> Not sure how much consumer self direction was involved.

It was entirely consumer self-direction, as neither browser was preinstalled by default on any platform, and all usage of either was initiated by a deliberate end-user choice.

"Aggressive marketing" indeed only has its effect through "consumer self-direction" as its whole purpose is to persuade end users to make a purposeful decision.

There were huge campaigns where google was paying per install, many of these installs were surreptitious. When you create standards that only play well in your garden then the only people making decisions are you and the devs writing them, the users either play along or cant use CORPORATE_WEB_APP - hence why IE is STILL around today.

You can do all that, but if you have a noticeable gap in parity on features that users actually care you'll just be the secondary utility browser. Like Internet Explorer traditionally was.

And yet the current dominance of Chrome, having decisively displaced IE in all use cases except entrenched legacy ones with high switching costs, conclusively disproves the very point you are making: nearly everyone did switch away from IE despite Microsoft doing the exact things you are describing.

As a user at the time, Chrome just looked better than FF. It was fresh and clean. The logo was brighter, the UI was rounder and clearer.

FF looked like a Windows 98 settings menu by comparison. Tiny, fiddly, cramped controls.

Also a user at the time. Chrome was barren, empty, and used too much memory. It used tricks to feel faster yet wasn't significantly better for the sites I used. Chrome was also less customizable.