I agree that Chrome has been good for healthy competition in the browser market. What I don't agree with is that Firefox hasn't been holding it's own the whole time.
They did force Mozilla to actually innovate on Firefox, which was great, but they closed the performance gap to insignificant levels pretty quickly.
I really think the majority of people switching to Chrome was just momentum of "I use Google and they say Chrome is better".
I told everyone I could to use Chrome because the risk of being infected by malware was radically lower. Flash 0days used to be so common, I know plenty of people who'd get hit. Java plugin was the other big one and Chrome had it click to play early on IIRC.
Chrome had a massive advantage over Firefox, security wise, for quite a long time.
> I told everyone I could to use Chrome because the risk of being infected by malware was radically lower.
I used to say so too, but that was because at that time everyone was using Internet Explorer, not Firefox. Both Firefox and Chrome had and have been much more secure than IE (and Edge used to be unstable for a long time), so this was not a good reason to prefer Chrome over Firefox even at that time.
I don't disagree that Chrome had been (and is still, due to the personpower) more secure than Firefox. But a gap between both and IE is much wider [1] than a gap between Chrome and Firefox and the latter didn't affect the recommendation. Chrome was much more secure than IE and had a good UX, that's it.
[1] Qualitatively: both didn't really support ActiveX. Quantatitvely: even back in 2010 (where Chrome's Flash sandboxing and Firefox's out-of-process NPAPI "isolation" was still at their infancy) both crashed much less often than IE.
They did force Mozilla to actually innovate on Firefox, which was great, but they closed the performance gap to insignificant levels pretty quickly.
I really think the majority of people switching to Chrome was just momentum of "I use Google and they say Chrome is better".