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Except with Microsoft browsers, the populace has decades of conditioning telling us "Internet Explorer bad, need to install my own browser." And when Edge came out, everyone just continued what they were already doing. When Edge came out, it also had serious issues with media playback at times that reinforced that decision to many.

The power of the defaults is not overrated. This is just an excellent example of an "exception."

In the case of Google, they already have decades of conditioning with people viewing it as the main or only search engine worth anything. When you need to look up something, most people would tell you to "google it." The power of the defaults benefits google.com much better than it benefits Microsoft with browsers.

>The power of the defaults benefits google.com much better than it benefits Microsoft with browsers.

And that's simply because the delta between Google and the competition in search is greater than the delta between Microsoft and its competition in browsers

Right, so if your product is the default offering, and you're already the most popular, the competition has its legs cut out from under them.

Granted, the power of the defaults is usually strongest in the context of random settings in a product that end users don't know anything about. Search engines are something most people know at least something about by now.

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.

>More people are going to notice they’re using a different browser vs. using a different search engine.

Chromium Edge and Chrome have pretty much identical UI/UX. If you switch between Google and Bing, you will immediately notice the difference.

>most people that have phones and not computers probably don’t realize or know how they can change the default.

"80.12% of iOS users, used Safari as their default browser as of 2020." Source: https://zipdo.co/statistics/apple-safari/

About 20% of users changing the default browser is a big deal, especially when all browsers are identical (WebKit) under the hood.

> If you switch between Google and Bing, you will immediately notice the difference.

Again, I'd argue that this may not be true for a lot of people. And even if they notice the difference, I'm not sure that a) they'd care, or b) they'd know how to do anything about it.

My wife/mom would probably ask me how to change their browser back, if the UX is different enough that they couldn't find their way around (but if not, then they won't care about that either).

But they're not going to care to change the default browser back, as the UX difference between the two has a much smaller gap. Only the results are different, if they may not even notice that.

> About 20% of users changing the default browser is a big deal, especially when all browsers are identical (WebKit) under the hood.

But this means that 80% users stick to the default (in this specific case). If these are users that don't care or don't know how to change the default, then the defaults matter more than the OP (and the linked article) suggest. And 80% is a much bigger deal than 20%.

People on HN really over estimate the average user. I start any troubleshooting with older family be starting with "Show me how you normally get on the Internet" because who knows which browser theyve already been tricked into using.

I'm not quite sure how - but I'm pretty certain my grandmother uses the web exclusively through her phones stock email client. I've tried to show her... but I always find her inside some webview spawned by the email app eventually.

Chrome also did a lot of legwork showing people how to change desktop browsers, taking out ads not only on their massive ads platform and online properties but on billboards, tv ads. etc.

No mobile search has launched anything nearly as comprehensive, probably because it would cost so much.