I’d argue these are very different, for at least two reasons:
1. This is comparing desktops/laptops to phones. Way more people have phones than computers, and most people that have phones and not computers probably don’t realize or know how they can change the default.
2. This is comparing a browser to a search engine. More people are going to notice they’re using a different browser vs. using a different search engine.
Obviously this is speculation, but it seems like pretty reasonable speculation, particularly the first point.
From left to right, that's Chrome desktop, Chrome mobile, Safari desktop, Safari mobile, and Firefox desktop
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The post specified that the users are mostly senior. Regardless of what they go with clearly 0% of their users benefit from leaving it to default today unless they somehow figured out how to sell smartphones to fetuses
I feel like it's a bit of an odd metric? It's like saying whether people want to use File Explorer. There's alternatives, but it doesn't enter the calculus of a lot of people.
It's not "do you want Edge on your phone", it's "do you want your desktop browser on your mobile" for a decent set of people, I think.
This is definitely a demographic. The browsers are both good enough products for many common user cases that something like this can dominate the consideration.
That’s pretty much the reason Google has a browser in the first place. Most normal users don’t really grok the difference between ”browser” and ”Google” anyway.
Using the web isn't the same as knowing what the difference between a web browser and a computer OS is. Most people don't buy personal computers anymore, politicians are likely only using office PCs and their phone.
It's a widespread assumption that defaults matter. But to what degree? I came across it first when I saw Dan Ariely's talk and his work on defaults (may not be the proponent)[1] but my takeaway is that it matters when you don't care about the as much.
For everyone with Windows, you start off with Edge/IE and then Bing as a default search engine. Yet, most switch to Chrome + Google almost instantly. People care about their browsing experience more than we give them credit for. Remember in 2009-10 when Chrome was new, it managed to win market share cos of superior product when it was not the default on Windows/Linux/MacOSX.
On mobile too, the behavior is likely going to be there to a certain degree. While Google pays Apple a massive fee, there was an admission earlier in the trial that both Mozilla and Apple would still go ahead w Google (even without the deals) because of superior UX. Not sure if both said it, but one of them certainly did.
"...folks tend to prefer homogeneity of their program set across devices."
You must know different folks than I do. Most of the people I know that aren't developers wonder why the icon for "internet" has a big E on it. I can guarantee you that the grand majority of people don't realize that the web browser on their mobile device isn't the same as the web browser on their desktop. And if they do, they're unlikely to be using IE right now anyway.
Just like when people were switching from the blue e to firefox/chrome: these were different browsers, with different UI, but the concept of browsing the internet was the same. So in the end, the different UI didn't matter.
1. This is comparing desktops/laptops to phones. Way more people have phones than computers, and most people that have phones and not computers probably don’t realize or know how they can change the default.
2. This is comparing a browser to a search engine. More people are going to notice they’re using a different browser vs. using a different search engine.
Obviously this is speculation, but it seems like pretty reasonable speculation, particularly the first point.
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