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>the switch would almost certainly make things worse because add-ons people relied on won't work and now you've burdened them with having to find new and unfami

>the switch would almost certainly make things worse because add-ons people relied on won't work and now you've burdened them with having to find new and unfamiliar alternatives to what they were comfortable with. I have no data to back this up so you could say I'm just talking out of my ass, but I would guess that the non-technical users who makes up most of Chrome's userbase either don't use any add-ons at all or mainly use extremely popular ones that have equivalents in other web browsers like adblock. I 100% agree with everything else though, the average user who uses a web browser exclusively for instagram and gmail does not see things like small performance increases or privacy as being worth changing habits for. Hell, some of the technical people I work with have no problem with companies/the NSA spying on them because they have "nothing to hide". I really think the only reason Chrome got so popular was because the meme that Internet Explorer sucks premeated our culture so strongly that basically everyone started to know that the first thing you do with a new computer is use IE to download a different browser, and what better to use than the one made by the search engine you use every day?

TheRealPomax 8y ago
I think you'll find that a billion dollar company throwing literally hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising to get people to use their product, all at the same time across multiple continents, has far more of an effect than you are giving it credit for. If you're using IE, but your _train station_ has a wall-sized poster going "pst, give Chrome a try", and every other train station does too, then your average person will absolutely give in to that poster's suggestion after being exposed to it for 14 days straight. Even if it's only so that they can tell their friends they tried it. Chrome's campaign was a phenomenal example of a successful international product launch. Made even more impressive because it was for software, something most people /really/ don't care about.

TheRealPomax 8y ago

I think you'll find that a billion dollar company throwing literally hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising to get people to use their product, all at the same time across multiple continents, has far more of an effect than you are giving it credit for. If you're using IE, but your _train station_ has a wall-sized poster going "pst, give Chrome a try", and every other train station does too, then your average person will absolutely give in to that poster's suggestion after being exposed to it for 14 days straight. Even if it's only so that they can tell their friends they tried it. Chrome's campaign was a phenomenal example of a successful international product launch. Made even more impressive because it was for software, something most people /really/ don't care about.