I visited HN for years before registering and making my first comment.

Those who leave comments are a small fraction of the total HN traffic.

If you saw the a recent thread which asked people why they stalk HN, you'd understand that many visitors aren't start up guys, programmers or even technical in nature.

In other words, I bet HN's actual traffic log will show mobile devices and Windows as the predominant OS.

Do you have any data to back this claim up? I would be surprised if the majority of visitors to HN were using mac.

No direct data. But that's the impression I have gotten over the years. I've seen a ton of posts at the frontpage that talk about moving away from Apple for whatever reason, which are always heated debates. I've never seen any post of people jumping from Windows to mac or linux (I believe that's not a situation a lot of people on HN are in).

it might be my filter bubble, but if I google "hacker news mac vs windows" the only results I get are posts where people are moving away from Mac to something else[1].

[1]: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/969743/46010063-fa... (that's just the top of the page, but the whole first page is like that).

> talk about moving away

It's just that. All talk. Including the usual empty threats of "don't piss of the technical people".

Meanwhile, they're still logging into Facebook using Chrome on their Windows machines.

I also believe most of these topics are just talk. But the point I was making is that whenever someone talks about "I'm leaving Mac for whatever reason" it blows up and everyone and their mom weighs in to give their opinion. It's not uncommon to have these on the frontpage. Why? Because most people use Mac so they have something to say.

However when someone says "I am moving away from windows because of X" it never hits the frontpage since most people don't care since they are not on windows.

This is obviously not great quantitative research. But if I go into any co working space or coffee shop where people work on their laptops. I find a lot of people on macs, and all the technical ones are on HN. Whenever I meet technical people with a windows laptop they are never on HN.

I thought this was quite well established that HN is very apple'y, so I'm having a hard to come up with proper data to back this up.

What about you? You think the opposite?

> What about you? You think the opposite?

I mostly agree with everything you said.

But I speculate, a good collection of today's "chrome leavers" here already use another browser - and are just adding fuel to the fire.

Or, they're not actually leaving chrome - just threatening, because they care.

> But I speculate, a good collection of today's "chrome leavers" here already use another browser - and are just adding fuel to the fire.

Haha you got me! I did leave Chrome (for privacy reason) for Firefox. Not during this big debate, but during a previous one (when Firefox came out with the big Quantum update and it started to perform on the same level as Chrome). Though I haven't stated I would leave today.

It's not a big change like migrating to another country. Most plugins have add ons for all big browser platforms. I do think that you'll see a decent amount of people in this discussion on HN change browser. But for Google this is just a blip in the graph.

The less empty detail is regulatory. "Big tech" is getting increasingly scrutinized over both monopoly abuse and privacy issues. Certainly this is another piece of evidence to regulators that Google is abusing their position.

I assume this is based on a lot of (web/mobile) devs being on HN and them using macOS predominantly based on conferences etc.?

I'd agree with that assessment, macOS probably first, Linux second, but then you have to remember how many Windows users there are. The HN regulars are probably mostly on Mac/Linux, but I'd imagine just the drive by Windows traffic would put it at the top spot.

There are plenty of Windows users on HN actively. Not everybody in tech is an SV webdev.

Right.

But there's a certain amount of irony that people are ditching Chrome, while still using an OS which literally does spy on you.

I tried looking up stuff about windows spying on users, and most of what I'm seeing is useless (debunked articles, generally clickbait stuff). Is there anywhere I could look to read more about this if true?

I see, thanks! I've opted out of everything you can already, and don't use Cortana, so all I'm sending is some basic telemetry data it seems.

And also whatever you type into the start menu.

It took me several days to root out all of the programs and services in my enterprise windows 10 install which were spying on me or attempting to install software without my consent, had to prevent cortana from running, block windows servers with hosts file, delete scheduled tasks, adjust group policy, disable updates, and firewall my own computer.

All this so that I could have an OS that isn't actively spying on me, and play games on it. Thank goodness valve is making progress on linux...

Even Windows 10 seems much less creepy compared with what Google's become.

The browser is looked upon as the portal to the Internet.

When accessing web-sites over a public network, I sort of expect (not necessarily like or agree) to be tracked and others to know what I'm doing. I'm always in the mindset of "what ever I do within this window, others will see" (regardless of browser).

For what I do on my local desktop? No. Not at all.

Is there some actual data on this somewhere? I'd be curious to know the browser / OS breakdown.