Advocacy is fine, but in the end it was the product itself that got the 450M users. You can't grassroots something that's not actually good.

Right, the developers and the early adopters deserve deference; I'm saying that it's easy for an early adopter to believe that the other 450mil users do not. After all, they're using it anyway despite it being friendly to the early adopters.

It doesn't mean the product was actually good, it simply means it lacked a better alternative.

If a product manages to be better than all the alternatives, it's hard to argue it's not a good product. At the very least it had to be better than "whatever everyone was using before" and "not using anything."

For the first few years, there were lots of sites that were designed for IE that broke in Firefox. Thus, at first, it was actually worse for many people. Yet, because the early adopters kept pushing it on everyone of their malware-ridden friends and relatives, it grew in usage anyway, allowing Mozilla to afford to make it better.

I was one of those folks who contributed to the Firefox announcement ads, but I don't really believe that it succeeded because folks pushed it rather than it simply being a better product. Yes, some sites at the time worked better in IE, but on the whole, the experience on Firefox was better and that's why folks supported it, not because they disliked Microsoft or something. (And yes, because we support proper web standards.)

Firefox was a spinoff of Mozilla and was a pretty good browser from v1, and within a year of release was considered the best browser available.