Being a web developer was not fun; and the web was absolutely being held back. Chrome did a lot of things right: per-origin sandboxing, properly implementing web standards, V8, developer tools, and back then Chromium was super close to Chrome.
Do I think Chrome is a net-negative for the web over the past ~3-5 years? Yes, especially with manifest v3, “privacy sandbox”, and them basically forcing through web APIs because they have the dominant marketshare.
But early Chrome was a technologically impressive and user-friendly browser that really did make the web massively better.
I remember happily putting Firefox and Chrome mini-banners (what are they called? Those little rectangular images) on my website, for free, because I recommended it.
The same exact issues we had with IE.
Chrome's introduction, albeit through smoother, lighter browser experience at the time, pushed other browsers to standardize to google.
In one way it's bad to have a homogenous approach to all things web based, but in another way it did make the internet a better experience overall.
Some libraries/scripts helped normalise things a little, but never enough. Yuck.
