There was plenty of discussion on this topic at the time, and there seemed to be a rough consensus: chrome was the google vote for choosing the direction of th

There was plenty of discussion on this topic at the time, and there seemed to be a rough consensus: chrome was the google vote for choosing the direction of the www. As other voters, we had internet explorer, where Microsoft basically decided to strangle the web and end evolution after it won the browser war, just to keep windows relevant. We had firefox, where mozilla is forever on life support and never very well managed. We had safari, only a valid choice in the apple world. So google's survival depended on the goodwill of an enemy actively trying to kill them, a drunk zombie, and an at best uninterested party. In this world, google brought much better security, much faster javascript execution speeds, much better rendering. All of these were building blocks for a higher level of web-based applications. I think everyone was surprised about how good chrome fulfilled its role. The desktop never got its central role back, to the point that electron a.k.a. chrome is now the dominant desktop gui paradigm for microsoft itself. Here is one random example from 2008: https://channeldailynews.com/news/the-business-case-for-googles-chrome/8152 https://channeldailynews.com/news/the-business-case-for-goog...