I think at least nowadays people try to pretend they care about web standards.
I don't know why that's ironic. The Microsoft web teams have always had a focus on being fairly standards compliant. The Microsoft Browser team themselves definitely went down a route of stagnation with IE6, but a lot of that had to do with W3C's stagnation as much as Microsoft's anticompetitive behavior. They also implemented massively useful technologies that are ubiquitous today, such as XHR.
They get a bad rap, for deserved reasons, but that decade of stagnation and non-Standard ActiveX controls wasn't fully on them.
Like, a colleague was working on code that would reach into the DOM and just tweak the CSS for a bunch of items, delete other items, move things around, and maybe 40% of the time it would work as intended, and 60% of the time, boom, dead browser, segmentation fault.
React, where it's just normal for Javascript to rewrite the entire page in response to a keystroke, would have been completely unthinkable, there's no chance you could fill out an entire form before the browser crashed if you do that.
We are talking about V8 being released in 2008, Chackra in 2011, and SpiderMonkey in 2009.
With GCs that can handle the amount of stuff that React throws away on each update.
Relevant: “A Visual Browser History, from Netscape 4 to Mozilla Firefox” https://www.andrewturnbull.net/mozilla/history.html
Phoenix saved us.
Unfortunately Mozilla’s refusal to implement process-per-tab, combined with Flash’s instability, let Chrome eat their lunch.
In the head of people google and chrome slowly became a synonym of internet the same way the ie icon used to be in the previous decade.
What you mention was certainly a major reason, but not the only one. Another one was that Chrome was simply a better browser for many years for normal users (mainly because of its performance).
