> None of this had to do with product quality.

This is quite mistaken, Chrome would not be the market leader without the best product quality. You can't force a worse browser into market leadership, as Microsoft can tell you. They've been aggressively forcing defaults and preinstalling their browsers at a far deeper level than Google was for years (and they're still doing it), yet they lost so badly they outright abandoned their own formerly dominant browser. Then even among techies and "power users" who know how to change defaults, Chrome gained incredible traction as the fastest and simplest browser.

Companies can push a browser all they want but getting the vast majority of people to actually use the browser that you've put in their face requires your browser to be legitimately better than the one they're used to. Everyone, including many "power users", could see how much further ahead Chrome was, especially in its early years.

I know some people prefer to think that Google has mind control abilities and can somehow trick users into using a product that provides a worse experience, but this is far from the reality. Effective marketing and delivery is only ever a fraction of the story. It's telling that even in the tech industry, full of professionals who know how to use computers, Chrome remains the dominant browser.

Casual users use only one browser, the very concept of a worse browser doesn't exist for them.

>who know how to use computers

That's not much, even monkeys know how to use computers.

Everybody under 30 knows the meme "IE slow, Chrome fast"

That doesn’t match my memory at all. I recall a lot of word of mouth between non tech friends about “this new fast browser Google made”. At the time it really was eye-poppingly fast by comparison to the competition.

There was definitely tech crowd excitement about Chrome back when it was actually fast, but you don't get a 71% market share that way. You get a 71% market share by cutting deals with other vendors to inject your app, which is exactly what was done.

Another fun fact, is that previously to Chrome, Google had been doing the same with the Google Toolbar for IE, which changed everyone's default search to Google as well. Chrome wasn't so much about "protecting the open web" as protecting Google: They were afraid (not inaccurately) that Microsoft was considering figuring out a way to prevent the Google Toolbar from hijacking the search settings in IE.

The nontechnical user flow at the time, was that they might have MSN Search or whatever on Internet Explorer 6, and then they'd hit a website that needed Adobe Flash Player. The Flash Player installer would have the "Also install the Google Toolbar" checkbox preselected, so it would install that browser toolbar and switch your search engine to Google.

The reason Sundar Pichai is the guy that ended up on top at Google is because the Google Toolbar (and then Chrome) was his baby, and that ushered in Google's monopoly much more than literally anything else at Google.

Plus Google‘s browser cared deeply about developer tools. They were a generation better than anyone else at the time and had great support/evangelism. That alone converted my team of 15 in a year.

Were they not already using Firebug? I remember seeing Chrome's devtools and thinking "oh, like Firebug but built in."

Firebug was pretty buggy, especially the JS debugger. Lot of upgrade-and-break and downloading different versions. Dev Tools just worked.

I don't disagree with your first paragraph - though I also remember, in London, giant billboards and cinema ads for chrome too as well as advertising for it on the google search page.

However, I switched from Firefox to Chrome when the former changed how DPI were calculated, told everyone that the new way is the right way and it's up to websites to deal with it, and everything looked wrong in the meantime. And then I noticed that on Chrome, not only did things look a bit nicer to me (quite apart from the DPI issue), but the same sites I often used rendered just a little bit faster - faster enough to be noticeable.

At the time, at least for me, Chrome was at least equal to Firefox in terms of product quality.

I used the first version and remember it being like a stripped-down version of Firefox at the time. It was the same codebase but with most of the useful UI ripped out.