Everyone who went to search Google saw the ad. It said something like "Try a faster browser"
The fact that Chrome was advertised on the most popular page in the world, and especially that it was the only ad on that page, definitely made a difference in adoption.
The quality of the dev tools has nothing to do with it.
Speaking as a dev, the dev tools had a ton to do with it.
There’s also a popover div ad in gmail: https://twitter.com/ridiculous_fish/status/10810743891336806...
Disclaimer: I am the creator of the video
I too remember seeing this ad every time on Google's search page, but it's hard to search for articles mentioning it now, because any search on keywords "google chrome ads" return completely unrelated results.
There are these old questions:
* https://support.google.com/chrome/forum/AAAAP1KN0B0FrX8mjNQu...
* https://support.google.com/websearch/forum/AAAAgtjJeM41xpRdM...
* https://support.google.com/chrome/forum/AAAAP1KN0B08liXq3dy9...
* https://www.quora.com/Why-am-I-being-shown-ads-for-Google-Ch...
Also this news piece: https://www.techspot.com/news/79940-how-youtube-employees-ki... While the article is about Google advertising three different browser in that particular banner, you can see on the screenshot there is another ad, that is just for Google Chrome. That's the ad that was shown all the time on Google Search and Youtube.
That people wouldn't buy into Apple stuff is a big assumption, because we did do just that, for better or worse. Speaking of which, I see many more successful commercial desktop apps for MacOS than for Windows or Linux combined, even if Windows still has a much bigger market share. And this happened since before Apple's App Store for MacOS became a thing.
I was also one of Facebook's early adopters, many of my programmer friends were too. Being from Romania, let me tell you, the early adopters here were all software developers ;-)
" see many more successful commercial desktop apps for MacOS than for Windows or Linux combined"
Office profits by itself would crush all MacOS application sales.
Maybe it is easier for the single developer to create something profitable on MacOS but that's because the bigger players have marketshare over windows in the profitable niches.
Geeks are extremely influential to their non technical friends but why would you ever impose Linux on them? I don't see how it would benefit them and you'd have to deal with the endless fallout and questions that arise.
https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/dell-laptops-and-notebo...
I was curious what specs made it "developer"-mode, and it looks like it's just a really big battery, very bright screen with good viewing angles, and easy to open with one hand (and a stable screen when you're moving around with it). Seems like it's specifically aimed at devs that work remote jobs and might be working outside from time to time?
Still, neat idea.
It's a lot easier to get people to switch browsers than OSs.
The consumerization of technology happened a long time ago.