? Chrome shipped with a fast JS JIT, simplified UI, per-process isolation. Acting like you had to pay someone to perceive a superior user benefit to Firefox, which at the time would crash and you'd like all your tabs, is ridiculously ahistorical.
You must have forgotten how they paid to put it in just about every installer, selected by default, and pushed it aggressively in every Google property. They may not have had to, but they used their monopoly position to cut the air off to every other browser. That's not ahistorical even if everyone seems to have forgotten.
We'll never know how things might have gone without that monopoly abuse. Maybe Mozilla would have had enough developers and testers to fix things without abandoning what made Firefox unique.
Yeah, tough luck. Pretty much none of the companies that showed up first in the tech industry are still amongst the top 5-10 players today.
On the contrary, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, WhatsApp, Skype, Netflix and pretty much every single tech giant that enjoys a quasi monopoly over their market today, they all arrived pretty late. Not second to market, mind you. Waay late.