https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1398220&page=11&p=...
Chrome was absolutely faster in web rendering than Firefox and more stable and the UX was cleaner, it made Firefox with its slow buggy performance and awful theme's look like myspace to Chromes facebook.
I also remember being very frustrated with Firefox on Ubuntu ~10.04 at the time and when Chrome came along it was exactly what I'd been waiting for.
Quantum/Servo/Rust/UI refreshes seems like this was Firefox catching up to Chrome v1 and honestly in 2020 it feels like Firefox has finally caught up significantly.
It's still not as stable as Chrome but it's getting there, webrender is a massive leap forward in performance:
https://testdrive-archive.azurewebsites.net/Performance/Chal...
That test is now showing at 6.65 seconds down from 45 seconds without it.
Gecko was a technical success.
On the non-technical side, it isn't at all clear that Netscape-the-company came out worse than it would have done if it had tried to stick with the buggy Netscape 4 rendering engine.