[spijdar]

Characterizing early Firefox as only gaining traction because people had more warm fuzzy feelings for it seems off to me, although I wasn't around at the time personally.

I started using Firefox in the late 2000s mostly because I switched to Linux, and Chrome wasn't a thing yet. The web dev tools were better (firebug, anyone?), there were extensions like pentydactyl and whichever predecessor it had back in the day, and overall I just preferred the UI.

Pretty much every reason I originally used Firefox is gone now. I used it out of habit now and because it's less memory intensive still, but that's it. There's just not much going for Firefox except being backed by "the good guys" in a fight against the Empire. Even the cross platform support has withered with all the Chrome components like Skia and dependencies on tools like node.js (ironic that Firefox needs chrome's javascript engine to compile) limiting it to mainstream target triplets.

Firefox is trying to stay usable and I applaud that, but now they're just perpetually stuck trying to play catch up with Chrome's features and performance, always lagging behind, either a little or a lot. Chrome sets the web standards -- I think Firefox has simply lost.

[marcodiego]

Actually not Firefox, but Konqueror. From conqueror came KHTML which was later the base for webkit which evolved in chrome and the rest is history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML