alt Hacker News> Mozilla was born to change this, and Firefox succeeded beyond what most people thought possible — dropping Internet Explorer’s market share to 55% in just a few years and ushering in the Web 2.0 era.
Is this true? I can see from here[0] that its peak was 32%, as IE was really on the back burner but before Chrome had fully risen to dominance, but I wouldn't claim that it was responsible for IE's market share drop.
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You’re right on the numbers....Firefox never had majority share. The stronger claim is causal influence, not dominance. I recently read somewhere that the Firefox (and later Chrome) forced standards compliance and broke IE’s de-facto monopoly mindset. IE’s decline was gradual and multi-factor, but Firefox clearly shifted developer and user expectations.
When do you think the "web 2.0 era" was?
Web 2.0 is around 2003 or so and chrome would not even exist for another few years. Giving Firefox/phoenix/Netscape the majority credit for the first fall of IE seems accurate.
The rise of chrome happened afterwards and by then IE also fell much deeper than 55%.