[incrudible]

Mercurial was better than Git on almost any metric, it eludes me why it lost out to Git, perhaps because it lacked the kernel hacker aura, but also because it did not have a popular repository website with cute mascot going for it. Either way, tech history is full of examples of better designs not winning minds, due to cost, market timing, etc. And now with LLMs being trained on whatever was popular three years ago, we may be stuck with it forever.

[gavinhoward]

Because Git was faster.

This mattered because speed is the killer feature [1], and speed is often seen by users as a proxy for reliability [2].

[1]: https://bdickason.com/posts/speed-is-the-killer-feature/

[2]: https://craigmod.com/essays/fast_software/

[JoshTriplett]

> Mercurial was better than Git on almost any metric, it eludes me why it lost out to Git

I used Mercurial, professionally, back when there were a half-dozen serious VCS contenders, to contribute to projects that used it. I disliked it and found it unintuitive. I liked Git much better. Tastes vary.

Git made me feel like I was in control. Mercurial didn't.

Mercurial's handling of branches was focused on "one branch, one working directory", and made it hard to manage many branches within one working directory.

Mercurial's handling of branches also made it really painful to just have an arbitrary number of local experimental branches that I didn't immediately want to merge upstream. "Welcome to Mercurial, how can I merge your heads right now, you wanted to do that right now, right?"

Git's model of "a branch is just a pointer to a commit, commits internally have no idea what branch they're on" felt intuitive and comfortable.