For the longest time Firefox was the only easy option in town.
Opera has always been a bit fringe like linux (while still being good). IE.. well enough said. Safari was a decent choice on mac for a couple years before Chrome.
Thats where my comparison to windows resides. It was the only decent option. It took OSX a big part of the 00s to reach mainstream dominance over Windows XP.
Perhaps Firefox never had a monopoly, but they did reach a point where they likely felt overly secure and could do whatever they wanted because they would always be the open source browser gave users a warm and fuzzy feeling when they install it.
The difference is MS stopped having people work on IE once Netscape was out of the picture. It's not like Firefox would just stop being developed. It's an open source project, after all.
Opera has always been a bit fringe like linux (while still being good). IE.. well enough said. Safari was a decent choice on mac for a couple years before Chrome.
Thats where my comparison to windows resides. It was the only decent option. It took OSX a big part of the 00s to reach mainstream dominance over Windows XP.