>Normal users however don’t care much about performance and whatnot. Their PC came with Chrome, so they use it
You talk like it's impossible for nerds to have influence on their surroundings. Way before Chrome got preinstalled on a computer or went on a dark pattern campaign, I heavily recommended it to my acquaintances, friends, family. I even remember a perfectly "normal user" type uncle using Chrome before I recommended it to him because he had learned of its existence from another person's word of mouth. I constantly see people try to diminish the power of word of mouth spreading good products here on HN, which is complete nonsense. Contrary to the popular belief on HN that "normies" are idiots who only ever settle for "defaults", they routinely try new things if their peers recommend it, it's how non-preinstalled apps like Whatsapp grow. It's not just the networking effect, you need to be better than the default. Sending things like pictures through texting apps sucked, group messaging sucked, Whatsapp provided something /much better/ so people used it. By the way, it's out of topic, but mentioning messaging apps reminds me of how Google in fact could not, despite its monopoly and advertisement power, get anyone to use theirs. If you think dark patterns and preinstalling apps is enough to gain success, then why has google failed, time and time again? Apps like Google Duo were preinstalled on all android phones I've seen and literally no one I know in real life ever made use of them. Maybe google's apps weren't bad, but they were not /better/ enough to encourage people to give a shit. To convert people, you can't just be "as good" as the competition, you need some serious oomph.
When Chrome came out, it was a landslide. IE was dead, and Firefox was dramatically inferior in both performance and security. The multiprocess architecture of Chrome combined with other security related decisions, and the V8 JIT for javascript made it a vastly superior browser and people knew about it. Firefox took a VERY long time to get to a place where it didn't feel bad to use once websites started taking advantage of Chrome's superior performance and got more bloated in the process. Some of the changes it made to get there were heavily contentious with the nerds who ended up being the main population of users for FF, like removing XUL, further pushing FF into a very specific niche : the privacy conscious and people who use it solely to reject google's monopoly. The "normal people" who would have used Firefox instead of IE back in the day because of peer recommendations would not use Firefox instead of Chrome today unless they're very obsessed with those things, because FF is no longer clearly better than the alternative, to the contrary, it's still weaker, though not as much as it used to be.
And while the crowd on HN tends to focus heavily on things like privacy, if there's anything the average person doesn't care about in my experience, it's that. They will never trade convenience for more privacy.