"I think it's far too easy to blame their low marketshare on their miniscule marketing budget. Mozilla faced similar problems. Mozilla failed when they had a crap product in SeaMonkey (née Mozilla Suite) and succeded when they had a compelling product in Firefox."
This is an important point, but I'm not sure that it's clear exactly why Firefox was so "compelling".
I remember when Firefox first came out, it was billed as a "faster Mozilla". I gave it a try, because I'd found that the original Mozilla browser was bloated and slow, and I was hoping Firefox might live up to the hype. But, no. Firefox was just as slow and bloated as Mozilla. In fact, from an end-user's perspective, they seemed pretty identical, except for the name. Yet people jumped all over Firefox like it was the Second Coming.
Now, I understand that Firefox does have one great advantage over Opera, which is that it's open source, while Opera is closed source. But the original Mozilla browser was also open source, and it didn't get a fraction of the interest Firefox got. Another advantage was that Firefox had extensions, but (if I recall correctly) the original Mozilla browser had them too.
So, can Firefox's success over the original Mozilla browser be chalked up completely to the name change? Would Opera have been more successful had they simply rebranded it with a sexier name, or claimed that the "new" browser they'd released was a "faster Opera"?
I'd argue that the key difference in Firefox was the UI. It was slimmed down and tidied up, with all the unnecessary clutter removed.
Firefox also shamelessly copied and polished up the best features from Opera (i.e. tabs and integrated search), attracting many early adopter Opera users, plus the fact it was free rather than ad-supported gave the browser a wider audience than Opera ever could.
Changing the name, the theme and the unused Communicator bloat (Mail, Composer, Chatzilla) was more symbolic in distancing Mozilla from the negative associations of the mostly terrible Communicator than anything else.
This is an important point, but I'm not sure that it's clear exactly why Firefox was so "compelling".
I remember when Firefox first came out, it was billed as a "faster Mozilla". I gave it a try, because I'd found that the original Mozilla browser was bloated and slow, and I was hoping Firefox might live up to the hype. But, no. Firefox was just as slow and bloated as Mozilla. In fact, from an end-user's perspective, they seemed pretty identical, except for the name. Yet people jumped all over Firefox like it was the Second Coming.
Now, I understand that Firefox does have one great advantage over Opera, which is that it's open source, while Opera is closed source. But the original Mozilla browser was also open source, and it didn't get a fraction of the interest Firefox got. Another advantage was that Firefox had extensions, but (if I recall correctly) the original Mozilla browser had them too.
So, can Firefox's success over the original Mozilla browser be chalked up completely to the name change? Would Opera have been more successful had they simply rebranded it with a sexier name, or claimed that the "new" browser they'd released was a "faster Opera"?