I remember it as, Firefox was fast enough, but Chrome was shipping a weirdly quick JS engine and trying to convince people to put more stuff into JS because on Chrome that would be feasible. Nowdays if you go out without your turbo-JIT hand-optimized JS engine everyone laughs at you and it’s Chrome’s fault.
The pita fix only works if you can dig up a CD drive to put it in though. Most people don’t have one and are SOL.