> Google started, developed, and built Chrome into the best browser available today

I don’t think this is as settled as you imply. I tend to like Google products, and do almost everything in the Google ecosystem. But my browser is normally brave or Firefox, because better Adblock is so so impactful. I feel that chrome is a valid alternative, but that no browser is really clearly “the best”. In your view, what is it that makes chrome the best?

1. It might not be the best across all metrics today, but it definitely was a few years ago.

2. While it's true that other browsers like Firefox have been catching up to Chrome in speed, it's still true that Chrome help lead the way and if not for it, the web would've likely been far slower today.

3. There has been an explosion in other browsers in the past few years, but admittedly they're all chromium-based, so even that wouldn't have been possible without Chrome

> In your view, what is it that makes chrome the best?

As a former Firebug fan: Chrome/Chromium has had superior browser dev-tools experience for over a decade now.

Anecdotally, I've seen many geeks (who certainly don't make their browser choice based on an annoying popup, and are generally more on the anti-Google side) use Chrome rather than Firefox, at conferences etc. (but this is mostly 5+ years ago). Not the majority, but plenty of well-informed opinionated people.

I believe especially back then, Chrome performance was significantly better than Firefox. On Android, Firefox was so slow and unpolished that the ad blocking couldn't make up for it (and even that wasn't available from the start).

Chrome is the "best" because all of the other browsers continue to fail at real world marketing. The best ads and marketing continue to be real life stuff - billboards, bus signage, people handing out flyers, etc etc etc. You can't just hype a browser on social media or web forums, and you can't hype it solely to those who are tech savvy.

A solid example of this right now is all of the Mullvad VPN ads I've seen on the Seattle Light Rail lately. Google used to have ads everywhere for Chrome. The only time I saw Firefox stuff was the rare t-shirt at a tech conference.

Brave is based on Chrome (Chromium).

When Chrome started, it was the best because it introduced the process-partitioned model that allowed it to completely avoid a common failure-mode among its peer browsers at the time: one bug in the processing of one tab would crash the entire browser (a problem exacerbated by the existence of a now-defunct plugin ecosystem where third-party code was running inside the browser process; we basically don't do that anymore). That was becoming brutal on users as more and more of the work they did every day transitioned over to web-based.

The other browsers have picked up the partitioning since then as a feature so the playing-field is far more level.