[creatonez]

> The bar for chrome was IE at the time, and it beat that.

I would say there were three trends that happened at the same time that really made a difference:

- People now actually update their web browser, and yes, started to ignore the browser vendor that wasn't shipping them (IE). Driveby download exploits started to disappear.

- Flash and Java went from enabled by default to prompt-first. Flash was later abandoned, and IcedTea-Web / Java Web Start had its core functionality gutted in later Java versions.

- No support for ActiveX at all, unless you wanted to go for IE Frame (Chrome and IE tabs under a Chrome interface) or Chrome Frame (IE and Chrome tabs under an IE interface), which quickly faded into corporate Intranet obscurity

All three saved us from a much worse future.