Even with all Mozilla's been doing lately (Hello, Pocket), I still trust them more than Google. That probably says more about the latter, though.

> Because it is the only browser that is not tied hand-and-foot to some major global commercial player

Not close to true. There are hundreds of browsers out there. I used Surf[0] and Xombrero[1] for a number of years.

[0] http://surf.suckless.org

[1] https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/xombrero

If you had taken a moment to actually scan those search results, you would have realized that "Chrome is the new IE" is typically a reference to its ubiquity.

Safari and Firefox is typically called the new IE because they are lagging behind the times.

Which is why I said "IE6" in my original comment. The later versions of IE were very decent. They certainly didn't seem like the frozen accident of history - an issue Firefox continues to grapple with.

Umm, no. See Firefox gives no one any reason to hate it based on idealogy. It's a pro-consumer, pro-internet user, privacy-respecting, standards-compliant browser. What is not to love in this ideology?

All the same, as of 2015, it is a poor implementation of a browser from the technical point of view. Not because it was designed badly, but because it has simply not kept up.