[newoldhead]

for most, i would assume it's largely just that during the time of the naïve web, there was a period where google kind of was the company, so people started using it for everything (think shortly before and then during the early google+ era). 10 years later almost every normie who didn't start using apple products uses gmail and chrome simply because they legacied into it from when they were younger and less aware of the negative aspects of the practice.

[seti0Cha]

I think you're overplaying the social aspect. For quite a while, Chrome had a serious speed advantage over Firefox and the developer tools were (are?) considered much better. I'm not sure if either is still the case. They both seem fine for my purposes, but I use Chrome because it subjectively feels a bit quicker and I've gotten disillusioned with the practice of choosing software based on political considerations.

[blahyawnblah]

Firefox's dev tools are much better than Chrome's

[cinntaile]

A decade or so back Firefox was just so fucking slow and Chrome wasn't. So I switched. It's fixed now so I switched back.