Firefox and Chrome have actual users who get stuff done, probably because their developers have a track record of releasing useful software. Perl 6 has a track record of not being useful, but I'm sure /this/ time they'll buck that trend.
I was involved in Firefox marketing. If the actual Firefox story is the template, Perl 6 is poised for great success.
The project that led to Firefox was started in 1993. It was called Netscape. (Let's say this is analogous with Perl 5.)
In 1998 the project was reinvented as Mozilla. (Let's say this is analogous with Perl 6.)
For much of the 7 years between early 1998 and late 2004 the Mozilla project (analogous with Perl 6) was lambasted by the masses for, first, failing to release anything, and then, when they did, releasing slow, buggy, bloated, irrelevant software. By 2003 Mozilla was being ignored by almost everyone.
What saved Mozilla was that some smart engineers refused to bow to, on the one hand, public disinterest, and, on the other, internal pressure to focus on improving Mozilla 1.0. Instead they did yet another rewrite of several key parts, and then in early 2003 those still interested got behind the rewrite and the outcome was Firefox 1.0 in late 2004.
The parallels with the Rakudo team's efforts are clear and I see scope for an analogous outcome.
I'm not certain that yet another mostly-incomplete virtual machine will really help the Perl 6 community much. They've already got that with Parrot.
The whole emphasis on targeting virtual machines, whether it's Parrot, or the JVM, or now this MoarVM, has harmed the ability of Perl 6 to be implemented. We've seen one partial implementation after another, for years on end.
Unfortunately, we can't actually use any of these implementations for anything serious, like we can with Perl 5, Python, and Ruby. This makes Perl 6 unusable, which is quite a shame.
I think that's the plan.