Chrome at launch was an extremely minimal web browser (hence the name, Chrome referred to the barest amount of window chrome around the web content) with decent system integration and essentially no Google service integration other than setting Google as the default search engine (maybe the only one, I don’t remember if there was even a setting to change it). There wasn’t a Mac version at first, but when that came, it has Keychain integration too rather than its own password manager.

It was fast. At some point it had its own install of Adobe Flash so you could get rid of your regular Flash install and run two browsers: one without Flash as your main, and use Chrome for those few websites that require Flash effectively isolating them from your regular web experience, until this eventually became moot, it was another WebKit browser, albeit with V8 instead of JavaScriptCore, and pioneered per tab process isolation so rather than your whole browser crashing, just that one tab would. Prior to Chrome, whole browser crashes were not uncommon, oftentimes because of Flash (giving another reason to want to isolate it, although plug-ins I think were also isolated).

What Chrome subsequently became is the very definition of enshittification, and you can pinpoint it to around the time Google started trying to force people to link their Chrome profiles to their Google Accounts.