>“it’s the Google ball on the taskbar and when you click it, the internet comes up” — is the argument to use Chrome that many people will go with.
>I’m not making fun of tech illiterate people either.
The problem here is that when Joe Sixpack buys a Windows PC and starts it up, there is no "Google ball" on the taskbar: there's an icon for Edge, Microsoft's own browser that's included in Windows. Chrome is nowhere to be found. Joe only sees Chrome when he goes to a Google site like YouTube and gets prompted to install it, and goes through the steps of doing so. Joe could just as easily install Firefox, but he doesn't, perhaps because no huge website like YouTube is encouraging him to.
And also, the majority of people in tech still use chrome out of convenience, because they don't give enough of a shit about Google being an evil monopoly.
How can we the expect Joe to "do the right thing" when his tech-friend uses Chrome too?
"but that one website I need to use once a month doesn't work in Firefox" - fine, from a techie it seems too much to ask to just use a different browser once a month.
All these things are likely. It is also often the case that Joe's friend who's "good with computers" will install Chrome for him. Chrome is massively popular and overall a very functional browser.
As another commenter mentioned, too, Edge is Chromium-derived. The manifest v2 will soon (2025) be deprecated in Chromium, which is not that different from the Chrome deprecation. In Chrome, v2 is still technically supported until further notice, even in the newest Canary builds. It's just that plugins using v2 will require manual installation. All in all, it looks to me like 2025 is when v2 will be properly dropped on Chrome and Chromium.
The problem here is that when Joe Sixpack buys a Windows PC and starts it up, there is no "Google ball" on the taskbar: there's an icon for Edge, Microsoft's own browser that's included in Windows. Chrome is nowhere to be found. Joe only sees Chrome when he goes to a Google site like YouTube and gets prompted to install it, and goes through the steps of doing so. Joe could just as easily install Firefox, but he doesn't, perhaps because no huge website like YouTube is encouraging him to.