We don't know that this kind of article doesn't have effects. If there's always some subpopulation who's never heard of diet coke & mentos (https://www.xkcd.co

We don't know that this kind of article doesn't have effects. If there's always some subpopulation who's never heard of diet coke & mentos (https://www.xkcd.com/1053/ https://www.xkcd.com/1053/ ), it's pretty likely that there's some subpopulation that is unaware of the implications of Chrome's dominance combined with Google's business model and amenable to arguments that something like Firefox or even Safari might be a better choice. And I think it's also worth considering that Firefox made significant strides into IE's marketshare back in the early/mid 2000s when users ostensibly had no reason to care by the standard of "no concrete/perceived benefits", since everyone had to code to accomodate IE. There's no other reasonable model I can think of other than IT professionals frequently recommending FF, and many non-pros finding that recommendation compelling enough to switch.