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Comment by Veen | Hacker News Reader

But most people aren't even going to try Firefox. Unless Google do something seriously stupid with Chrome, the average user has no incentive to move. Chrome is good enough.

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I don't know, I feel like many people started using Chrome because technical-minded folk recommended it to them (certainly, I told many family members to switch to it). So, maybe the same thing will happen with Firefox (I have just switched from Chrome to Firefox and am prepared to recommend it as someone's default browser).

Looking towards technical minded relatives and friends definitely helped, but what really pushed Chrome over the top IMO was Google.com, Gmail, Youtube, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Hangouts, etc. all insisting you must use Chrome.

To explain why I think this, the Quality delta between Firefox and IE when Firefox reached about 20-30% marketshare was orders of magnitude greater than the delta between Chrome and Firefox over the period Chrome managed to push to 60-70% marketshare.

I wonder why they did - FF was always safer in so many ways, helping you instead of the advertisers, having a separate certificate store made it safe against nasty BIOS level viruses, etc etc

> having a separate certificate store made it safe against nasty BIOS level viruses

Sorry but that’s just wishful thinking. In this regard Firefox is less of a target than Chrome/Internet Explorer because it isn’t the dominant monoculture, similar to how Mac OS is less of a target than Windows. That doesn’t mean its safe.

Firefox cannot be a dominant monoculture like windows can. It is not an operating system.

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