One thing that drove Firefox usage was the EU rule that required Windows to display a menu of web browsers, I seem to recall. I remember seeing stats on this that this lead to higher firefox adoption in the EU. If you display a menu then people have to make a choice but no menu and people use the default.

Basically a large number of users are lazy and use the web browser include whether safari on apple or edge on windows. So most people don't really choose web browsers, like they dont choose OSs. This is the same reason Linux never takes off. People dont care about the OS, they buy a device to do what they want, and they dont make a seperate decision on what OS to put on it, often they dont even know what an OS is, much less how to install one.

People dont mess around with installing firefox because really there is nothing to gain and what they have by default is good enough.

Firefox removing features and being a leftie political movement doesn't help either.

Its nonsense. Instant messages are synchronous and allow for instant reply and exchanges. Plus there is the audio video option. Electronic communications can be a time saver since it allows for task management and queueing in reviewing them. Linux is a prime example of how this works and can be substantially more efficient than in person conversations which can wander off focus and become an unproductive time waster.

To elaborate further some of the surviving rock from the period may have been offshore where the ice wouldn't have made contact with the rock, or they could have been in deep basins such as rift valleys , or rocks caught in subduction zones, or caught within thrust faults, where some rock had been pushed deeper into the crust in the subduction zone. I know some of the rocks from the period are in the UK and Nova Scotia which were coastal areas at the time like today, but were positioned of the coast of Africa.

That is good to know and I don't like how so many journalist articles are basically watered and dumbed down. Most people really are smarter than that. Its interesting how they could estimate the amount of missing rocks and thanks for bringing that up

Its incorrect to say there are no rocks from that period. But they are rarer, and the unconformity is widespread. There are still pockets here and there of rocks from the period for whatever reason escaped whatever it was, probably glaciers . Some of them

The feature is called the great uncomformity. Its really not all that much of a mystery because as is said, completely rational, almost hard to belief if it was not the case, explanations exist for it, such as the combination of Rhodinia and a vast ice sheet which covered the whole thing and scraped the continents clean of sedimentary rock. If its an ice sheet, then the cambrian explosion makes sense, because the ice sheet goes away, sedimentary rock starts piling up again, and life takes off in the warmer climate.

also read about the galileo gambit

One distinct threat to Facebook is what took out Myspace a mass user defection contagion. Once the defection process to Myspace got started, it sort of fed on itself and snowballed. When people started seeing their friends leave, they left as well for Facebook, etc. Of course it was catalyzed by several things such as a malware plague on Myspace that made it basically become unusable and let to a chaotic user profile disaster. But this remains a great danger to facebook. Could a privacy concern cause that? If it starts to become a noticeable impact on people, but so far Facebook quietly sells data in such a way that it does not disturb people too much. I think something really has to become a major practical annoyance or a threat. People probably don't care so much about advertiser demographic data but they will care about things like stolen credit cards etc.

Facebook is aware of that and thats why you get the "people you may know" alerts is that Facebook knows that what keeps people on the platform is networking with other people on the platform and they know if people start moving to an alternative it could start the snowball effect, so Facebook is trying to be a little proactive with trying to connect people via Facebook before they do so by an alternative platform.

Facebook has also been branching out into other areas such as the games to try to reduce their dependence solely on social networking, or to build a synergy with social networking and other applications like gaming.

Anti-trust arguments against Facebook are very, very, very weak IMO. As long as someone can offer an alternative to it, and they often do, there is no real monopoly. Its entirely by user choice that people use Facebook and they have alternatives. Facebook is actually and can be protected from antitrust issues so long the cost of entry of competitors is low so you have startups, which gives Facebook the chance to say, look there are other services people can use and they are easy to start up. So its kind of in Facebooks interest for their to be an open internet. But Facebook knows, because Facebook has so much inertia and the fact is people tend to stick with it since that is where their friends are, Facebook would have to kill themselves by doing something so disastrous that people would dump it, to ruin their business model, like the Myspace malware plague that drove people off that. But given that Facebook avoids the problems that doomed Myspace and maintains a UI that is attractive to users I think they can avoid defections. Trump wanted to go after them but that was out of spite. But this does show a danger with Facebook that if they get aggressive with this deplatforming thing it might start to piss people off. Facebook/Twitter actually caused themselves self inflicted harm by deplatforming Trump and if you ask me doing that kind of thing is what endangers them.

The big appeal of facebook is for people to catch up with their family and friends so as long as their family and friends are there and keep on sharing their activities then people will come back since there will be something new. Facebook has branched out into games etc also. So it is certainly within its power to maintain user interest. Its not lack of user interest that killed AOL. Its that people got broadband and AOL was a monthly fee service for dialup so people were compelled to drop it to stop the monthly billing. If AOL was a free platform from the beginning and not associated with dial up access it might actually still be doing ok.

These are good points and if they keeping messing up their UI people might leave. But I don't think they will leave becasue of privacy. Most people don't care about privacy.

AOL was fundamentally different. You paid by the month for it, so when people didnt need dialup, they cancelled to stop the billing and moved on. Facebook is free (ignoring the cost to your privacy) and ISP agnostic, so it doesn't have the impetus that caused people to dump AOL.

If they get their UI act together Facebook is in no danger. People are basically stupid and don't care about privacy, at least in the manner Facebook does things, where its kind of a quiet thing from the user perspective. People only care if there is a stolen credit card number etc, but facebook is careful to make sure their selling of data happens quietly to not alarm people too much

This. The move away from broadband hurt AOL and they were not all that effective in transitioning away from that model. AOL was associated in the public brain with dialup, so when people got broadband, they dropped AOL because of its association with dialup. This may have influenced the failure of AOLs attempts at social networking, but the UI issues and the fact they wouldn't stick with it to let it gain momentum,

I also agree, the public doesn't care about privacy. They care about friends and facebook is where their friends are. If people cared about privacy they would dump Windows and run Linux, but most people are apathetic and don't have the initiative to do it, and do not care. Really people are not very smart generally.

Several facebook alternatives exist that help protect privacy. The fact is, I don't think most people are "with it" enough to care, or even comprehend, the privacy implications of Facebook enough to stop using it;. Also, too many of their friends are on Facebook, and getting your friends to switch to something else is almost impossible, for most people the privacy argument doesn't matter, either they don't care, or can't process it. Otherwise everybody would be using Linux and no one would use Windows. I think to switch you have to have initiative that most people don't have .

If you actually want to use it to communicate with family or friends you know in the physical world, its really tricky to avoid facebook.

I don't use it, but most people will not try Mastadon or some other service if you ask them. So the bottom line is they can't communicate with me through social networking because they won't touch anything other than Facebook, so its mainly email.

Yep, I was thinking hormones and environmental toxins also.

I wonder if its all the toxic chemicals in the environment that are causing that, altering hormones. It doesnt really make sense for it to be evolutionary.