Firefox started with a terrible backdrop (Netscape 4), but after it's mozilla and phoenix days it was fairly fast fairly quickly.
It then started adding bloat and terribleness, which Chrome didn't have.
It's recovered now though, and is far better than chrome. It saddens me that so many on HN champion google and actively push for competitors to fail.
Indeed. When Chrome was first released Firefox had already broken the IE monopoly having reached around 33% of the browser "market share", and was still growing. Speed was the issue I seem to remember most people switching to Chrome for at the time.