I happen to be staying with a non-technical man of around retiring age at present. Yesterday he had his laptop returned from a service which included an OS reinstall. After that, Firefox was installed and Chrome was not; he knows of Firefox, but has been a Chrome user for whatever reason. He observed: “Firefox? But no Google. I suppose they’ve installed Firefox and didn’t reinstall Google. Hmm. Firefox. Is it any good?” I responded: “well, I use Firefox”. So now he’s using Firefox and having no difficulty. (I then watched him hunt-and-peck “www.google.com” into the address bar. I told him that he didn’t need to do that, he could just type his search term straight away. In this case, he wanted to access Gmail. I despair sometimes, really I do. But this all matched what he’d been doing in Chrome, it wasn’t anything specific to Firefox.)
The observations here:
1. Most casual users don’t actually care which browser they use. (Citation needed, to be sure, but among casual users, I suspect it’s the substantial majority.)
2. Corollary: often I have seen cases where a different browser is installed, and the user just accepts it and keeps going. This has been used most parasitically by Google, bundling their browser with other things (an obnoxious practice in the industry at large that is I think not as common as it used to be, but is still widespread in certain niches). A great many users that have Chrome don’t even know how it ended up on their computer; it just… became their default browser at some point.
3. Google as a whole has been extremely underhanded in its marketing and positioning of Chrome, abusing their position of strength in one industry in order to dominate another. There has been some grumbling about this in legal circles, but not a great deal of action; yet if current trends continue, antitrust lawsuits will assuredly come. He wasn’t calling it “Chrome”, he was calling it “Google”. Google search, Google mail, Google browser, Google horizontals.