Firefox beat Internet Explorer and Chrome, in turn, beat Firefox. In an alternate universe, Google could have backed Firefox instead of building their own brows

Firefox beat Internet Explorer and Chrome, in turn, beat Firefox. In an alternate universe, Google could have backed Firefox instead of building their own browser, making Firefox number one. Mozilla was and still is heavily supported by Google. Gecko may indeed be the reason why it didn't happen. Supposedly, it is an engine with a lot of baggage and hard to work with, which is the reason why there are so many KHTML/Webkit/Chromium/... based browsers and components and so few based on Gecko. Google wanted a fast browser to support their webapp ecosystem, they found it was better to use Webkit as a base. Firefox eventually caught up, but it took many years, and we still don't have an easily integrated Gecko-based engine.