> their focus on things like ... security ... helped them become absolutely dominant
I don't think Chrome's security features had anything to do with its ascension. Chrome took off because it was fast and had a good UI (iirc it had the ability to drag a tab from one window to another, a while before other browsers did).
The average user knows nothing of the security features of their browser.
Chrome took off because Google leveraged their position in another area (search engine) in order to push it. Exactly what people were concerned about with Microsoft and Windows/IE.
I think Microsoft at the time probably thought it's own engine was also better in many ways. It was in several regarding power efficiency and things like pen/pdf support.
Reason Chromium was chosen was more because they already had a bunch of developer experience with the engine.
That and more importantly it would cause Google to lose some control over Chrome and the web. Now Google can't exactly do further anti-competitor shenanigans like the whole shadowDOM fiasco and youtube. In this case adding random features to chrome, implementing them and causing other browsers to have a bad experience.
That and because edge is as fast as chrome (if not faster), there is less of an incentive to switch to chrome.
Oh and Microsoft is one of the few companies to be able to maintain a hostile fork of chrome and have it competitive. Largely because they have enough resources to match google for Chromium.
This is one of those cases where Microsoft can subtly claw back marketshare by playing the strength of chromium against Google. They wouldn't be able to do the same at all with Gecko/Firefox.
I think they were the first to have separate processes for tabs (?) which you could really see add robustness - when flash could blow up your session etc you could much more easily close out the offending tab.
They were stricter and more prompt in blocking things like activex controls, they'd remove features tabs would use to try to take control of your session or confuse you. All these enhanced security and usability.
There's no disagreement here. Chrome brought lots of good security enhancements, and raised the bar for other browsers, but security isn't the reason people made the switch.
Yes, Chrome was the first to do process-isolation. As for ActiveX, I believe that's generally only available through Internet Explorer (not Edge), I don't think Chrome ever supported it. [0]
I don't think Chrome's security features had anything to do with its ascension. Chrome took off because it was fast and had a good UI (iirc it had the ability to drag a tab from one window to another, a while before other browsers did).
The average user knows nothing of the security features of their browser.