alt Hacker NewsSure, it could easily take 1%.
Going above 5%, OTOH, I would be shocked to ever see happen, for two reasons. 1) Mass-market adoption requires working well on an enormous long tail, which is difficult without a large team. 2) The primary driver of playing at that size is mass marketing/distribution, which requires $$$. Engineering a great product is necessary, but not sufficient.
My perspective on this is informed by being on Google Chrome from inception to 2025. Chrome from near the beginning was well-engineered and had three compelling-according-to-user-research advantages over the IE of 2008 (speed, security, and not being made by Microsoft), but mass adoption depended on a large number of non-engineering factors, of which marketing/distribution was (to a then-mid-20s software engineer) the most surprising one. I didn't believe that was what made the difference in which browser most people used; I was very wrong. Techies are not the leading-edge trendsetters for the masses we sometimes believe we are.
IMO, taking mass market share in the future will require either a compelling-to-users product coupled with at least a couple hundred million dollars in marketing and distribution budget, or else something that is completely unlike web browsers of the past (maybe there's something that replaces the web entirely). No one has done the former since Chrome launched; the closest people have come to the latter thus far is things like Dia/Atlas that try to reimagine workflows in an AI context, and I think the market has not found those to be sufficiently different+compelling.
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I agree, 1% is reasonable. That's still a huge number of people. And, not all users are created equal. If that 1% of everyone is skewed towards the more educated, IE if 5% of millionaires switch, that's 5% fewer eyeballs looking at a sports car ad.
Yeah basically everybody I know who's non-technical switched to Chrome when Google started advertising it on google.com (This was back when nontechnical users would start every search query by going to google.com). "Oh this says it's better and faster, let me download it". Google also paid shareware/freeware developers to bundle Chrome with their installers if you didn't uncheck some option in the "expert install" mode. Chrome would then launch and prompt the user to set it as the default browser. This is somewhat questionable, but this sort of developer usually pushes some sort of malware in their installers so I suppose Chrome was an improvement on that.