different significance
Its not as if somebodies coins will suddenly become worthless.
Bitcoin has a lot of actors. Users, investors, miners, exchanges, shops... And everybody will have some hassle with a fork.
Just like on the WWW where there are webmasters, webdesigners, users, browser vendors, shops... And every has some hassle with browser compatibility.
I think this is in fact the nightmare scenario that some folks are worried about.
I agree with you it's unlikely to happen, because it's in very few people's interests, but I think that the degree of danger is exactly what's causing people to try so vigorously to find ways to co-operate on this matter.
And it's true that browsers also have incentive toward compatibility. But the fact is, despite this incentive, browsers remain in many ways incompatible. And for the most part, nobody notices, because minor incompatibilities in browsers do not "fork" the web the same way an incompatibility in bitcoin protocol forks the blockchain.
However I purposefully didn't try to interpret the stats there to allow people to make their own mind up.
If the "Net Applications" stats are correct then any insight as to why IE users visit Wikimedia sites so seldom?
IE is used far more at work whereas Chrome, safari, Firefox et al are used more on personal devices. You'll actually see a rise in ie use during the business day if you track hourly on many sites.
I wish someone would take a closer look at how Google push Chrome as well.
Currently there is only one Bitcoin implementation. And the developers a) refuse to implement what users want. And b) implement bloat that users dont't want.
So Bitcoin will "break up" in a similar way the WWW "broke up" when new browsers were introduced.
It's a good thing.