I don't understand why you're arguing with everyone in the comments. The premise was that enthusiasts drove public opinion. I was one of those enthusiasts. I g

I don't understand why you're arguing with everyone in the comments. The premise was that enthusiasts drove public opinion. I was one of those enthusiasts. I got everyone I know to switch to Chrome. Why? 1. It opened instantly. The others hung. 2. People can't conceive of this now but in that era if a rogue website started going crazy with Javascript it would CRASH THE ENTIRE BROWSER. In chrome it only killed the one tab. That sandboxing was game-changing for the state of the internet back then. 3. It could handle an obscene amount of tabs. The others couldn't. 4. 3 enabled a new mode that essentially didn't exist before - "reopen tabs". Tabbed browsing existed in Firefox but each tab was still so heavy to reopen that essentially nobody would expect to reopen their last tabs. With chrome the default was to reopen where you stopped. 5. Its built-in popup blocker actually worked. Yes, pop-up blockers existed before. And yet websites still found a way to work around it. Chrome's just worked. I don't know why they could do it but others couldn't, but at worst it would pop up a new tab next to your existing one. For others internet browsing was still an experience that ended closing a browser window with "oh shit there's been a porn popup window in the background this entire time". Not so with Chrome. NONE of this came from marketing. ALL of this became apparent within seconds-to-minutes of using it. I only had to lead my friends and family to it, once they started using it they never ent back.