For a time, chrome was bundled along side JRE updates. I went over to my mother's multiple times and saw that Chrome had, yet again, replaced Firefox.

Not to mention the constant advertising/banners to switch to Chrome on all of Google's web properties.

>Chrome didn't dethrone IE and displace FF because google advertised it.

This I almost heavily disagree with. Surprisingly, marketing and advertising is far, far more effective than product performance. Performance helps retain users, but advertising is what moves users. That is nearly always the case.

It started that way, then it dominated because every google search not using chrome popped up “Better with Chrome” or “Try Chrome.” Same with all of Google’s properties. There’s no way to disable this. That’s billions of free adverts every day. It adds up.

I think similarly back in the 90s that IE4 took off because Netscape4 was horrible and then stagnated, but dominated because Windows bundled and required it. They had bundled and required IE2/3 but those were inferior to NN3.

So being good gets them to critical mass and then anticompetitive forces got them to owning.