for most, i would assume it's largely just that during the time of the naïve web, there was a period where google kind of was the company, so people started using it for everything (think shortly before and then during the early google+ era). 10 years later almost every normie who didn't start using apple products uses gmail and chrome simply because they legacied into it from when they were younger and less aware of the negative aspects of the practice.
I think you're overplaying the social aspect. For quite a while, Chrome had a serious speed advantage over Firefox and the developer tools were (are?) considered much better. I'm not sure if either is still the case. They both seem fine for my purposes, but I use Chrome because it subjectively feels a bit quicker and I've gotten disillusioned with the practice of choosing software based on political considerations.
Firefox devtools where long time not comparable to chrome, now they are almost the same.
There are now some features I prefer on Firefox and some I prefer on chrome.
The biggest difference was Firefox's best Dev Tools in those years were extensions and maintained via a wider community and updated on a different (sometimes faster) cadence than the browser itself. Good old Firebug was more capable than Chrome's Dev Tools at most points in time in that "long time not comparable" people believe existed, but Firefox didn't get "credit" for it until Firefox was finally pressured to move extensions like Firebug in-box and into the browser's normal deployment cycle. (I'm not sure that's necessarily the improvement people think it was.)
"eternal september" refers to when the internet became accessible to "normies," thus supplanting the old internet vibe (mainly hackers, engineers, etc) in favor of being useable by the general public.
go to instances.social, pick a relatively small one and sign up for an account. now you're on mastodon and have a fediverse account. this account can interact with everything fediverse, from mastodon to pleroma to pixelfed to peertube. decentralized to the max. (don't join mastodon.social)
HTML, CSS and at least the basics of JS can be learned for free from codeacademy. Once you have those, code a website for yourself so you get how they work. Shouldn't take more than a week to finish this if you're dedicated.
The author essentially states themselves that the feeling they have is nostalgia, and it should be noted that we as society should not let our longing for the past prevent our moving toward the future.
However, I do agree with them and believe everybody should make their own website in order to bring this feeling back. We don't need social networks - we can make our own networks via webrings and linking. Bring back "netizens."
Actually, that's plenty of time for meaningful evolution in humans too. Lots of changes in general distributions in response to environmental influences occur in that time.
We don’t have any specific genes to point to like with lactose tolerance but humans have definitely coevolved with dogs, especially pastoralists and hunters.
With dogs most of the obvious coevolution has just been cultural.
