I remember Chrome being way better than anything else at the time. I switched from Firefox to Chrome during that period because it was just so fast and lightweight in comparison. I think it was also the first time mainstream users had access to features like tabbed browsing, which was truly novel at the time.
Chrome was the first to give each tab its own thread, which helped prevent rogue pages from bringing the whole browser down (not completely, but it was a dramatic improvement).
Firefox had tabs. Chrome's selling point at the time was that its tabs were process-isolated. Crashing one couldn't bring down the others. Which was a common Firefox experience.
