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nomeltoday at 3:09 AM1 replyview on HN

No, it was larger than many of the other browsers (like Opera), and size wasn't different enough to matter. Back then, download time was entirely quantized by "one night", because the only thing that mattered was that it finished by morning so someone picking up the phone wouldn't sever the dialup connection. A substation piece of software, like a browser, was happening during sleep time, regardless of size, and rare, so two night would also be fine (resuming was trivial with ftp, where these were sourced, usually from university mirrors).


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majormajortoday at 3:17 AM

Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox first made was in the 2002-2004 era where a substantial portion of the internet-trendsetting audience that adopted it in the US had broadband.

20% of adult Americans had broadband at home by early 2004 - https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2006/05/28/part-1-broad... - which is not a majority but had heavy overlap with the group that wasn't just settling for IE6. Similar with Facebook - it was driven by the mostly-young tech-forward early-adopter crowd that either had broadband at home or was at university with fast internet.