A disheartening chart from Ars Technica, if you're a Firefox booster: That gentle downward slope indicates Firefox might never reach 25 percent marketshare. Why? Because companies with money care about browsers now. Or, in a word: Chrome.

Chrome is the only browser that gained marketshare from January to February, bouncing .41 percent to 5.61 percent. Even the release of Firefox 3.6 in the last two months didn't help, with Firefox sliding .18 percent (second to IE's .6 percentage point drop, which you'd assume would be sending users to alternative browsers, like Firefox).

Here's one difference between Firefox and Chrome, in a nutshell: Banners on two of the biggest, most trusted websites on the internet. Chrome's by Google. It's fast! It's nice! Switch to it!

But you know what? It is faster and nicer than Firefox. The heyday of Firefox, when it was hands down the best was when nobody with money cared about browsers that worked, that made the internet a better place. So guys on a shoestring could out-innovate and slaughter the incumbent tyrant. Now companies with resources—Google—can iterate new versions and features just plain faster. Not to mention, advertise the crap out of its browser.

Part of me really hopes that Firefox does hit 25 percent, just as a symbolic "fuck you" to the old browser regime. But the other part me thinks Chrome might do it first, even if that's a ways away. [Ars]