Why are they better? I'm developing for browsers, and it runs amazingly well. I wouldn't know how to build such a thing natively (for one thing, it layers on top of and syncs with music videos), and wouldn't have bothered.

There are tons of web apps, games, etc that "people want." Maybe you don't want them, but other people do. Even HackerNews is more than browsing, since you can post to it.

I get that some people want their browser to do a very limited subset of the things that a browser like Chrome can do. I don't think that is actually the view of Mozilla, but if it was, and they actually advertised that, I suspect they'd have even lower usership.