[Erunno]

Yeah, there are probably several factors which assisted Chrome's rise to prominence. Obviously Google's huge marketing power and their bundling deals can't be disregarded easily but in the end Chrome is also a great product. It's fast (real and perceived performance), it has a remarkably polished primary UI (though some of the secondary UIs like history are rather suboptimal) and has neat features which only get slowly adopted by the competitors (e.g. ingenious tab closing behavior, built-in translator, built-in PDF reader, etc.). So great product + good marketing = success.

And the importance of geek/early adopter/enthusiast users shouldn't be underestimated because these are the ones who often have wide reach (e.g. journalists, bloggers, etc.) or are responsible for how web technologies are used (e.g. developers). It's a bitter lesson the non-WebKit browsers vendors had to learn after most mobile web developers started to target only WebKit because that's the devices/browsers they are using on a day-to-day basis. And in its early days Mozilla thrived on the free guerrilla marketing provided by enthusiast users, not just in their immediate private space but also in magazines, on websites and other outlets where users and authors were constantly praising Firefox for its security, speed and features compared to IE6. Today that place has been mostly taken over by Chrome.

I still having a hard time wrapping my head around how badly Mozilla handled the appearance of Chrome for years. The threat was so obvious from the very beginning and not just in hindsight. As I said, I have the impression that they are on the right track now but there must be lessons to be learned from the 2008 to 2011 period for Mozilla itself and other organizations in similar situations. I wish Mozilla higher-ups would sit together and publish a retrospective about what they perceive they did right and wrong.