Right. Although it's hard to know if Firefox was the cause, one of many causes, or just something around at the right time to get caught up in an inevitable change. History is hard, even only 8 years later. Still, it seemed to me at the time to be at least partially causal.
I'm confident it was Firefox. Not the browser, but the community-based marketing campaign - Spread Firefox when it was launched, and before that geeks installing Firefox on their parent's computers (and so on).
For me, a key moment was when my not-very-computery Mum, without prompting by me, phoned up her stockbroker to complain the site didn't work on Firefox. She did so because she felt Firefox was the "latest greatest thing", and blamed the broker for not supporting it.
In my view, modern Apple wouldn't have been possible without the Firefox community web standards campaign. The version 1 iPhone would have bombed if most websites hadn't worked on it.
Likewise, modern Google wouldn't have been possible. Projects like Google Docs, Mail and Maps are much better because of the standards push that started with the Firefox community. It lets Google compete directly with Microsoft.
