When Chrome first launched it was actually quite rough. There are some rose tinted glasses on this thread. It was Windows only, lacked basic features like printing, had no extensions system and had no few site compatibility bugs. The primary "features" that set it apart were all non-functionals like performance, security and the skyline tab UI which was nice but other browsers had tabs too. Oh, there was Incognito Mode, which was a nice improvement over other browser's history clearing UI.
It got some initial launch attention but then usage fell a lot (I was at Google at the time), and plateaued for a long time whilst the team fixed bugs, ported to other platforms and caught up on the feature set. It took a lot of belief by Google to continue funding it during these quiet years when relatively few people used it. One of the biggest struggles the Chrome marketing team faced turned out to be that nobody even knew what a browser was let alone why they'd consider switching to a different one.
Still, the team didn't give up. They just plugged away at it, year after year. They caught up on features, added a thoughtful/controllable extensions API and were careful to stop power users doing things that would accidentally trash performance, like opening billions of tabs or installing extensions that trashed the browser internals (a particular problem for Firefox).
It got some initial launch attention but then usage fell a lot (I was at Google at the time), and plateaued for a long time whilst the team fixed bugs, ported to other platforms and caught up on the feature set. It took a lot of belief by Google to continue funding it during these quiet years when relatively few people used it. One of the biggest struggles the Chrome marketing team faced turned out to be that nobody even knew what a browser was let alone why they'd consider switching to a different one.
Still, the team didn't give up. They just plugged away at it, year after year. They caught up on features, added a thoughtful/controllable extensions API and were careful to stop power users doing things that would accidentally trash performance, like opening billions of tabs or installing extensions that trashed the browser internals (a particular problem for Firefox).