Chrome gained traction because IE was really, really bad. Now it has mindshare and you might could argue that Google maintains this mindshare with malpractice.
The damage was done, people learned to "download the internet" from google first. And if they forgot, all Google services kept pushing them till they did.
They all had checkboxes for Chrome and other ad-ware. If you didn't pay attention to unchecked them during installation you'd find your default browser changed and other crap. Those who did "tech-support" for family members remember.
Average joe: next next next done.
Don't ever fantasize about average users back then doing research if there would be a better web browser and then going ahead to download and install chrome on their own.
"What is a web browser?"
Eventually the Google Toolbar itself would just auto-upgrade to Chrome as well.
Anecdotally, my father liked the Google toolbar for giving a separate search box in IE, but disliked Chrome and was confused when Chrome auto-installed and the Google Toolbar partly became a big ad for "congrats, you can use Chrome now", and that was one of his reasons to (finally) switch to Firefox for good (he used both IE and Firefox for a long time prior).
I remember that I had to specifically uncheck this during installation of freeware back then. People I helped with their computer had no idea where chrome came from, the internet changed on a sudden day. They believably told they didn't download it. Most likely it came with some freeware they did download. For some it could be that they __did download it__ in fact by being tricked into it by weasel wording from google. There was a real strong push, I remember the chrome ads and links to chrome where pushed everywhere in google's services.
Aside, ask a friend what the internet is and they point to chrome. We keep overestimating the average Joe. Young people are not necessarily any wiser, to the contrary I would say.
We live in the 1950's, I work for Maddison Street and build a massive ad campaign putting ads everywhere you look about smoking, saying how it's so cool and beneficial for your health and how all people should do it if they wanna be cool and healthy. After a while, consumers already happy with breathable atmospheric air become smokers en-masses, voluntarily, putting toxic fumes in their lungs to look cool as advertised.
Who's responsible here?
But Chrome was just better than Firefox when it launched so it accelerated the IE decline.
This feels exactly like the whole Mac M1 thing. Every techie person seems to think that the M1 was going to cause all sorts of people to switch to Macs. Guess what? Nobody gives a shit about a 5% faster processor except for power users.
Regular people don't care about Chrome being "better," either and that's not how it got market dominance.
IE was awful, and Firefox was…perfectly cromulent. Chrome was so much better than any of the competition.
- They found the internet had gotten a new icon and had no idea how it got there. (bundling with popular software)
- They were instructed by google.
That is how chrome came to top. See other comments for more context.
The fact is, browsers aren't a product, they're a platform feature. Users have zero incentive to ever switch from whatever their OS came bundled with, unless you make a massive advertising push. The fact that Google managed to get people to switch to a non-platform browser at all is a shocking achievement.
Would you rather everyone still be using IE? Because that's exactly what would have happened otherwise.
Chrome copied lots of stuff from Opera, and Opera had 2.5% of marketshare. Firefox (who I personally didn't enjoy as much as Opera) had benefited from a grasroots campaign had taken years to get 35% of marketshare. Both were nobrainers compared to how broken IE was, and they were on the market years before chrome.
So.. Yeah. Chrome was a good product. But competitors had showed that being a good browser without insane advertising was never going to be enough.
It definitely wasn't better or faster after it forced your system to start heavily using a swap file on spinning rust storage.
That's not to say IE was better than Chrome. I just don't think it appearing on the desktop was a deliberate decision for many. I'd be surprised if many even realized they had installed it.
One especially awesome feature was a built in pdf creator. You did not have to download cutePDF or whatever.
It was also more reliable and crashed less, and probably other things I forget.
Upon its release it also predictably had compatibility problems, leading Google to implement a wrapper around the IE engine. Firefox had compatibility issues as well. I'm not trying to say one was better than the other. I think people tend to forget the environment Chrome was released into.
Do while IE wasn't great, it was far more stable for me. I favored Firefox, but it was in a bit of tumult at the time. I'm sure Chrome was a better experience for others. I think at the time Google was still basking in its adulation from tech enthusiasts, papering over Chrome's flaws. That was back when people got excited for new Google products and trusted them to not be evil.
As a bonus fun fact, Chrome created a massive headache for Selenium because Firefox's internals where called "Chrome" and "chrome://" was a URL scheme. Selenium used those URLs and got stuck with loads of support requests from the ensuing confusion. Everyone thought Chrome was just an internal project name and that Google would surely pick something that didn't conflict with another browser.
Google paid vendors so that Chrome installed and made itself the default without users even knowing what had happened.
The "purposely mis-function" thing isn't a mis-characterisation either. It became fairly well documented over time.
It was just soooo much better than the competition. I mean, Firefox was better than IE6, but that was not a high bar to pass in the first place. The thing that won over developers IMO was the developer tools: Firebug was slow as molasses and an utter memory hog. And that didn't change for many years - but by the time Firefox caught up, it was too late.
While there was for sure a long period of time where Chrome was significantly faster than Firefox, there was never a time where Firefox was particularly bad. Firefox always oscillated between "really good" and "totally ok".
I’ll agree with you that Chrome really changed the web development experience with incredible tooling compared to what you could get back then but this had no impact on most users experience.
I totally remember Chrome being the fastest/snappiest browser, especially the first versions but Firefox has never been slow.
Yes, but guess what the developers started pushing onto their friends who asked for a browser? The one they were personally using.
Word-of-mouth is insanely powerful and FF alienated way too many of the key people.
I was a Firefox user at the time (was using it when it was Firebird). People were already starting to shift away from IE towards Firefox at the time. A sequence of events where a person's computer was infect with malware, they asked a computer savvy friend for help, the friend "fixed" it, installed Firefox and told them to stop using IE is how most people switched browsers in those days. But Firefox was a slog and Chrome was a breath of fresh air when it was first released. So the sequence was tweaked to "install Chrome and tell you to stop using IE".
Chrome became what it is because Microsoft had tried to neuter the internet because they saw the web app potential and understood that it could undermine Windows market share. And when they realized that there was no stopping the internet, they spent several years incompetently trying to improve IE (and eventually Edge) before eventually going the "can't beat em, join em" route.
However, Google was smart enough to know that being superior doesn't count. Firefox was not horribly slow, the leap from firefox over IE was massive. Chrome over firefox wasn't quite the same leap.
The average user has been pushed aggressively, they weren't going to do research on web browsers when they even didn't know what a web browser is. Google knew that.
Chrome didn’t. It was noticeably faster and more reliable.
Switching browsers isn’t something that people generally do lightly. You lose them, you lose them for a decade+.
That and Mozilla behaviour hasn’t been great over the past several years; like, forced advertising extensions, crypto, more advertising to turn off on a fresh install than _google_…
Manifest v3 will probably be the straw that forces me to switch back again, but reluctantly.
Aggressive marketing is not malpractice.
Neither would have Chrome to be fair. I remember being a PC user in the late '00s and Chrome ads and downloads links where absolutely everywhere. On Google, on Youtube, on GMail, on any kind of SW installer for Windows would come with a pre-ticked checkbox that would shove Chrome down your throat and then also set itself as the default browser on your system, like ad/-spyware. Naughty-naughty.
It was impossible to escape Chrome not getting on your Windows machine back then, it was like a disease. Sure, it was also hip and cool back then, like all brand new products launched by Google back then that generated hype and curiosity getting people to talk about it and recommend it further, but it wouldn't have reached such insane popularity on pure merit and word of mouth alone.