Rather than looking into Google s faster release cadence for Chrome, which forced Mozilla to accelerate its Firefox release schedule in 2011, the larger number of features in Chrome releases, organizational turmoil and missteps, talent departures and layoffs, Google s ability to promote Chrome on its search page, or corporate resource disparity, Mozilla s user-experience researchers decided to test various hypotheses about how people respond to priming.
Priming, the paper explains, is a psychological phenomenon whereby people use the most immediately accessible information to make decisions. The researchers supposition is that recent media exposure about a specific subject can alter people s judgements and opinions about that topic.