This was pretty much entirely because of the JS performance advantage from V8 near the beginning.

> It could handle more tabs.

This was pretty much entirely because of the JS performance advantage from V8 near the beginning.

> It isolated tabs so if one crashed it didn't crash the whole browser.

This is definitely a win for Chrome and something we eventually saw Firefox adopt, but many many years later.

> Memory usage was lower.

This was a combination of factors, but heavily related to the improved JS performance due to V8. A big piece was also that XUL was a pig.

Thanks for pointing out some specific things, but while they affect specific perceptions, underneath the covers most of this had to do with the combination of improved JS performance in Chrome + a heavy reliance on JS for web.

Link Prefetching was in Firefox 1.0 and DNS Prefetching was added in Firefox 3.5. Both were supported in the first release of Chrome, but DNS Prefetching hadn't ratified as a standard yet. The first stable release of Chrome was on December 11th, 2008. Firefox 1.0 came out on November 9th, 2004 and Firefox 3.5 came out on June 30th, 2009. Firefox 2 (October 24, 2006) already had support for the control headers for DNS Prefetching, but the standard wasn't ratified until later, which is when Firefox brought it into support.

That's not to say that Chrome didn't have different approaches to predicting and triggering prefetching compared to Firefox, and that in some ways those methods were better, but both Link Prefetching and DNS Prefetching were ideas before Chrome exists, Link Prefetching was ratifed and in Firefox before Chrome existed, and DNS Prefetching was shipped in Firefox as soon as the standard was ratified (Chrome shipped it in the first release before the standards process had concluded).