Firefox was never “the king”, you clearly live in a bubble. I don’t think it ever even reached 40% of the market, businesses were still eating whatever Microsoft told them they should eat.
> The appearance of Chrome was a breath of fresh air
Not really. The appearance of Safari was a game changer, and only because Apple was basically forced to give WebKit/KHTML back to the community thanks to the LGPL. Webkit triggered the wave of embedding that made its engine a de-facto standard in development circlets, so that it was the obvious choice by the time Google had to pick one for strategic reasons.
There is an alternative timeline where KDE just used BSD, Apple just took their code and kept it closed, and Chrome never happened.
> The appearance of Chrome was a breath of fresh air
Not really. The appearance of Safari was a game changer, and only because Apple was basically forced to give WebKit/KHTML back to the community thanks to the LGPL. Webkit triggered the wave of embedding that made its engine a de-facto standard in development circlets, so that it was the obvious choice by the time Google had to pick one for strategic reasons.
There is an alternative timeline where KDE just used BSD, Apple just took their code and kept it closed, and Chrome never happened.