I'm always watching how my coworkers and friends are using computers, in part because people will always teach you something brilliant about how to use a computer if you give them a chance1. Also, being as I am, interested in the future of technology, I think Stephen O'Grady is right developers drive technological change.
One thing that I've noticed in the past 3 months, or so, is that folks are slowly moving away from Chrome and back to (mostly) Firefox. I don't think this is emblematic of any greater shift in the way that programmers work and I don't think that this is evidence that Chrome itself is unsuccessful...
I think there are a few interconnected reasons driving the move away from Chrome:
Chrome can be flakey in some cases: tabs freeze, the memory use tends to run away with large number of tabs.
All of the "magic" that Chrome is doing to make things fast and efficient, increases the actual heat generated by the machine, which is both uncomfortable and reduces battery life for laptops.
Firefox by contrast, has the same good standards compliant rendering, isolates tabs using a process model, has a more stable resource profile, has an emended PDF reader, has an established extension ecosystem, and a regular incremental development cycle. If competition is good for innovation, Chrome gave Firefox the push it needed.
Second, I think the most technologically interesting and important aspects of Chrome (from Google's perspective,) aren't actually the ones that would drive adoption of Chrome: notably the automatic "self-updating," and having a viable runtime for projects like ChromeOS and Dart. Some people have to use it, but they don't all have to use it for it to succeed.
For one emacs using coworker, anytime we watch each other use emacs, we inevitably ask each other "wait, how did you do that," notably for flyspell-auto-correct-previous-word and dired-maybe-insert-subdir, which are both amazing but even after years of collective emacs use we each were only familiar with one. ↩︎