I think the biggest boost to Chrome's initial success was the fact that it's capable of installing entirely within the user profile, so unless a corporate IT de

I think the biggest boost to Chrome's initial success was the fact that it's capable of installing entirely within the user profile, so unless a corporate IT department has gone out of their way to lock a system down an unprivileged user can install it for themself. Remember, Chrome was released in 2008. Internet Explorer, with almost 2/3 of the browser marketshare, was on version 7 at that time and a stupid number of corporate IT departments would continue to default to IE 6 rather than updating or fixing their ancient garbage applications for years to come. Chrome provided a way for power users to have a non-shitty browser, which then blossomed from there as more and more web sites made use of modern browser capabilities and worked worse and worse in corporate-mandated IE instances. Putting on my BOFH hat obviously I'm not the biggest fan of such "shadow IT" processes but I understand that they happen when needs and wants aren't being met and sometimes this is the most effective way to force a necessary change.