They had the goodwill of the community when they decided to develop an open source browser engine to keep the likes of Microsoft from taking over the Internet and dictating the rules
That's some revisionist history if I've ever read any. From what I can find, the first version of Chrome was released in 2008. In the 4 years from 2004 to 2008, Internet Explorer market share dropped from 90% to 70%, with Firefox making up most of that difference at 20% market share and still rising. Microsoft dominance was already solidly in decline to an open source competitor.
Yes, Firefox was far from perfect, hence why Chrome adoption shot up and quickly over took Firefox and then Microsoft products, but to say stopping Microsoft's stranglehold of the Internet was the reason Chrome was created is a complete fabrication. Google wanted to harvest your data from day one of the Chrome release. That's always been the primary goal.