And they did aggressively market it to get to that point.
If you visited Google on Firefox or IE you would get a banner suggesting you to try Chrome.
It was bundled with all sorts of software, including Flash which would install it by default unless you found the right checkbox. (Many non-technical people I know ended up unintentionally installing it this way)
They even had offline (real-world) advertising for it.
I'm sure word of mouth had an effect, but it was only a small part of why it succeeded. Remember that Firefox only ever achieved a fraction of Chrome's (current) market share, and relied mostly on word of mouth (though they did have the occasional real-world ad campaign), despite its superiority to IE.
> If you visited Google on Firefox or IE you would get a banner suggesting you to try Chrome.
Let’s not understate this, as I remember it clearly.
As a Firefox user, using any Google-product on the web, I was constantly badgered to “upgrade” my browser.
That’s right: Google lied and told Firefox-users that they were downloading upgrades to their Firefox installations.
Completely inexcusable, fraudulent behaviour. Combined with the bu sling and drive-by-installers Google paid for, me and lots of my technical friends still consider Chrome genuine malware for this reason.
Sure, and as I mentioned elsewhere: before they had Chrome, they aggressively marketed Firefox, paying referral commissions for every Firefox install that included their toolbar. That was in 2005/2006 and ran for years, and was a large part why Firefox became successful: websites got paid to recommend it to their users.
Marketing is a large part of everything, I agree. But the argument I replied to was that it was the monopoly & bundling that made it successful. That's obviously completely false and pure propaganda, trying to absolve Firefox of anything and everything, essentially saying "none of those things matter, it was only Google's evil behavior".
> I'm sure word of mouth had an effect, but it was only a small part of why it succeeded.
I'm not so sure. Internet Explorer as "the perfect tool to download Chrome" wasn't a meme because people watched ads, but because Chrome (on Windows) was easy to download & install and fast & stable. Firefox wasn't any of that in comparison, that's why lots of people I know switched to Chrome back then.
And once you've gotten used to something, you really need a reason to switch back - something that Firefox never provided. Privacy might become that, but Chrome with plugins isn't terrible either, and Firefox sent data to Google for analytics "out of the box" as well (and probably still does?).
I understand that it's nice to have a boogeyman that can be blamed, but I don't think that's accurate. Firefox lost because of Mozilla, not because of Google.
If you visited Google on Firefox or IE you would get a banner suggesting you to try Chrome.
It was bundled with all sorts of software, including Flash which would install it by default unless you found the right checkbox. (Many non-technical people I know ended up unintentionally installing it this way)
They even had offline (real-world) advertising for it.
I'm sure word of mouth had an effect, but it was only a small part of why it succeeded. Remember that Firefox only ever achieved a fraction of Chrome's (current) market share, and relied mostly on word of mouth (though they did have the occasional real-world ad campaign), despite its superiority to IE.