Chrome gained traction because IE was really, really bad. Now it has mindshare and you might could argue that Google maintains this mindshare with malpractice.
Chrome copied lots of stuff from Opera, and Opera had 2.5% of marketshare. Firefox (who I personally didn't enjoy as much as Opera) had benefited from a grasroots campaign had taken years to get 35% of marketshare. Both were nobrainers compared to how broken IE was, and they were on the market years before chrome.
So.. Yeah. Chrome was a good product. But competitors had showed that being a good browser without insane advertising was never going to be enough.
Btw, the EU has fined Google in the past for promoting their products over competitors in their search results. That was already the hint that google has gotten too big to be not in conflict of interest anymore.
The damage was done, people learned to "download the internet" from google first. And if they forgot, all Google services kept pushing them till they did.
They all had checkboxes for Chrome and other ad-ware. If you didn't pay attention to unchecked them during installation you'd find your default browser changed and other crap. Those who did "tech-support" for family members remember.
Average joe: next next next done.
Don't ever fantasize about average users back then doing research if there would be a better web browser and then going ahead to download and install chrome on their own.
"What is a web browser?"
Eventually the Google Toolbar itself would just auto-upgrade to Chrome as well.
Anecdotally, my father liked the Google toolbar for giving a separate search box in IE, but disliked Chrome and was confused when Chrome auto-installed and the Google Toolbar partly became a big ad for "congrats, you can use Chrome now", and that was one of his reasons to (finally) switch to Firefox for good (he used both IE and Firefox for a long time prior).
I remember that I had to specifically uncheck this during installation of freeware back then. People I helped with their computer had no idea where chrome came from, the internet changed on a sudden day. They believably told they didn't download it. Most likely it came with some freeware they did download. For some it could be that they __did download it__ in fact by being tricked into it by weasel wording from google. There was a real strong push, I remember the chrome ads and links to chrome where pushed everywhere in google's services.
Aside, ask a friend what the internet is and they point to chrome. We keep overestimating the average Joe. Young people are not necessarily any wiser, to the contrary I would say.
That's not to say IE was better than Chrome. I just don't think it appearing on the desktop was a deliberate decision for many. I'd be surprised if many even realized they had installed it.
One especially awesome feature was a built in pdf creator. You did not have to download cutePDF or whatever.
It was also more reliable and crashed less, and probably other things I forget.
Upon its release it also predictably had compatibility problems, leading Google to implement a wrapper around the IE engine. Firefox had compatibility issues as well. I'm not trying to say one was better than the other. I think people tend to forget the environment Chrome was released into.
Do while IE wasn't great, it was far more stable for me. I favored Firefox, but it was in a bit of tumult at the time. I'm sure Chrome was a better experience for others. I think at the time Google was still basking in its adulation from tech enthusiasts, papering over Chrome's flaws. That was back when people got excited for new Google products and trusted them to not be evil.
As a bonus fun fact, Chrome created a massive headache for Selenium because Firefox's internals where called "Chrome" and "chrome://" was a URL scheme. Selenium used those URLs and got stuck with loads of support requests from the ensuing confusion. Everyone thought Chrome was just an internal project name and that Google would surely pick something that didn't conflict with another browser.
Google paid vendors so that Chrome installed and made itself the default without users even knowing what had happened.
We live in the 1950's, I work for Maddison Street and build a massive ad campaign putting ads everywhere you look about smoking, saying how it's so cool and beneficial for your health and how all people should do it if they wanna be cool and healthy. After a while, consumers already happy with breathable atmospheric air become smokers en-masses, voluntarily, putting toxic fumes in their lungs to look cool as advertised.
Who's responsible here?
Really it's just market forces at work and the cigarette manufacturers developed a superior product and should be rewarded for it.
The "purposely mis-function" thing isn't a mis-characterisation either. It became fairly well documented over time.
But Chrome was just better than Firefox when it launched so it accelerated the IE decline.
This feels exactly like the whole Mac M1 thing. Every techie person seems to think that the M1 was going to cause all sorts of people to switch to Macs. Guess what? Nobody gives a shit about a 5% faster processor except for power users.
Regular people don't care about Chrome being "better," either and that's not how it got market dominance.
IE was awful, and Firefox was…perfectly cromulent. Chrome was so much better than any of the competition.
- They found the internet had gotten a new icon and had no idea how it got there. (bundling with popular software)
- They were instructed by google.
That is how chrome came to top. See other comments for more context.
The fact is, browsers aren't a product, they're a platform feature. Users have zero incentive to ever switch from whatever their OS came bundled with, unless you make a massive advertising push. The fact that Google managed to get people to switch to a non-platform browser at all is a shocking achievement.
Would you rather everyone still be using IE? Because that's exactly what would have happened otherwise.
It definitely wasn't better or faster after it forced your system to start heavily using a swap file on spinning rust storage.