It was true, and it was what made Google Chrome popular in the first place. Internet Explorer and Firefox were dead slow to start at the time while Chrome started instantly.

We just don’t know how bad slow browsers can be because all others have caught up.

That was a funny period of time because you could very transparently see the clear application of a corporate team that was tasked with improving the “startup speed KPI”.

During that time IE startup time went from a dozen or so seconds to also instantaneous. It was even faster than chrome sometimes. But that was just the startup. The application wasn’t ready to accept any user input or load anything for another 10 or 15 seconds still. Sometimes it would even accept input for a second then block the input fields again.

It’s the same mentality all those insanely slow webapps do when they think some core react feature for a “initial render” or splash screen etc will save them from their horrific engineering practices.

At the time, the argument for Chrome was that Firefox and IE were bloated and their memory requirements were too high.

A system with less than 64 Megabytes of RAM (most computers of the time) would have to lean heavily on spinning rust virtual memory, making everything slow.

However, since then Chrome has become one of the biggest memory hogs that people commonly run.