[jayceedenton]

I think that GitHub is a massive factor here. The emergence of distributed version control created the battle ground, but GitHub meant that the entire world of open source and sharing code online would be dominated by git. It was their execution (marketing as well as good tech) that was better than bitbucket and attracted more and more of the open source world to GitHub and therefore git.

There's a powerful network effect with choice of version control tool, because others need to collaborate with you (even if just to pull or browse your repository) so the tool that starts to dominate will likely monopolize. This isn't the same with browsers.