Well, you have to remember that we are in an echo chamber here in the Fediverse.

I think the easiest way to explain this is with an example that might put you in their shoes for a bit. Ask yourself this, what would it take for someone to convince you to switch from using Lemmy to using something else like Mbin/PieFed? Where is the line you draw on what the developers say or do that would cause you to make that change? (Rhetorical questions).

Everyone has different values and different lines that can be crossed. For some, if the developers even hinted at support for a particular belief, they would immediately drop the software and find something else. For others, they might disagree with the developer’s opinions/actions but since they’re using Lemmy.World, they’re not directly supporting the developers anyway, so they’ll continue using Lemmy as long as it’s not under the dev’s instance. And then there are others who will somewhat or even strongly agree with the dev’s opinions/actions.

I would argue that only a small minority of users would fall under the category that would completely drop using Lemmy. At that point, the only factor that most others really care about (for switching) might be for better features or ease of use. So, unless the devs did or said something far worse to the point that it crosses the line for most users, bringing up the same points isn’t going to change the mind of most users.

Now apply this to browsers. The vast majority of people will prefer features/convenience/familiarity over the opinions/actions of one developer vs another developer as long as certain lines aren’t crossed (again, what that line is will be different for everyone).

Some users will be in the camp that, if any software even touches LLMs, Crypto, etc. then they won’t use the software. They hold those values as high as they do privacy/security which is why they would use something like LibreWolf instead of Brave.

Most users would probably not have strong enough opinions one way or another on Crypto, LLMs, etc. (the other concerns you raised) to let that factor too much into their final decision.

Even for the ones who disagree with it, as long as those options are disabled by default, easy to disable, or as long as they aren’t directly supporting them, then this would still factor lower on their final decision for which software to use.

Marketing definitely plays a big part. Doing a quick search for “compare privacy related browsers” leads to a bunch of articles that usually rank Brave very high. Additionally, the vast majority of users are going to stick with something that’s familiar to them and already has the features they’re used to.

Privacy reasons aside, most people are going to stick with what’s familiar to them, and the vast majority of users are already using some sort of Chromium browser.

My apologies for the wall of text, I found your comment interesting. Most of this I’m sure you already know. I just wanted to explore the subject a bit more, so I got my thoughts out.