Astyanax Because "M$" with IE built-in to their OS was the big meanie "corporation" du jour to hate at the time when Chrome came out.
I think there were a couple things. Chrome did focus on speed. Something that other browsers were lacking. That led to the speed wars where people would benchmark browsers to see which one was capable of loading a page 0.1ms faster (while waiting for data on 1Mbps connection). I think the other browsers caught up quickly and it really wasn't that big of a deal. But that sort of gave it the 'tech' browser title.
And the other was bundling. Chrome used to be bundled in a lot of software. I think programs like CCleaner would automatically install Chrome as the default. Most people aren't aware of what browser they're even using, or they need help getting 'foxfire' to run.