nobody ever seems to detail what kinda bloat they mean when they say that, i don't think they actually thought about it that deeply. nobody complains about anything specific like XUL support, for example.

I switched to Chrome back then because it ran tabs in separate processes. A tab crashing in Firefox would take the whole browser down.

The final straw for me was the plugins. Flash, Java, Acrobat, etc. Chrome kept them up to date for you. Firefox made you just through hoops, which eventually lead to a rogue site injecting crap onto my machine which took me a day to clean up. Plugins are pretty much dead now, but back then you needed them for half the web to work.

Chrome really was a great browser back then (and MS were still in the "what's wrong with Internet Explorer?" era), and it's a shame that they're now working so hard to fuck it up again.

It was back before enshittification of the internet, when things were better. Was just big and clunky, chrome came along and ran very fast, until last few years, they swapped places.

that's how I remember switching to chrome in the 00s. it had become unstable.