They took a rendering engine, made some changes to allow tabs to be run as their own process, and took a year to implement an underwhelming and feature-sparse extension system.
What is the big achievement? Mozilla created their own rendering engine. And I don't think that's a bad thing. I think we'd be worse off in a world where the sole choices are Trident and WebKit.
There is no browser as fast as chrome anywhere for javascript, not even safari, not by a factor of 2x. The "omnibar" in chrome is a legitimate innovation, every browser should work that way in my opinion (it's not too difficult to tell the difference between a search string and a url automatically). How many browsers implement web-sockets? Hrm, not too many. The Chrome dev team's amazing pace of development has been spent in the last year putting together a solid, full-featured browser (extension support is almost there, that's the only real lacking element), it looks like they will continue that pace into implementing state-of-the-art features (like web-sockets) before anyone else.
They took a rendering engine, made some changes to allow tabs to be run as their own process, and took a year to implement an underwhelming and feature-sparse extension system.
What is the big achievement? Mozilla created their own rendering engine. And I don't think that's a bad thing. I think we'd be worse off in a world where the sole choices are Trident and WebKit.