It was a better browser through and through, maybe because MS slept on IE or maybe not, but in the end it isn't revisionist to say they beat MS's proverbial posterior because the browser was better.
But also, google spent a mountain of money advertising chrome.
I think this factor isn't given enough weight in the shift to Firefox.
At that time, the largest pain point in web development was (by a long shot) browser compatibility.
When developers fell in love with Firefox, they started pushing business requirements away from IE and towards the browser that didn't feel like it was their enemy. Alongside with this there was also massive shift to start taking web standards seriously, which is another area where IE dropped the ball spectacularly
It took a few years, but eventually pointy haired managers got sick of our whining and gave in.
Having lived through the browser wars, this is my new favorite fact about the whole thing.
It really was a very different time, and you couldn't have convinced me back then that I would miss it one day.
Not to mention preferential treatment like the Youtube anti-IE campaign [1]
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/4/18529381/google-youtube-in...
Once Chrome came along with their devtools, improvements quickly escalated between the 2 before Google eventually won out.
I can't recall the exact point in time when my use of Firefox fell off, but it was probably due to the account integrations with Chrome.
Chrome was a lot faster and a lot lighter (in the beginning)
Neither KDE nor OS X ever shipped their built-in Web Inspector prior to the appearance of Firebug in 2006, and by that point WebKit and Safari were already in full swing. The very first iteration[1] of Web Inspector appeared around the same time as Firebug and was an original contribution by Apple; it wasn't borrowed from KHTML.
1. <https://web.archive.org/web/20070621162114/https://webkit.or...>
That money was also used to increase the user base via drive-by installations, e. g. while installing Adobe Reader you had to deselect the Chrome installation, otherwise you'd find yourself with a new standard browser afterwards.
not via marketshare. The fact is, only developers (and adjacent) were using firefox. IE, during those days (pre-chrome) was still such a dominant browser that you had to check for IE compatibility.
But today, developers are not checking for firefox compatibility. So, firefox today (and during the firefox heyday) were never truly "beating" IE from a marketshare perspective.
That's not an entirely fair measure though, considering Microsoft lost an antitrust case that was brought because they were unfairly leveraging their monopoly in operating systems to give them an advantage in browser adoption. The DOJ threatened to break up Microsoft over it, and eventually only stopped when Microsoft added an option for users to pick a difference default browser over IE.
By that time IE's dominance was beyond Mozilla's reach and it was only when Google leveraged their monopoly in online advertising that a real alternative option for users became viable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
There was also the integration with Dreamweaver, Frontpage.
The big thing about firebug was that you could see/edit the DOM, CSS, and at some point Network requests, etc.
Mozilla didn't "take on" IE. Mozilla reclaimed their lost browser position. IE kicked the proverbial posterior of Netscape which both Netscape and Mozilla struggled to reclaim right up until the release of Firefox.
The case was specifically about IE integration in Windows, so it definitely had an impact.
I think this is probably what the comment was thinking about.
MS presented the choice for a browser from 2009->2011.
IDK that MS has ever actually fixed the situation since their last fine in 2013.
IIRC, firefox really started taking off around Firefox 3, which was first released in 2006. Looks like they officially beat IE in 2010. That does seem to line up with MS's implementation of the browser choice screen.
It wasnt about "respecting users", or "agency" but simply implemented standards properly.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape:
In November 2007, IE had 77.4% of the browser market, Firefox 16.0%, and Netscape 0.6%"On July 15, 2003, Time Warner (formerly AOL Time Warner) disbanded Netscape. Most of the programmers were laid off, and the Netscape logo was removed from the building."
Peak Netscape was 1996. By 2003, they had already handed development off to Mozilla, and Netscape the browser was just a thin veneer over Mozilla's browser.
By 2007, it was just Mozilla with AOL branding and almost all of it's users were people still using AOL in 2007.
Back in the naughties, testing a web page with Netscape seemed miraculous because if it rendered correctly with a PC, chances are it would with a Mac, and with Linux.
Microsoft didn't care about standards. If a page rendered incorrectly in other browsers than Windows MSIE they didn't care (even if it was Mac MSIE).
But that difference wasn't enough to save Netscape because, as a web browser, Netscape was a bloated mess.
When Firefox came along, it was popular with web designers, for the same reasons as Netscape was - but its streamlined design catered to regular users.
20% of adult Americans had broadband at home by early 2004 - https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2006/05/28/part-1-broad... - which is not a majority but had heavy overlap with the group that wasn't just settling for IE6. Similar with Facebook - it was driven by the mostly-young tech-forward early-adopter crowd that either had broadband at home or was at university with fast internet.
No, having broadband had nothing to do with desire back then. It was entirely based on availability and how quickly your local telecom/cable monopoly deployed it, being so bad that the government had to step in many times to motivate them. Everyone I knew purchased broadband (some cloning cable modem to get it for free) the day it was available. For broadband users, the difference in browser size was entirely negligible.
Facebook required that you were at a universities to register. Its not a reasonable thing to compare to web browser use.
That is revisionist history. Firefox succeeded because MS was sitting on their hands with IE, and it was stagnating. Firefox didnt do the opposite of what IE - you could argue Mozilla was doing what MS should have been.
It wasnt about "respecting users", or "agency" but simply implemented standards properly.
And that's going to be a hard problem with Chrome because you're up against a browser that is moving very, very, fast.