You don't think it had anything to do with the introduction of Safari and Webkit, more than a year earlier? Safari was utterly irrelevant until the late 2000s,

You don't think it had anything to do with the introduction of Safari and Webkit, more than a year earlier? Safari was utterly irrelevant until the late 2000s, where it only gained relevance through the iOS devices. It did nothing to spur movement. Further from a history perspective, while Safari might have preceded the coining of the Firefox brand, Firefox was an offshoot of the Mozilla Suite (effectively splitting the browser out of the suite) with a history going back to 1998.