Spot on. As said many many times, the browser is the new OS.
If Google wowed the world and introduced a free (beer or speech, doesn't matter) Windows-killer OS[0] that was better in every way than Windows, was Windows-compatible, tons of people would use it. You and I wouldn't.
[0] I do know about ChromeOS, yes
> I'd say my motivation
I’d be careful not to generalize your own experience here. Just the fact that we are having this conversation on HN puts us in a bubble that is not representative of “most people”.
My motivation is privacy. The motivation of many people I know is “ads are super annoying”. Privacy awareness is growing, but most people are not as aware as the people on this thread.
If you consider a simplified definition of cognitive dissonance that goes something like “thoughts or actions that do not match your beliefs or values”, then the behavior described by the parent comment could be cognitive dissonance, but probably only if certain things are true:
- The person understands the nature of Google’s business
- The person believes that using Chrome still benefits Google even when anti-tracking extensions are installed
That said, the people who understand enough to be categorized as such are not the average Chrome user. The average user is not experiencing cognitive dissonance, they just don’t know any better.