Chrome has a 60-70% market share on its own. Most people don’t even know the difference between “the internet” “the www” and “chrome” So, there is zero incentive for the 30% of non-chrome browsers, but most of the people who don’t use adblockers anyway will be sucked into this.
I think whatever the setupper of the computer dictates whatever Internet is, and secondarily the OS vendor if the new user doesn't have a tech friend.
I don't think Chrome is somehow == Internet for these people specifically. (Personally I call the shortcut "Internet" so it's consistent across devices and they don't have to recognize Lightning on their phone and Firefox on their laptop.)
The Google homepage on the other hand...
Android is the most popular mobile OS (+70% of market share[0]) and most Android phones sold outside China come Google Apps/Chrome pre-installed. That's a lot of Chrome installations.
And now Chromebooks are selling like hot cakes (30M in 2020[1], a huge increase mostly because of the pandemic) and Chrome is the default browser there too.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste... [1] https://www.androidpolice.com/2021/02/01/chromebooks-continu...
But also Chrome isn't super hard to install anyway and the dark patterns "help" with the process. Go on Google.com with MS Edge and it'll tell you Chrome will give you a faster, more betterer Internet. It must be pretty convincing to hear that from the de facto arbiter of the world wide web and all you have to do is follow the pretty blue buttons. I was able to install Roblox when I was 10 with less guidance.
> We also often encounter websites that block the exact string “Vivaldi”, with no contact or warning to us. This is particularly problematic when the larger technology behemoths (some of whom we directly compete with in the browser space) do this
Not saying it's right how Chrome is pushed though. IMO, ideally there would be regulation requiring Windows to offer a fair choice of browser downloads (none preinstalled) when you set up the computer, and google wouldn't pull it's "faster, better browser" thing when visiting their search site.
The Google homepage for years said that web users should install Chrome and now almost everyone believes it.
Beside that, a lot of people is induced by Google to install Chrome. A lot of Google services doesn't work so well in browsers that are not Chrome. One of them is Google Meet, that is used in my country by a lot of schools. This is of course by design, there are no reasons Google couldn't make a software that works in all browsers.
And chrome OS come bundled with chrome too.
I mean it used to be that most people didn't know the difference between IE and the internet, and some time in the last ten years I guess it changed to Chrome instead of IE.
Now of course there have been more people coming on to the web during that time as well, but I have to think that there is a significant number of people who by this time must have some idea that the browser itself is not the internet.
And I don't use adblockers, but I don't use chrome either.
Right and there was a reason for that. IE's monopoly didn't fall from the sky. Netscape was flying high and they decided to rewrite the whole browser while IE kept adding features. The end result was that yes, Firefox was born, but its market share collapsed.
Now you have a lot of browsers deciding that the most important thing they can do is remove features and break websites. Maybe those features aren't very good from a privacy point of view, but when the other guy's browser works and yours doesn't, that's not a recipe for gaining market share. Chrome is the other guy, and unlike Safari which is disabling cookies right and left and refusing to load resources, Chrome is willing to do it and sites work with Chrome. So in that dynamic, there is little reason to think that Chrome is going to lose market share to browsers whose main raison d'etre is that they will refuse to load/send resources. If it wasn't for iOS banning non-safari engines, Chrome's market share would be much higher, which is pretty sad given that it's become so bloated. But users care more about stuff working.
From memory it looked more like MS bundled their browser with the OS, and back in the day discoverability of software was practically zero, so MS just sort of won through inertia.
Mozilla did start writing firebird (phoenix?) which then became firefox, but I think by then MS already had the de facto monopoly.
I may be misremembering history there of course...
I was there using Firefox.
They have a list of sites which user agent sniff for Chrome but work perfectly fine in Firefox.
For those sites they add a rule to pretend to be chrome.