We're in the current situation because Google could spend enough money on promoting Chrome. That's it. A different, or even better browser won't change that. Google can put a chrome ad everywhere again for a few months.

I feel firefox market share is mostly because they actively enshittificate their browser, and not because of google ads, or chrome being better.

I disagree, IMO the main reason they lost so much marketshare to chrome was because for a long time, chrome just was much faster and much more stable. Performance, stability, and compatibility is all that matters to most users.

Firefox (mostly) caught up with quantum and process isolation on the desktop, but by then I think it was too late. And the android version still has horrible performance, stability, and compatibility compared to Chromium browsers.

Mozilla just doesn't have the same engineering resources to poor into the browser that google does, so I'm not sure there's any way they can really maintain pace with google outside of becoming yet another chromium browser.

Doubt it. Things tech people complain about (like integration of Pocket) are completely irrelevant to the masses.

On the other hand, things like performance improved drastically, and it is now competitive with Chrome. Firefox the product is in the best shape it ever was.

There's barely any enshitification in Firefox. People like to complain there, because any tiny addition looks bad in comparison. But it's not even close to Chrome's default. An average user is unlikely to notice either though.

But while Chrome was growing, the ad campaign was crazy. You could not miss it - Google results, Gmail header, every Adsense anywhere. Everyone was told to install Chrome when they used internet, every day - there was no escape.