Why Tomita created GLR and didn't use Earley?
Better late than never.

If I understand correctly, Earley is top-down, and will spend time and memory creating Earley items for every production at a given S(i). This means that for natural language, in S(0) we create and check an Earley item for every possible word that starts a sentence, and there are quite a lot of those.

But GLR is bottom up, so assuming efficiently hashed table/state lookups, the first token selects the next transition(s) in constant time.

This is true specifically for natural languages, with the huge number of distinct productions. But not really meaningful for programming languages, with the very small set of productions.