Possibly Google paying companies to bundle Chrome with their software installers had a part as well.
Perhaps putting a Chrome advertisement to the Google homepage and recommending an "upgrade" to all Google visitors played a part too. Maybe.
* A safer browser. * A more performant browser.
Which was more than enough for most of us to recommend everyone switch. Much the same was as when Firefox first came out it was unambiguously:
* A safer browser. * A more performant browser.
Which was more than enough for most of us to recommend everyone switch. The switching cost of a browser is quite low. The next browser to meet the above criteria will experience a similar jump in users. The challenge is in actually delivering a browser that can do so. The web standards are massively complex for many reasons, some of them legitimate. The barrier for entry is going up over time and shows no sign of slowing down.
Remember, Chrome was released in 2008. Internet Explorer, with almost 2/3 of the browser marketshare, was on version 7 at that time and a stupid number of corporate IT departments would continue to default to IE 6 rather than updating or fixing their ancient garbage applications for years to come.
Chrome provided a way for power users to have a non-shitty browser, which then blossomed from there as more and more web sites made use of modern browser capabilities and worked worse and worse in corporate-mandated IE instances.
Putting on my BOFH hat obviously I'm not the biggest fan of such "shadow IT" processes but I understand that they happen when needs and wants aren't being met and sometimes this is the most effective way to force a necessary change.
Mozilla has made some bad decisions but we should acknowledge that a fair fraction of them were also flailing around trying to recover from those competitors’ actions. I don’t think Firefox OS would have happened if, for example, iOS allowed a real browser market.