I guess I started using Firefox when it was called NCSA Mosaic. A friend showed it to me at Apple in 1993, but I didn't get what the web was good for then. (To be sure, there wasn't much there yet.) By 1994 I was working at SGI, and marketing was exploring whether there was a product there for us, so I installed it, started using it, followed NCSA's daily roundup of new web sites for a while. It was mind boggling -- hundreds of sites, and three or four new ones every day! (Yes, those are global totals.)
By late 1994, Mosaic Communications (later renamed to Netscape, then Mozilla) was poaching employees from SGI, including quite a few people I knew.
By 1995, my girlfriend (now wife) was shocked to see a URL on the side of a bus. That was our proof that the web had gone mainstream.
Internet Explorer and Chrome didn't exist yet, of course.
I started using Firefox for its adblock addon on W98 with v1.0.3? but my computer at the time couldn't handle it (433mhz,96MB RAM) so I used Maxthon.
When I got a new computer with 256MB RAM (later 768) I switched over to Firefox 1.5.0.14? near full time because of the amount of customization.
I was saddened by v53+'s lockdown & eventual removal of XUL API's for customization & am still waiting to recover functionality to this day with v115.
On mobile I used Opera in ~2007/2008 on a feature phone.
My first android phone in 2011 (Transform, a low end 2.1 Eclaire slider with 256MB RAM) in 2012 didn't cut it CPU arch & RAM wise so I used Opera & Dolphin because of RAM.
It took until I got a SGS4 (2GB RAM) to switch over to Firefox & I haven't looked back.
When I started, Netscape was wonderful. I loved the toolbars with the 'drag' bars which you could click to collapse... so much better than IE.
When I moved to Thailand, internet shops started up - using Windows 98 for a while there.
Opera browser and Firefox were really good viable options. Opera had super smooth mouse gestures and was better for a while - but in the long run Firefox was more reliable.
Chrome took over for a number of years, but Firefox later became my 'default' (though still not most-used) browser.
About 5 years ago when I moved over to Manjaro KDE, I liked their theming for Firefox (I dropped it now, but still...) and just found very very few reasons to fire up another browser.
KDE with X11 desktop has mouse gestures built in, so it no longer matters in that regard if I use Firefox, or anything else (even text editors) because many shortcuts are now almost consistent across all softwares... I can close, reopen and navigate tabs in Dolphin file browser the same as with Firefox.
Man... I don't remember specifically when I started using Firefox, but it was up until Chrome first was released and then I was stuck in the Chromium and its offshoots ever since.
I recently came back only as of....last year and made it a point to get away from a lot of Google junk, as well as negative social media experiences!
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