OP, agreed.

Prior to Chrome, Google actually used to promote Firefox on its own pages instead - which was a major driver of Firefox adoption. Google did it because they had a partnership with Mozilla, and were very much in favor of users switching to a browser that's not Internet Explorer.

Then Google decided they wanted more control over Firefox. Mozilla decided that Google isn't going to get it. This resulted in Chrome.

Firefox was evicted from Google's promotion, and it never quite recovered.