With Firefox, when it grew, most of what I saw was friends installing it on their friend’s computer. It felt very organic and word of mouth. It may have also been an answer to the pop-up hell of the era, but I’m more hazy on that.

> they just don’t know how bad Chrome is (for the internet)

I agree on this. Every time I’ve brought this up on HN I get a lot of push back from people arguing that Chrome is pushing the web forward and the other browsers are holding it back. I think this is a very short-sighted view.