It was so much faster you could not believe it. It was a revelation and even though "degoogling" was already a thing, Chrome was so much better than the rest that you just had to use it. Tabs actually worked without crashing your PC.

The risks were clear from day one but Google and Chrome were great to both users and devs, and it stayed like that for a long time.

When chrome was literally first released it was in fact faster than IE and Firefox, by quite a lot, and had some nice features that neither had, too. But that gap didn't last for long.