Comment by elmerfud
6 days ago
I do think you're rewriting history a bit here. Of course a Google advertised to their product but people didn't move to Chrome simply because of the advertisements. Chrome took hold because literally every other choice sucked and sucked hard. When you only have sucky choices you have to deal with them and they made something massively better than anything else at the time. Companies with buckets of money like Microsoft didn't innovate in this space and even when they saw what Google was doing with Chrome their ability to compete with it was laughable. Even when they finally switch to their edge browser because the Internet explorer name was so tainted with bad experiences they still suck in this space. Even with Bing and the billions of dollars they can throw at it they still suck in this space.
I think it's a combination of both. There was absolutely a period where Chrome was faster, and Chrome still has a better security design. But Google also pushed Chrome incredibly hard, including bundling it with other software as a checked-by-default box, and used all the tactics to get it made the default browser and make it hard to switch, and advertised it on Google services for free, and made some features of Google products require it.
> Google also pushed Chrome incredibly hard
To fight the Microsoft monopoly. And we are lucky that browsers (Firefox&Chrome&SafariMobile) won on the back of DOJ action against IE. We could all be using Windows applications and a few lucky rich have a Compaq iPaq phones: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=compaq+ipaq&iar=images&iax=images
Without Chrome would we have got Safari on the iPhone? I also remember WAP (uggggh) pages before HTML. In the alternative universe DOJ is fighting their 10th lost cause against Microsoft (who keeps getting away with their evil ways).
It took hold because it was a part of almost every popular piece of software installer back in the day, and enabled by default