Firefox of course got much better eventually, but by then the damage was done, and Chrome's ability to sync with the rest of Google products (and Android devices) made the browser extremely sticky.
Chrome UI was (and is) total shit compared to Opera (Presto Opera, not the new Blink one). The tab bar was literally unusable for like 10 years if you had more than ~20 tabs open.
Last time I used Windows without an SSD, Chrome kept stalling on IO every couple minutes (for some profile or temp files bs), fixed by symlinking to a ramdisk.
Chrome still can't properly VSYNC, can't keep a stable framerate and has unnecessary frames of input lag.
When (if) they make ad blocking impossible, they will lose every single tech savvy user they have.
What OS bundles Chrome? Do you mean ChromeOS?
> and 2) they could shove "try Chrome!" banners at the top of every Google property.
That happened way later.
Maybe you have forgotten since it was so long ago, but the original wave of power users migrating to Chrome and bringing their non-power user friends along was exactly like the wave of folks who moved to Firefox. Chrome came out in 2008, had process-per-tab isolation and custom Chrome (i.e. window decorations, that's where the name comes from) that used less vertical space.
Your statement is revisionist history.
Android.
[EDIT] and Chrome was better enough that it got power users switching (this is before "Google has become very obviously evil" was common geek opinion yet, which helped), but I'm not sure it would have gotten them installing it on normal folks' computers with quite the fervor we did Firefox, back in the day. The banner ads are what got them on normal people's computers.
https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/
edit... I'm sort of amazed the whole thing is licensed as CC
Non-nerds can no longer tell it's better, so I stopped doing that. No longer worth the effort, might even end up adding to my friends-and-family tech support burden rather than reducing it. I still use it myself anywhere Safari's not available, but yeah, it's a power-user-only product now.
Chrome only did better with regular users because 1) it was OS-bundled, and 2) they could shove "try Chrome!" banners at the top of every Google property. I don't think the product itself is significantly more focused on normal users. Google's just got a way, way better platform for promotion. They can snap their fingers and get a million installs of something in a day, if they really want to. But fact is FF doesn't have that. What they did have was power users doing all their marketing for them. Not so much, these days.