People who choose chrome because of a view UX enhancements, or choose Google because Gmail syncs better than iCal/idav, or decide to use Google search over duckduckgo because of blah, is the reason why Giant Corporations rule the planet.
Why not support the underdog that actually cares about your privacy and liberties, rather than choosing an option that feeds the beast and sends us down a path to a dystopian future complete with global surveillance?
I don't think many people use products because of their politics. They use what works for them. Chrome seems to be doing so extremely well, despite its flaws and questionable competitive practices.
I have three browsers on my laptop. I hate Chrome because it is a battery/memory/data hog. But I can't comfortably switch profiles (work/various orgs/non-profits/personal) on FF like I do with Chrome. The feature is actually in FF, but it isn't available in the interface for whatever reason.
This feature is nonexistent on Safari.
Despite the alternatives on FF, this one feature is what keeps me on Chrome. Had FF had that, I probably would've switched by now.
Nothing political (unless the politics suddenly begins to matter)
I, for one, am not convinced they do. I'm convinced that's the message they're trying to sell right now because they can't compete in other ways, but history has not shown that they really do.
I think it could be a killer feature.
I'm now using Hyper, rather than iterm2 because it's not mac only. Hyper isn't great, but I don't have a better cross platform general terminal. I use VS Code everywhere, absolutely love it. I tend to use Chrome, because it pretty much works everywhere, though Brave is my default on my phone.
There's a lot to be said for a better UI/UX, and programs that work everywhere. Also, google doesn't sell their data, they do sell ads using their data. I do wish they'd lock down their advertisers a bit (restricting to text + images, no JS should be needed in-ad).
I have mixed feelings about Google as a company and their culture. I don't trust most of their services/apps to stick around, so tend not to use them beyond browser, search and gmail.
Hopefully this can't be read as downplaying the negative character of political discrimination. It's dangerous to expel people from their jobs based on their political views, unless you're an 1800s sweatshop boss working to stop unions. Otherwise you will face all of the downsides of other forms of discrimination (not having the best talent for the role, nobody to watch your cultural blind-spots, and so on) while running a high chance of ending up as an active fighter on the wrong side of history.
(Nor was Eich "kicked out", per se, in a top down fashion - merely the publicizing of his views practically fomented a revolution within the Mozilla community, including volunteers and donors, to the extent that it was untenable for him to continue to attempt to lead. And so he resigned.)
Some good coverage of this: https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2014/04/11/did-mozilla-ce...