FF (Phoenix, Firebird) gained market share because a bunch of geeks & power users installed it on any computer they could get ahold of, because it was an obviou

FF (Phoenix, Firebird) gained market share because a bunch of geeks & power users installed it on any computer they could get ahold of, because it was an obvious safety, performance, and usability win over default browsers, and especially IE. Maybe others are still doing that, but the situation's a lot murkier now. Firefox's UI is more confusing than it used to be (every time you open an application and it does something it doesn't normally, that's confusing to non-nerds—looking at you, update-announcement tabs and "hey come look at Pocket!" messages), other browsers have gotten better, and FF requires extensions to deliver an obviously-better browsing experience than other browsers (it may provide more privacy than Chrome or Edge out-of-the-box, sure, but my mom can't tell that, unlike automatic pop-up blocking, which was obviously a improvement over IE when FF was getting started). It's also not so lightweight that it draws comments from normies when you launch it, because it comes up so fast (this was an actual thing back when it first came out, vs. IE)