Firefox did most of the early damage to IE all it's own. Taking IE down from an insane 90+% marketshare position and steadily eating up 30% marketshare by the time Chrome even really showed up. And it didn't even have to stealth install itself with every adobe flash update to do it.

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/worldwid...

In 2004 IE had 94% share of the browser market.

There were "tiny upticks" but, going slowly and steadily, in August 2008 Firefox had gained about 30-33% and IE was down to about 60%. And then (September 2008) Chrome happened.

In hindsight Chrome was worse for the internet than IE ever was.

A spyware and ads company fooling devs and users alike.

Well a lot of those devs seem to like the spying as long as they themselves have access to (some of) the data.

That reminds me of that quote about bankruptcy from The Sun Also Rises:

> “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

> “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

It felt like that’s how IE lost its dominance.