Looking at Mozilla IRC at the time, the reason wasn't bribery, but something way more basic.
Did you ever support an old SOAP server made in '90, that had a lot of bugs, that was slow as hell made of molasses, and was vulnerable to several security exploits?
Now imagine you have millions of users demanding, speed, security and those XML add-ons , I mean servers.
Basically Mozilla decided to ditching the old system in favor of the newer one, was the best choice at the time.
Did you ever support an old SOAP server made in '90, that had a lot of bugs, that was slow as hell made of molasses, and was vulnerable to several security exploits?
Now imagine you have millions of users demanding, speed, security and those XML add-ons , I mean servers.
Basically Mozilla decided to ditching the old system in favor of the newer one, was the best choice at the time.