[diffeomorphism]

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%.

[LamaOfRuin]

Opera was also essential at this point, not in terms of market share, but of innovation in the browser space with features that would eventually spread to everything else.

[kbelder]

That shouldn't be forgotten. There was a time when the 1% or so of users that ran Opera were getting a much better experience than any other browser. It was far superior for several years, until all of its innovations were copied by other vendors.

[freedomben]

Yeah, my anecdotal memories aren't worth much, but in that era it was all IE or Firefox. Even once Chrome came along it still took quite some time before I noticed it popping up on normie people's systems.