Despite loving Firefox I see this as a good thing. Firefox has always been the hobbyist/technical person's browser. Chrome is a slick experience aimed at the end-user.
Personally, I'll be using Firefox with its fantastic tweakability and addons, but anything which causes there to be multiple major browsers is good, because it means people have more incentive to create standards and stick to them.
Firefox has always been the hobbyist/technical person's browser. Chrome is a slick experience aimed at the end-user.
I'm not sure. I think it's the opposite. Most end-users won't really know or care what browser they are using, but they do care what their hobbyist/technical friends/colleagues/kids use, because those are "the experts" so they know what's best.
Chrome had very significant uptake among those, and one of the reasons for the very steep growth in its market-share is that this "trickles down" to lesser experienced users. It's also the biggest problem for Firefox, because it gained its market-share in exactly the same manner.
And for the users that were impervious to this, bundling deals like with Skype and Flash are also obvious big wins over IE and Firefox.
I'd be curious what features of Chrome make you believe its a more slick experience for the end user as compared to Firefox.
Mostly the lack of options, and the way the updates don't get in your way.
Firefox gives you a lot more power, but everything you can do in it beyond the basics gives you the possibility of things going wrong.
So you can install Tabmix Plus, but that gives you a wall of tab options that can leave you wondering how to find things. You can install NoScript, and be left wondering why half of your web pages don't work any more.
When it comes to "plain Firefox with nothing installed" and "plain Chrome, with nothing installed" I suspect they're about as easy to use.
When the Flash installer bundles Chrome, is the user's default browser reset to Chrome? Assuming Chrome auto-imported all their bookmarks from IE or Firefox, some Chrome users might not even know they are using a different browser.
But it's also because Google has been making use of its massive amount of ad space to push Chrome, and on top of that taken out ads in actual physical locations too.
Personally, I'll be using Firefox with its fantastic tweakability and addons, but anything which causes there to be multiple major browsers is good, because it means people have more incentive to create standards and stick to them.