[nerdix]

Exactly. It's been a while and so a lot people either don't remember or were too young to really remember.

I was a Firefox user at the time (was using it when it was Firebird). People were already starting to shift away from IE towards Firefox at the time. A sequence of events where a person's computer was infect with malware, they asked a computer savvy friend for help, the friend "fixed" it, installed Firefox and told them to stop using IE is how most people switched browsers in those days. But Firefox was a slog and Chrome was a breath of fresh air when it was first released. So the sequence was tweaked to "install Chrome and tell you to stop using IE".

Chrome became what it is because Microsoft had tried to neuter the internet because they saw the web app potential and understood that it could undermine Windows market share. And when they realized that there was no stopping the internet, they spent several years incompetently trying to improve IE (and eventually Edge) before eventually going the "can't beat em, join em" route.