My guess is that i wasn't marketing. It was because FF was dog-slow back then and Chrome was (still is) blazingly fast
No, it wasn't.
Quick reminder, the issue with IE was webpages loading broken, or not loading at all.
People that used that crap didn't switch because "Chrome was a bit snappier than FF", they switched because all of a sudden every webpage, many sotfware install wizard, and even billboards on the street told them to switch to Chrome. Some "toolbars" installed it without asking. They probably never had heard of FF or Opera before.
It will be interesting to see what happens next year in that case, because FF+UBO will be much faster than Chrome with a nobbled ad blocker. If your right and speed is what everyone cares about there should be a mass migration back to Firefox.
But I doubt it, because we have already have a similar experiment. FF+UBO on Android is blazing fast compared to Chrome on Android. Chrome not supporting extensions on Android means the situation is nothing like desktop where Chrome and Firefox are roughly comparable (and always have been). On an ad laden site FF+UBO is going to load a page several times faster. More to the point to me, ads on desktop are often "out of the way" of the main content, but on mobile that consume roughly 1/3 of an already small screen. Like the ancestor poster, I'm stunned that nobody uses Firefox mobile (I'm defining 0.49% market share as nobody). Performance wise the difference is enormous - yet clearly no one cares.
Which also means, you and I and other nerds notwithstanding, it likely no one cared about Firefox's performance versus Chrome when they switched on the desktop. Marketing, bundling, breaking of Firefox on Google's home sites look to fit the facts much better.
However she thought it was totally fine as she was used to it :S
So, convenient that they pushed something that half the web and browsers didn't pay much attention to, but they did because they wanted interactive apps and things inside a browser. And hey, this was at the time fancy UIs and frameworks were popping up. Were they prescient or just riding the wave? Or were they perhaps doing that plus also pushing the wave in the direction that best suited what they were good at and also made them lots of money in advertising.
So when we say marketing, we have to include all that advertising now just for a browser, but also for everything that google was pushing in synergy with it.
Adobe used to bundle Chrome by default with Acrobat Reader for instance. - this was how a LOT of people got Chrome the first time.
All the people coming up with revisionist bs about firefox being bad just don't realize that 1) there wasn't only Firefox, Opera was also present (chrome was basically a ripoff of Opera's ux) and that 2) the incumbent back then was IE. The gap between IE and firefox/opera was way larger than whatever people claim the difference was between firefox/opera and Chrome.