"having watched “hundreds of people” installing a web browser sounds a bit dubious…"
There's definitely jobs where this is possible... IT support at a medium sized company, various user research, etc.
I remember seeing non-technical people back in the days making the switch to chrome because it was faster indeed. Firefox had to do some catch up, and words of mouth didn't work in Firefox's best interest for quite some time.
back in the early days I remember people switching over to it because it had a built-in Flash plugin.
In more recent years, I've seen people installing it because they were sick of the pop-ups advertising it on Google sites, or they just assumed that it worked better with Google products because Google made it. Having learned that Google kind of made things that way, I'm not surprised.
Gmail was bait to lure millions into the Googleverse, where they usually don't leave.
Personally I'm kind of happy to see Microsoft Edge gaining some marketshare at Chrome's expense. (even if it's mostly just Chrome)
> because they were sick of the pop-ups advertising it on Google sites
for the longest time chrome advertising on google.com were actually malware : (
This forum isn't some obscure backwater.. A large chunk of all the world's tech wizards congregate here during boring meetings, bathroom breaks, etc.
If someone claims to have done some work with tech, chances are they're telling the truth
Re:Mozilla’s Uncertain Future
by craftinator on Saturday August 15, 2020 @03:56PM
(#24171848)
This is a case of the problem of "most people are idiots in this realm". It pops up in many different domains.
I don't know who you are, but having watched “hundreds of people” installing a web browser sounds a bit dubious…
Personally, I have discussed with a few dozens of websites users and most of them would answer the question “what web browser do you use” with “Google” no matter if they were using Chrome, Firefox, or IE (there are few Mac users in my country).
Firefox users had it installed on their computer by some computer-savy relatives, and most of Chrome users didn't know were it came from (most believing it was already there beforehands) which is a good marker of people getting it bundled with other pieces of software.