At this point I honestly wish chrome never happened.
And then we end up with Chrome, and Facebook, and Slack, and Twitter, and WhatsApp, and GitHub, and LinkedIn, and nobody ever seems to learn that if you don't insist on an open ecosystem, even if it's “just for now”, then eventually we all lose that option altogether.
> And with social networks, the interest in them is pretty proportional with the availability of the people you want to interact with being on there.
That's kind of my point. If we geeks stop jumping on the closed thing, and instead support the alternative open federated/decentralised network, then the open network has a chance of gaining the bigger/better pool of users.
As any tool becomes common, it becomes easier to figure out, because mainstream websites run “howto” articles: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=howto+instagram
We understand the network effect. We should apply it for great good!
Now at least, users have choice of what they deem the "best browser" to be and I honestly don't think they're inherently wrong for feeling that way. If someone uses Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Edge (though with that last one, I feel for them because it doesn't have the best tab recovery when Edge closes unexpectedly), or some derivative of any of the above, I think they're going to be reasonably okay.
But the sort of people who use whatever's put in front of them because they don't know or care are exactly the sort of people who need a browser that isn't actively hostile to their privacy and autonomy.
Greedy businesses are preying on vulnerable technophobes, and we who grok should make sure those vulnerable people have their best interests looked after by organisations whose motives genuinely align — not by big tech firms behaving like ambulance-chasing quack doctors, who'll sell you any number of appendectomies.