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Firefox was seriously a better browser, not just "implements standards better". It ran faster, it had tabs (wow!) and at one point it got Firebug which let you have a console INSIDE the browser that showed information you could print with `console.log`, I kid you not.

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.

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Firebug was a big reason for webdevs to adopt firefox in the first place. Part of what made chrome succeed is it came out with a pretty robust set of webdev tools right from the get-go.

But also, google spent a mountain of money advertising chrome.

Chrome borrowed their webdev tools from Webkit, who borrowed them from KHTML. Chrome launched with dev tools, but they didn't develop their own distinct version of them for many years after launching the browser.

> Chrome borrowed their webdev tools from Webkit, who borrowed them from KHTML.

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...>

> Part of what made chrome succeed is it came out with a pretty robust set of webdev tools right from the get-go.

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.

We, no joke, ultimately were able to drop our support for IE6->8 because of the youtube "we are dropping support for IE" banner. We spun it to our bosses as "If google is doing this, we should be able to."

Some time ago there was a post here about it. The guy claimed he and a few other fed up devs made that banner on their own initiative. The whole thing was a huge bluff because at the time google had no such plan but it gained so much momentum that they went ahead with it eventually.

That's awesome.

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.

Which, if you haven't read it before, the story of how they did that is worth the read.

https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6

Chrome has the advantage that they inherited webkits inspector. The chrome team made improvements, yes, but it originated in Safari

It's hard to state just how much of a game changer Firebug was for web development. Before that your only option was "alert()"ing or outputting directly to the page.

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.

Around 2006 or 2007, I was working on the Sage Notebook. I did a little JavaScript injection, and managed to make the notebook execute JavaScript instead of sending Python code to the server and printing the result. Lo and behold, I could interact with my JavaScript environment on any browser we supported (ie, ff, safari and Opera). I don't recall if firefox had its JavaScript console yet but it was a game changer on those other browsers.

> But also, google spent a mountain of money advertising chrome.

Not to mention preferential treatment like the Youtube anti-IE campaign [1]

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/4/18529381/google-youtube-in...

To be fair to Google, they also kicked ass on implementation at the beginning too.

Chrome was a lot faster and a lot lighter (in the beginning)

> But also, google spent a mountain of money advertising chrome.

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.

One big feature at the time was Firefox had a built in popup blocker, IE did not. Popup ads were rife towards the backend of the 90's and the internet felt borderline unusable without a blocker.

> beat MS's proverbial posterior because the browser was better

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.

not via marketshare

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 never a browser choice mandate in the US.

There was a period of time when our university help desk was installing and recommending Firefox for students and faculty to use over ie6.

I remember friends of same age to also actually switch browsers by themselves, suddenly finding that their computer now used Firefox instead because it was simply faster. Same reason everyone switched to Chrome at a later point.

The console already existed... since Netscape I believe. Basically printf-level debugging.

The big thing about firebug was that you could see/edit the DOM, CSS, and at some point Network requests, etc.

You could have a similar console on IE already back then, naturally it only worked on Windows, and MS being MS, the expectation was that either Office Tools or VS would be installed, as it was provided via them in a way similar to Firebug.

There was also the integration with Dreamweaver, Frontpage.

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