Your memory seems to be broken, since what really happened was that Chrome was just stupidly faster and nicer to use than IE and Mozilla/Firebird/Firefox.
Rewriting history is wrong - Firefox was kind of a dog for a long time.
Both things can be true. Chrome was generally faster [1], and also some of Google's growth tactics were shady [2].
[1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/528214/browser_speed_compari...
[2] https://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/03/google-chrome-bund...
I disagree, if you opened enough tabs back then Chrome was unusable.
But if that is your view, you should switch to Brave. 44% less memory use, (1/3) longer battery life, no telemetry and if you block undesirables it is obviously much much faster.
> AnandTech tested median page load time across one hundred top-trafficked websites in WebPageTest using a 50 Mbps cable connection. Brave 1.69 loaded the median page in 2.1 seconds, while Chrome 147 took 6.7 seconds. The 3.2x difference is not engine speed, it is Brave Shields aborting requests for ad networks, analytics SDKs, and third-party fingerprinting scripts
Rewriting history? Google used the most scummy techniques to get Chrome installed, mostly bundled with completely unrelated things.
Your memory seems to be broken
Rewriting history is wrong
https://www.ghacks.net/2012/02/26/avast-7-will-install-googl...
https://searchengineland.com/google-chrome-page-will-have-pa...
https://community.adobe.com/questions-638/adobe-flash-instal...
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/wdsi/filesubmission
https://www.findmysoft.com/news/google-gets-pushy-with-chrom...
Etc. This stuff was very real and is a ten second search away, maybe try that before accusing parent of having a faulty memory because it doesn’t agree with yours.