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Google has put a lot of time and money into getting Chrome mainstreamed. IE Tab was a big help for enterprise adoption and that made more normal people accept it as a "normal" browser. Most people use Gmail, Google Search, and YouTube, all of which heavily promote Chrome. Firefox has responded well to Chrome for the most part, but when Chrome was released, Fx had some long-standing problems that Chrome obviated, and many in the tech community have been Chrome devotees since. Mozilla sometimes gets confused and makes bad choices, like manually reviewing all code that gets published in its addon store and refusing to ship patent-encumbered H.264 codecs, that further hurt adoption and reinforce the reputation that Firefox makes it "harder" than necessary to use the web. Google made a deal with Adobe to fix up some of the stability and performance issues in Flash and they ship the improved plugin as "Pepper", part of Chrome; Mozilla still doesn't have a good solution for this, though it has a small start in Shumway. Google built an internal PDF reader so that people didn't have to worry about Adobe Reader popping up as they clicked around. Mozilla eventually copied them, though Mozilla's reader is written in JS, and Chrome's is written in C++. Google systematically attacked the most annoying things about internet browsing and dispatched of them effectively in Chrome, didn't make excuses about how the bad experience was Adobe's fault. Mozilla is less effective because it's usually too busy with infighting over what technically counts as "open" and what doesn't to get the real work done, or at least to get it done before Google has already shipped the change to their users. I used Chrome for about 18 months full-time but have been back on Fx since version 4, so I'm not a Chrome apologist, but these are the reasons why Firefox isn't crushing Chrome. |
To be fair, extension malware runs rampant in Google Chrome, so it wasn't necessarily a bad idea per se. Just perhaps not a great execution.