I also believe most of these topics are just talk. But the point I was making is that whenever someone talks about "I'm leaving Mac for whatever reason" it blows up and everyone and their mom weighs in to give their opinion. It's not uncommon to have these on the frontpage. Why? Because most people use Mac so they have something to say.
However when someone says "I am moving away from windows because of X" it never hits the frontpage since most people don't care since they are not on windows.
This is obviously not great quantitative research. But if I go into any co working space or coffee shop where people work on their laptops. I find a lot of people on macs, and all the technical ones are on HN. Whenever I meet technical people with a windows laptop they are never on HN.
I thought this was quite well established that HN is very apple'y, so I'm having a hard to come up with proper data to back this up.
> But I speculate, a good collection of today's "chrome leavers" here already use another browser - and are just adding fuel to the fire.
Haha you got me! I did leave Chrome (for privacy reason) for Firefox. Not during this big debate, but during a previous one (when Firefox came out with the big Quantum update and it started to perform on the same level as Chrome). Though I haven't stated I would leave today.
It's not a big change like migrating to another country. Most plugins have add ons for all big browser platforms. I do think that you'll see a decent amount of people in this discussion on HN change browser. But for Google this is just a blip in the graph.
The less empty detail is regulatory. "Big tech" is getting increasingly scrutinized over both monopoly abuse and privacy issues. Certainly this is another piece of evidence to regulators that Google is abusing their position.
It's just that. All talk. Including the usual empty threats of "don't piss of the technical people".
Meanwhile, they're still logging into Facebook using Chrome on their Windows machines.