In the early day every driver CD and a large portion of online installers had chrome bundled and pushed. Pretty sure almost every preinstalled system also had chrome. If I don't miss remember, even game installers occasionally pushed chrome. It was very noticeable and I remember quite well the annoyance of having to go to advanced setting and unselect chrome several times during reinstalls of windows 7.

They did have a different memory profile (might still have one in macos, I wouldn't know since I don't use mac), and the UI is each to ones own, but I few programs outside of AOL installers has been as pushy as chrome during the beginning.