[pmikesell]

I'm a technically minded person. I've been using web browsers since NCSA Mosaic. I switch browsers probably once per decade (mosaic -> netscape navigator -> firefox -> chrome).

At the time I started using Chrome IE was the dominant web browser and firefox was losing the war because content creators were continually accidentally making things work in IE only. (By "accidentally" I mean that the standards were very confusing, and understanding what would work with which browser was a continual battle, and Microsoft had a good 15 years under its belt of attempting to make the web a windows only affair).

So then Chrome comes along, backed my Google, and people started treating it as a first class citizen. Sites were belt to run with, and tested on Chrome.

Fast forward to now. I actually do want to have a wide array of ad sponsored content on the internet because I appreciate the free content and I'm not going to pay 30 different 5$ per month subscriptions for stuff I might read. Are they tracking me? Yes. When I search for lawn mowers online I get spams (which gmail seems to filter just fine) and my rarely logged into facebook feed is full of lawn mower ads. I use in-cognito when I want to see what a google or linked in search looks like without my user context. I use ABP when sites are too aggressive with their ads.

And it's all fine. I suspect my current experience is common, to answer your question.

[dao-]

> At the time I started using Chrome IE was the dominant web browser and firefox was losing the war [...]

This is false. Firefox's market share was continuously rising until Chrome came along (and Google marketed it aggressively). IE was still strong but already losing.

[olyjohn]

You are correct. For some reason, I keep seeing this history repeated over and over, but even the chart in the article confirms you're correct. Firefox was taking over like crazy before Chrome came along...

[pmikesell]

... I'm talking about before that. Netscape went from 90% to 6% once IE started bundling on Windows. Firefox "taking over like crazy" is a later comeback.

[pmikesell]

Netscape Navigator was something like 90% at one point. Netscape fell down to single digits against IE and then started climbing back up. That's the point at which the chart in the article begins. That's what I'm referring to when I say "losing the war". 90% -> 6% is losing.

I'm not like an IE fan - I don't user Windows for anything other than gaming, I just remember what the browser wars were like in the early 2000s.

[mda]

It's share was definitely stagnating around the time Chrome came out. I advocated heavily for Firefox at the time, but it was not enough. Not a surprise that many Firefox engineers went on to create Chrome at Google, Firefox codebase was still carrying the burden of old Netscape and it took them 10 years to modernize it.

[dao-]

> Not a surprise that many Firefox engineers went on to create Chrome at Google,

Google paid a bunch of engineers to work on Firefox, then pulled them to create Chrome. They weren't given a choice. So yeah, not surprising at all.

[blub]

IE wasn't winning any war against Firefox, it was Firefox which was gaining marketshare from IE, which had a crap reputation at that point.

For this reason and the fact that you think lawnmower ads are the worst that surveillance capitalism can do, I'm skeptical that you are technically minded at all. This is 100% how the average Joe thinks.

[klingonopera]

I remember when I made the change, must've been 2004 or 2005, I was reluctant at first to change from IE to Firefox, but the killer feature FF had at that time was tabbed browsing.

Kids these days will never know the struggle of having 10 browser windows clogging up the task bar...

[newscracker]

While I agree with your point on not willing to pay “30 different $5 per month subscriptions for stuff I might read”, I do not agree that technically aware people who know about privacy ought to have a lackadaisical attitude to tracking and surveillance. At an individual level you could argue that it doesn’t harm you (or better, hasn’t harmed you so far), but at the level of society and the world, we’d be worse off if everybody thought this wasn’t important and hence did nothing about it.

[ignoramous]

If only user tracking was limited to product ads. Behaviour control and propaganda are a thing, as evidenced many times over with Rohingya genocide, US elections, Brexit, and the Hong Kong pro-democracy protests to name but a few.