undercut

It was a long time ago but I'm 99% sure that there was a banner for Chrome on Google.com since the first public release.

The widespread adoption of Chrome was largely driven by word of mouth

No, it was driven by having a banner in the most privileged spot of the Internet, Google.com (the most visited site in the world with 0 ads on the homepage) saying that was faster and more secure than the alternatives. In fact Firefox benefited from some free ads on Google.com against Internet Explorer before Google developed Chromium.

There is something wrong with your Firefox installation (maybe try a new profile with vanilla settings). I use search shortcuts all the time (w + spacebar for wikipedia) and it's exactly the same behavior in Firefox than Chrome/Edge.