Right, and what I was alluding to in that point was, why should any user switch from IE if it has feature parity with Firefox or any other browser?

Firefox had developer tools in Firebug, so it was already getting a geek user base, but when Firefox got some legitimate new features like Canvas that other advanced browsers like Safari had, regular users began to dabble. With the occasional news report that honestly reported the security nightmare that IE was, I found that between 2006-2009, Firefox was an easy sell to regular users.

The way I see history, Mozilla floundered between 1998 and 2005 and had almost no marketshare. All the Netscape rewrites that came before were a shitshow and the AOL thing must have been a huge (but necessary for funding) distraction. Probably the only fair interpretation of history is that, of course, the codebase was a mess given the development practices back in the day.

That said, I recall the Gecko rewrite was a long and painful one. Was it unnecessarily so? I believe it had a lot of dumb component architecture concepts and I would love to understand what the drivers were there. Did they believe that components were the best way to organize a huge open source project? Woulda, coulda, shoulda thinking about Mozilla makes me really sad sometimes.