It had, and to this very second continues to have, world-class dev-tools. Which is doubly ironic because I believe that the dev-tools are an independent open source repo from Chromium itself but what I can't say with certainty is how many hooks are required into Chromium itself that would prevent adoption by Firefox

I can't recall so much from the early days but modern Chromium releases are packed with "shiny new toys" that the web-dev crews love. I deeeeeeeeeply appreciate that saying such a thing further entrenches the "Chromium is eating the world" perspective, but I'm just pointing out that web-devs love shiny toys and Chromium seems to ship them on the regular

So, too, do they ship an unholy number of C++ footguns, but omelet-breaking-eggs-etc-etc :-/

When Chrome first launched it was actually quite rough. There are some rose tinted glasses on this thread. It was Windows only, lacked basic features like printing, had no extensions system and had no few site compatibility bugs. The primary "features" that set it apart were all non-functionals like performance, security and the skyline tab UI which was nice but other browsers had tabs too. Oh, there was Incognito Mode, which was a nice improvement over other browser's history clearing UI.

It got some initial launch attention but then usage fell a lot (I was at Google at the time), and plateaued for a long time whilst the team fixed bugs, ported to other platforms and caught up on the feature set. It took a lot of belief by Google to continue funding it during these quiet years when relatively few people used it. One of the biggest struggles the Chrome marketing team faced turned out to be that nobody even knew what a browser was let alone why they'd consider switching to a different one.

Still, the team didn't give up. They just plugged away at it, year after year. They caught up on features, added a thoughtful/controllable extensions API and were careful to stop power users doing things that would accidentally trash performance, like opening billions of tabs or installing extensions that trashed the browser internals (a particular problem for Firefox).

At the time for me I had been running Firefox for years but it was kinda slow and an absolute memory hog, I don’t remember specifics but I remember having to constantly close it on my 4gb ram computer. When Chrome came out it’s big thing from what I remember was it was fast and lightweight. I remember installing it and it was night and day, I could have multiple tabs open with out my computer paging memory to disk and everything felt so snappy.

With all that said I think somewhere around 2015 or 2016 I switched back to Firefox because Chrome had become a CPU and memory hog while Firefox had stepped up its game and was a lot faster and more lightweight than Chrome.

Chrome was noticeably faster, not just the benchmark but actual usage , in both startup time and ajax sites. It crashed less often, and when it crashed, usually it took down only a single tab instead of the entire browser. The UI was more minimal and clean.

It was superior in almost every way. All other browsers had to play the catch-up for a while - especially the performance.