I've been saying this for years, that Chrome's market share is mostly caused by
Google's aggressive advertisement. Many users don't even know exactly what a browser is, they just clicked that button at some point because the text next to it told them to do so.
Chrome for years and years was sold as lightning fast and secure from malware - and it delivered.
That was why I switched back in the day.
Even today, it has a reputation for being lightning fast, and having a fast pace of development.
In my (admittedly mostly/predominantly) technical circle - I don't know many who switched to ads. In fact, those people are the least likely to click on ads.
Most of them switched because Chrome is fast, and lightweight - or for the non-technical people, because their technical friends told them to.
Yes, it's fast in many aspects, but totally not lightweight. It eats memory like there's no tomorrow, and spams the OS with processes. But to be fair, that's not super relevant for most users.
I've seen technical people switch because of performance, and I occasionally use it for certain tasks too for that reason.
But almost every time I see it on a non-techie computer and ask them something like, "ah, you're using Chrome?", they look at me like I'm speaking a different language. So I suppose they were not aware when they installed it.
