In 2004 95% of browsers were IE, firefox was on 2.7% (TheCounter.com)
By 2009 this had dropped to 70%, with Firefox and Safari on 20% and 6%. Chrome hadn't even launched.
The hard work had been done -- people were using things other than IE, and it was growing.
Firefox then plateaued and Chrome built on this, in 2012 not a single browser had more share than 33% share.
After that things started going pear-shaped, and chrome started snowballing into monopoly
