Firefox was top dog when chrome came out - it had unseated IE already for many users fed up with XP-era crapware.
Firefox was not simply 'bloated', but designed for classic HTML rendering at a time when javascript (aka 'web 2.0 ajax') dev was taking off and memory was not as abundant as it is now - though slow, it was more that the core architecture was out of date than it was 'bloated'. Indeed firefox was already a stripped down version of 'the mozilla suite' (see also seamonkey, thunderbird, etc - all of which predate chrome).
Chrome then came in, borrowed another project's browser engine, and decided to say 'screw memory, just fork processes' and avoided the whole multithreaded thing all together, oh yes, and open blank tabs faster with a little animation for perceptions sake.
This facilitated html5/javascript bloat, and by extension kept it in the lead as the only browser that could handle it.
of course I'm biased here (as is parent) - but chrome unseating firefox which unseated IE is born out by the facts.
> Firefox was top dog when chrome came out - it had unseated IE already for many users fed up with XP-era crapware.
Maybe in mindshare for devs but Chrome officially unseated IE browser saturation in 2012. Firefox didn't pass IE until 2015 [1].
Firefox was amazing on its resurgence in mid-2000s but did get into memory/bloat stages that opened it up for minimal/performant Chrome that was also more secure at the time primarily due to the process per tab. This possibly did lead to more js bloat later, initially it was lightning fast and also had a debug console and was based on Webkit which was better than Firefox rendering.
Firefox definitely saw Web 2.0 come in from 2006 on and was revolutionary in web development/debugging with Firebug and eventually that was part of the browser and is now industry standard to have a console/debugger on the browser.
Most developers were using Firefox by 2005-2006 and then Chrome a couple/few years later and it has been top for almost a decade now.
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Firefox was top dog when chrome came out - it had unseated IE already for many users fed up with XP-era crapware.
Firefox was not simply 'bloated', but designed for classic HTML rendering at a time when javascript (aka 'web 2.0 ajax') dev was taking off and memory was not as abundant as it is now - though slow, it was more that the core architecture was out of date than it was 'bloated'. Indeed firefox was already a stripped down version of 'the mozilla suite' (see also seamonkey, thunderbird, etc - all of which predate chrome).
Chrome then came in, borrowed another project's browser engine, and decided to say 'screw memory, just fork processes' and avoided the whole multithreaded thing all together, oh yes, and open blank tabs faster with a little animation for perceptions sake.
This facilitated html5/javascript bloat, and by extension kept it in the lead as the only browser that could handle it.
of course I'm biased here (as is parent) - but chrome unseating firefox which unseated IE is born out by the facts.