* Got years of free advertising real estate on the most visited website on the internet, but hid the ads if you were using Chrome already
* Payed the likes of AVG, Avast, Adobe, Oracle and others to have their own software installers automatically install Chrome and make it the default browser unless you uncheck the boxes
* Repeatedly leveraged nonstandard and Chrome-specific APIs (Polymer v0) on their websites which caused other browsers to need slow and clunky polyfills.
Did you just update Java? Looks like a new browser you've never used is your default now.
It had to compete against the default interenet icon on both major operating systems and the OSes themselves were marketing themselves loudly as well.
Once exposed to it, many people chose to continue using Chrome because Chrome offered a better experience than browsers like Firefox and IE did at the time.
Early on, Chrome felt faster and sleeker than its competitors, without sacrificing functionality.
Chrome, for a long time, was simply _better_. It's bizarre how you want to erase history when we installed Chrome originally because of how much darn faster it was than Mozilla (not to mention IE7 and that crap).