[zarzavat]

Git won a long long time ago. Most people’s first VCS is now git. Mercurial is a lot better than SVN so it was able to pick up users back when SVN was dominant, but it’s not really better or worse than git it’s just down to taste. When you consider the network effects and switching costs it’s hard to convince anyone that mercurial is worth learning.

[iggldiggl]

I initially picked up Git because that was the cool/recommended thing to do. Then I started contributing to Firefox and at that time the story for using Git with Firefox's Mercurial repository was much more cumbersome, so I gave up and started using Mercurial instead. Over time, Mercurial has grown on me and these days I actually prefer it over Git.