[newoldhead]

for most, i would assume it's largely just that during the time of the naïve web, there was a period where google kind of was the company, so people started using it for everything (think shortly before and then during the early google+ era). 10 years later almost every normie who didn't start using apple products uses gmail and chrome simply because they legacied into it from when they were younger and less aware of the negative aspects of the practice.

[seti0Cha]

I think you're overplaying the social aspect. For quite a while, Chrome had a serious speed advantage over Firefox and the developer tools were (are?) considered much better. I'm not sure if either is still the case. They both seem fine for my purposes, but I use Chrome because it subjectively feels a bit quicker and I've gotten disillusioned with the practice of choosing software based on political considerations.

[blahyawnblah]

Firefox's dev tools are much better than Chrome's

[0x073]

Firefox devtools where long time not comparable to chrome, now they are almost the same. There are now some features I prefer on Firefox and some I prefer on chrome.

[WorldMaker]

The biggest difference was Firefox's best Dev Tools in those years were extensions and maintained via a wider community and updated on a different (sometimes faster) cadence than the browser itself. Good old Firebug was more capable than Chrome's Dev Tools at most points in time in that "long time not comparable" people believe existed, but Firefox didn't get "credit" for it until Firefox was finally pressured to move extensions like Firebug in-box and into the browser's normal deployment cycle. (I'm not sure that's necessarily the improvement people think it was.)

[cinntaile]

A decade or so back Firefox was just so fucking slow and Chrome wasn't. So I switched. It's fixed now so I switched back.