>Chrome's appeal was primarily technical. Each tab got its own process and could crash without taking down the entire browser. No one else had this at the time,

>Chrome's appeal was primarily technical. Each tab got its own process and could crash without taking down the entire browser. No one else had this at the time, and it was a big deal because Flash was still widespread so sites were even less stable than they are today. Actually IE8 had the same thing (and it was in development by 2007, so the few-months-later release date vs Chrome doesn't matter in terms of architecture).