People were anti-IE because IE was vastly inferior to other offerings. Firefox had been making steady but slow progress as tech-savvy folks would install it for their friends/family.
Chrome came out and it was even better than Firefox on speed (javascript especially, with v8), reliability (process isolation, websites would freeze all of your tabs if not your whole computer at the time), and usability (unified search/url bar). And it had Google marketing behind it, meaning non-tech folks knew and loved the company making it and don’t rely on their tech-savvy friends to hear about it.
Chrome came out and it was even better than Firefox on speed (javascript especially, with v8), reliability (process isolation, websites would freeze all of your tabs if not your whole computer at the time), and usability (unified search/url bar). And it had Google marketing behind it, meaning non-tech folks knew and loved the company making it and don’t rely on their tech-savvy friends to hear about it.