- Legacy applications where nobody wanted to rewrite them to work with non-IE
- Chrome gained market share because the entire user experience was better. That includes updates, but also it was just really snappy to use. Speed is probably the bigger factor; normal users don't care about updates.
- As some have pointed out, lots of less technical users just use the default
- Did I mention those couple decades worth of legacy apps? It bears repeating, since MSFT had successfully kept other browsers out of market share through their 1-2 punch of strategic browser incompatibility and shipping with the OS.
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Such things rarely have a single succinct answer.
In reality, there's other factors:
- Legacy applications where nobody wanted to rewrite them to work with non-IE
- Chrome gained market share because the entire user experience was better. That includes updates, but also it was just really snappy to use. Speed is probably the bigger factor; normal users don't care about updates.
- As some have pointed out, lots of less technical users just use the default
- Did I mention those couple decades worth of legacy apps? It bears repeating, since MSFT had successfully kept other browsers out of market share through their 1-2 punch of strategic browser incompatibility and shipping with the OS.
IE being the default also meant that malware and viruses targeted it, and VBA scripting in Office.
Chrome started out not being targeted by these, and in addition, Google pushed security patches pretty quickly.
Anyone got any numbers on the frequency of exploits, and the mean time-to-patch, for IE vs Chrome, over time?