My perspective on browser history is a little different. I've been following and using Firefox since before it was Firefox. At one point in time, I was working

My perspective on browser history is a little different. I've been following and using Firefox since before it was Firefox. At one point in time, I was working in a computer store. IE6 - 8 was letting ActiveX controls and other scripts run rampant, infecting people like crazy. 99% of our business was malware cleanup and removal due to IE. Once you explained to people what happened, they were appaled and were happy to switch to Firefox, despite many sites only working on IE at the time. THIS is what really triggered the migration away from IE. Firefox was taking off (look at the chart in the linked article), and was starting to dominate, well before Chrome ever became a thing. Those of us on Linux also had Konqueror, and it had a decent userbase as well. I think that's when Google noticed that the IE monopoly was breaking, and they jumped onboard and took Konqueror's code and then launched their own browser. The same code that Apple used for Safari. So they basically came in on the hard work of Firefox and the KHTML team and took over the market by putting Chrome right on Google's homepage. It's my opinion that Chrome didn't become popular because it was better, or because it was cool (no average user cares about that). It became popular by being right there on everybody's home page, right at the perfect time that people were catching on to the fact that IE had zero security. Firefox broke the monopoly and freed us, and then Google and Apple came in and shat all over them.