Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone else who lived through those days, I have to disagree. First, JavaScript performance was not an afterthought, it was a big deal. Second, Chrome's sandbox was massively superior from a security point of view. In a world full of viruses, that was a big deal. I personally recommended Chrome to family and friends. I did so because I didn't want to be tech support for their virus problems. But what I sold them…
> First, JavaScript performance was not an afterthought, it was a big deal. It's a /very/ big deal. It's not a mistake that V8 was chosen to build Node.JS on top of. Javascript performance continues to dominate the overall performance of browsers on the modern web as front-end developers utilize more and more JS weight in their pages and SPAs become even more commonplace. Don't mistake my comment as saying that the w…
On the sandbox, I think that you are confusing the Chrome Sandbox (released in 2008) with the Privacy Sandbox (released in 2019). At the release of Chrome, it was a significant security improvement over existing browsers. You might not call their process isolation a sandbox, but they certainly did. See https://blog.chromium.org/2008/10/new-approach-to-browser-se... to verify.
True, security and sandboxing have improved greatly in the decades since. But the current quality of Firefox is irrelevant to people's reasons to switch back then.
Now let's go back to why Chrome was developed. As articles like https://www.computerworld.com/article/1501244/the-real-reaso... demonstrate, Google's reasoning was widely understood at the time. Google wanted complex web applications to run better. And Google also wanted people to not fear for the security of their web applications. So they focused on performance and security.
What Google didn't care about was creating a monopoly. Sure, they could have released V8 without a browser attached. But that wouldn't have changed the consumer experience in the way that Google cared about. That said, they had every reason to pull V8 out of Chrome and release it independently. They were as surprised as anyone when someone chose to create node.js out of it. Their actual goal was to hope that other browsers would use a better JS engine after one was shown to them. Or, if they failed to use it directly, they'd study it and copy its good tricks.
Now you claim that the fact that V8 could have been shipped on its own was part of some larger point. I have absolutely no idea what larger point that might be. But there was a significant period of time where Chrome had V8 and everything else was comparatively slow. Which speaks directly to my point that consumers had very good technical reasons to switch to Chrome.