was that they were simple and faster than other search engines, that is true when Chrome was introduced as well. Google explicitly marketed Chrome speed as a selling point. For example: this video
I still remember their ads: this video But Chrome had a clear advantage those days compared to other solutions Microsoft's value proposition? PDF users and memory consumption?