I am old enough to remember that Chrome didn't really take off until Google released an extension framework with many popularly supported extensions. There's likely a lot of room in the browser market for custom browsers curated and managed by trusted third parties but my sense is that a) given their history, people wouldn't necessarily feel comfortable having Microsoft fill that role and b) given their size, Microsoft wants Edge to compete directly with Chrome and Firefox for absolute majority market share, rather than chase single digit % niche markets (which would be a very exciting business for almost anyone else).
Interesting. My memory is probably hazy, but for me, Chrome took off because the choices at the time were IE and Firefox, which used to be an insane memory hog.
I've been using Firefox continuously as my only browser since it was in beta and called Phoenix. This has never been even remotely true, at least on my experience.
To carry on with your anecdotal evidence, I'm going to disagree and say that yes, there was a time where firefox was just dog slow to open - on all 3 of the PCs I owned at the time, two using only 2-3 extensions and one using none. If there wasn't, I never would have switched to chrome.
IE was pretty bad but Firefox was decent. I interfaced a bit with the early Chrome team. Better performance was a necessary but not sufficient condition for success. Chrome was the fastest browser for at least six months but many early adopters wouldn't touch it without an extension framework. Certain extensions like Firebug had become extremely popular with developers by then. Google wanted these developers as early adopters. Once the extension framework was released then everybody hopped on the Chrome train (except for the Firefox purists), and Google proceeded to leverage their O&O sites (and spend billions of additional dollars) to pump distribution. Later on the extension frameworks (for all browsers) became riddled with malware and adware and are still a major source of vulnerability today.
