That’s hard to prove or disprove without having an alternate universe ready for A/B testing.
Although, frankly, I can’t shake the feeling I’ve been living in the B-branch for, say, the last two years. If so, let me just say: if your results are not yet conclusive, please ask your statisticians for what “multi-armed bandit” means to them, then shoot them if the quizzically look at you. You may even skip the question.
Back on point: I know many people who use Firefox for “ideological” reasons. In fact, anybody who still used FF as of 6 months ago arguably fell in that group, save some extreme cases of inertia.
But, even more tittilating: Firefox seems to be once again be competitive wrt performance. That may just be its salvation, and not a moment too early to make it dramatic.
What are you even talking about? You're making it sound like Firefox has ever been a lot worse than Chrome, but that's far from the truth.
I've used both quite a lot and I've always preferred Firefox, even _without_ considering the privacy aspects. I still use Chrome on my laptop as Firefox doesn't support decent pinch zooming (that's more or less my only complaint), but for desktop usage I definitely choose Firefox over Chrome.
Not the OP, but when Chrome came out, it was leaps and bounds ahead of Firefox in terms of performance, and it took Firefox many years (until just recently, with Quantum) to catch up. I personally endured it, but it was definitely hard after having used Chrome for a short while, and I don't blame anyone for making the switch back then.
Most users don't care about features; they just want a browser that works well.
Why would it be "extreme" inertia to still be using Firefox? If it's never felt like it's failing to do the job of being a web browser, then not switching is inertia, sure, but it's not extreme...
Although, frankly, I can’t shake the feeling I’ve been living in the B-branch for, say, the last two years. If so, let me just say: if your results are not yet conclusive, please ask your statisticians for what “multi-armed bandit” means to them, then shoot them if the quizzically look at you. You may even skip the question.
Back on point: I know many people who use Firefox for “ideological” reasons. In fact, anybody who still used FF as of 6 months ago arguably fell in that group, save some extreme cases of inertia.
But, even more tittilating: Firefox seems to be once again be competitive wrt performance. That may just be its salvation, and not a moment too early to make it dramatic.