Yes, my first browser was Mosaic, and I've been working as a professional web developer since before Firefox existed.
Firefox benefitted from years of stagnation and neglect of IE by Microsoft. And even then, when it was clearly the superior product, it took years to gain a significant portion of the browser market, and it still never managed to get much over 20%. Only Google, with the most popular website on the planet, and billions of dollars to spend, managed to actually dislodge IE.
As things stand, Chrome is not stagnating or neglected. Firefox is a good browser, but it is by no means a clearly superior product. There is a vastly larger number of deployed PCs, using Chrome as their default browser, than there was in the early 2000s. Mobile has replaced the desktop as the dominant consumer computing platform, where installing and using a replacement browser is far less likely. There are far more apps and content optimised for Chrome than there ever was even for IE, and the quantity is expanding all the time.
For all these reasons, and more, I am convinced that advocacy and evangelism alonge will not succeed to change the situation, and such efforts, while noble-minded, are mostly a waste of time.
I didn't say the concerns are wrong, just that repeating them again and again, mostly within an echo chamber of tech people, will do nothing to change the facts.
I don't think people should sit there and go meh. They should just be realistic about what actions will and will not make an actual difference.
I find it kind of hilarious that people seem to think the solution to the Chrome monoculture is them personally switching to Firefox and then writing a blog post / comment / tweet about it. It's like saying we need to get serious about climate change, so you're going to start cycling to work, and encourage your friends to do the same. If that salves your conscience, then great, but your individual actions are statistically irrelevant.
There are systemic trends and market forces at play here involving billions of people. And nowhere amongst the significant forces and trends will you find "there are insufficient nerds evangelising Firefox". Hacker News can upvote as many as these kinds of articles as it likes, but Chrome's market share will continue to grow until there is something far more substantial to stop it than philosophical objections by tech insiders.
Actually, it does make sense. While the ability of the super-rich to affect society is enhanced by their wealth, their ability, and need to do so, are reduced by their small numbers. They do not form the kind of large, broadly homogeneous social group that drives long-term changes in society. The sheer scale of their exceptional wealth also lets them make special, individual arrangements that preclude the need to act en-masse.
The 1% on the other hand, are rich enough to enjoy outsized political influence, but poor enough to retain some economic anxiety, and be genuinely affected by changes to taxation, inheritance, redistribution, etc. And they are numerous enough to form a corporate whole that acts to protect its own interests.
The 1% are the middle managers of the world's socioeconomic hierarchy. They don't possess great power individually, but their collective power to shape the culture is vast, and has a tendency towards toxic outcomes as they attempt to safeguard what wealth they have managed to accumulate.
In European cities like London, Paris or Zurich, the supply of housing is so constrained that, barring something catastrophic like a war or a global financial crisis, prices will never drop that much for that long. In fact, it's quite a big economic problem — there's little reason for the majority of people to put their savings into anything other than property, because it tends to be so reliable.
And somewhere like London, renting a whole property is often just as expensive or more expensive that paying the equivalent mortgage would be. So you wouldn't even save any money by renting.
Firefox benefitted from years of stagnation and neglect of IE by Microsoft. And even then, when it was clearly the superior product, it took years to gain a significant portion of the browser market, and it still never managed to get much over 20%. Only Google, with the most popular website on the planet, and billions of dollars to spend, managed to actually dislodge IE.
As things stand, Chrome is not stagnating or neglected. Firefox is a good browser, but it is by no means a clearly superior product. There is a vastly larger number of deployed PCs, using Chrome as their default browser, than there was in the early 2000s. Mobile has replaced the desktop as the dominant consumer computing platform, where installing and using a replacement browser is far less likely. There are far more apps and content optimised for Chrome than there ever was even for IE, and the quantity is expanding all the time.
For all these reasons, and more, I am convinced that advocacy and evangelism alonge will not succeed to change the situation, and such efforts, while noble-minded, are mostly a waste of time.