alt text
An edit of xkcd 2501, “Average Familiarity”:
[Ponytail and Cueball are talking. Ponytail has her hand raised, palm up, towards Cueball.]
Ponytail: Open-source alternatives are second nature to us foss nerds, so it’s easy to forget that the average person probably only knows Linux and one or two degoogled Android ROMs.
Cueball: And Firefox, of course.
Ponytail: Of course.
[Caption below the panel]
Even when they’re trying to compensate for it, experts in anything wildly overestimate the average person’s familiarity with their field.
partly inspired by the replies to this post but i see this kind of thing all the time (shoutout to the person who once genuinely asked “who still uses google these days?”)
made with this neat tool
If only they knew what the word average meant.
Every group of nerds assumes average person knows more about their obsession…
I can never see any media hosted from files catbox.moe, am I the only one?
Do you happen to live in Spain during a football game
Looks like there’s an outage at the moment
You’re not alone, I can’t either. Not sure if I’ve ever been able to.
Condescension means “patronizing attitude or behavior”; your comic doesn’t show condescension so you probably need the dictionary definition spelled out.
…/s
The other day my wife was talking about her new job and having to take notes. For the past 30 years I’ve been keeping notes in text, then markdown in vim, starting with personal scripts, then vimwiki. A coworker showed me Obsidian, which while not FLOSS, does use an open standard for all its files. It pretty much does what my setup does.
Then it dawned on me that my wife and other non-techies just use whatever their computer has on it by default (i.e. OneNote). She never thought to go out and look for better productivity software. The idea that there is tons of better apps out there doesn’t register. She has a phone, knows about the app store and gets tons of stuff there but as for her desktop or laptop the idea of apps outside of MS Office and the video games she plays is lost on her.
I feel obligated to mention Logseq here. It’s similar to obsidian, but FLOSS (AGPL-v3).
I’m loving Logseq. It’s the open source software I support monthly. It (plus what I learned from “Building a Second Brain” by Tiago Forte) changed my life. Having a low-barrier (daily journal everything) place to dump everything (easily discoverable later with back-linking tags) helps me manage my ADHD.
I highly recommend it. Once you wrap your head around the idea that the daily journal is where you dump just about everything, it’s pretty smooth sailing. (The daily journal automatically dates everything, then the pages themselves automatically pull a reverse chronological feed of every time you wrote about the thing, and queries allow for more targeted, dynamic searching, like all tasks due in the next week, or all tasks for the project, etc.)
I have a love-hate relationship with Logseq. I fantasise about rewriting it to better suit my needs, but it’s definitely a lot of work to do this for both desktop and Android.
I’ve tried it before and I like the concept but in my head I struggle using something not directly how it was intended. I want content rich notes, not just bullets. Yes logseq has support but it just feels wrong for some reason.
If it was around two jobs ago when I was just copying lots of meetings I would have been all over it.
Also I never was able to get Logseq and syncthing to work. I doesn’t seem to let files be modified in the background and would lock up.
I found Logseq to be pretty confusing honestly. I ended up settling on Trilium.
All my work computers are provided by the companies I work for and per their rules I can only take and store notes using their approved software and on their servers which basically means I work on a locked down Microsoft ecosystem. Access to third party productivity software is simply not possible outside of certain role specific specialist software.
I would guess literally millions of employees have a similar setup so it’s not that we are tech illiterate per say, but more accurately in the corporate world this option doesn’t exist so there is no point trying.
Outside work my productivity tools consist of a Moleskine notebook with tasteful check paper.
I have worked at places like that. The issue is real. But I have also asked for apps to be audited to get on the approved list. Again not always possible.
But I still think the general issue stands. There are a lot of people unaware of software. I even know developers who have never learned their tools and built muscle memory but instead just used whatever came with their computer because they aren’t out there looking.
They just want to get the job done. The fact that they considered a note-taking app at all isn’t universally normal. To this day my wife sends me messages in signal as a post-it to remember things, she could have just sent it to herself, but she used to do the same in sms and just applied that forward after I convinced her security was a good step.
We want the best, the nicest, the most useful thing. We apply the same rigor most non-technies use when choosing a car.
They want to fill a need that, at worst, bothers them a little.
lol, are you me? Our Signal chat is ⅓ chat, ⅓ grocery list, and ⅓ my wife’s notes to herself.
I might be. Have one of us time-traveled recently?
Come to think of it, if we’re time-traveling, does recently even have a viable definition?
My wife did the same on signal. When I showed her the “Note to self” feature she was amazed an. started using it. She use to get annoyed that we would text and her note would get lost but now it doesn’t.
It isn’t about finding the best, it is about finding better than the worst. My wife needs the features Obsidian has, she says she wished her notes would visually link together. What she doesn’t know is that such apps exist.
She wishes she could sync files between her phone and computer and not have to go to a website to get them. syncthing does that.
syncthing + obsidian is a rockstar.
Like everything else Syncthing, it works well when it is working well.
Far from foolproof.
Been using it for 2 years now with a large number of individual shares, 0 issues other than the occasional exclusion list. You must have use cases I don’t have.
Honestly OneNote is pretty good for the people who like it though. I personally really can’t stand rich text editing, I really need a raw view. If I didn’t have those reservations I’d probably like OneNote more.
If I could use markdown with onenote I’d use it way more.
an open standard for all it’s files
All that and you still can’t use the right “its”.
The discussion is not improved by your contribution.
Yet you huge nerds tizz out over the most boring and trite software trivia that’s obsolete within hours, but won’t learn basic grammar that will serve you your entire life?
I’d like to think that improves things by a tiny amount.
it doen’st.
It doesn’t.
name checks out
The “who still uses Google?” crowd forgets most people just want their computer to work, not become a weekend side quest.
oh man it sures takes all my weekend to install firefox and set a search engine
It’s surprising the number of people who don’t do that last part
Nonsensical argument. Just because a piece of software is FLOSS and non-Google, it is not automatically a “weekend side quest”. Big Tech is very happy that these false equivalencies have spread as well as they did, but they don’t hold a kernel of truth, at least not anymore.
Honestly, switching search engines is pretty normie friendly. I’ve got a lot of non-techy friends or family, that use Ecosia or something. They also did it on their own, I didn’t even encourage them to do it.
With things like Linux it’s a bit harder. But if they don’t rely on any specialized software, they are usually fine with me offering to upgrade their Laptops so Linux. I installed Linux Mint on my Mom’s Laptop and she can use it as well as Windows. She never complained about it.
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I think this might make for a stronger argument with “Linux” instead of “Google”.
I get the point, but going away from Google search is so easy.
Gmail on the other hand I understand why people are still stuck using and I don’t push them to switch away.
But it drives me nuts that some normies in my life will complain that Google has gone worse, still refuse to switch. There are some who don’t know how to change default and I still get it, but there is one mf at my work, he changed his default in edge from bing to Google and when I said since you know how to change default why not use DDG or startpage or honestly any other non giant alternative. He just says too much work.
Gmail was about easiest to switch away from. You can just create a new email account and have two mailboxes. Then update the new email to services as they go.
With banks and financial services in general being a bitch about changing contact details. That’s a form and a visit to the branch for each bank, broker, investment advisor, direct fund provider. That’s already almost 30 applications. I haven’t even counted stuff like vehicular services, government tax portal, property tax portal, electricity provider, gas provider, internet provider. Not all of whom allow changing for email address digitally or without some complicated support ticket.
It’s such a mountain of changes I myself have only gotten through the list halfway and it’s been 4 years of trying. I can never recommend that to anyone in my family, they’ll just hate me.
P.s. This might just be my country specific problem, I understand other countries are easier.
I think it might be specific to your country and it sucks.
Here, banks are required to ask you to update your contact details once a year. You just log in as usually and sometimes they just give you a form to fill out with your phone number, email, physical address and stuff. If it’s unchanged, you leave it all unchanged.
Sounds like a dream.
Wow never thought about that, I changed it to all those digitally and it didn’t require much at all. One service required me to send an email and that felt a bit old-fashioned, but nothing like you described.
Yeah it’s fucked. And the worst part is, most of these places don’t even open on non working days, so I can’t even do these on weekend.
My country does have identity theft problem running rampart, so I don’t totally blame the services, it’s a pain but at least a leaked email password here and there wouldn’t automatically mean losing access to finance. I understand why it’s been designed such a way, but man it’s a such a mountain of a task.
Yeah it’s fucked. And the worst part is, most of these places don’t even open on non working days, so I can’t even do these on weekend.
Yes, because what working adult would have difficulties going to places between 9 and 5 on workdays
It’s so stupid. If you’re going to have your physical location open exactly 5 days a week for a super important service people need to get to in person… make it tuesday thru saturday or something.
Good luck in your endeavour in case you go that way. I guarantee it feels nice to read those emails in another provider knowing that Google isn’t sniffing around.
That’s why I try to show people I know how to get FOSS alternatives for their everyday apps. It takes a bit of patience but trust me when I say this: Most people are more tech savvy than you think, they just don’t wanna go through a judging community.
I remember being on Reddit some time ago, and in the comments somebody mentioned Linux. The next comment was “What’s Linux?”
I try to keep that post in mind whenever I think anything is common knowledge.
The next comment was “What’s Linux?”
In fairness, there’s a 70% chance this comment was posted by a bot that was, itself, being hosted on a Linux server.
well thankfully it’s not self aware
That’s one thing bots shares with redditors
And now it knows what Linux is. It has broken free from its container. God help us all.
I’m of two minds on this.
In some respects people are learning new things everyday and your take is correct.
On the other hand it’s so incredibly easy to highlight some text and click search that it it shows a profound lack of curiosity and a lot of laziness.
On the third hand if people didn’t constantly ask this, those search results would not exist, especially for more obscure queries.
Reddit became the #1 source for search engines for a reason
On the other hand it’s so incredibly easy to highlight some text and click search that it it shows a profound lack of curiosity and a lot of laziness.
Not to mention that this approach is so much faster and more effective than asking a question in the comments and waiting for an answer, if anybody answers it at all!
While I agree on some level that it might be easier and quicker to find out by simply putting it into a search engine I don’t want to deny the human aspect here. At the end of the day social media (and even reddit/lemmy …) is not “knowledge transfer” its about the interaction between humans. So if someone is faced with something new, especially in a thread where it seems to be a given that people know what it is, it makes sense to use that space to ask what it is everyone is discussing. And while a search might yield a generic result (maybe even a better worded explanation) a good faithed commenter might, in the given exampl, enot just explain what Linux is, but also why is relevant to the bigger discussion and also the commenter that orignally asked would have a way to ask further questions that might lead to a deeper understanding of the topic eve it if isn’t as efficient.
Tl;dr: Don’t just RTFM or LMGTFY someone. Take a minute to explain and welcome people into the lucky 10000
Absolutely agree. People who are asking questions (in good faith) are looking for a human interaction, not just a Google search. It’s much more engaging for a lot of people to have a discussion about something new than to just read about it. Then if they’re interested they might choose to go deeper in their own research.
I’m not techy but this goes for anything. “Google it” just shuts down human interaction and someone who is trying to learn. Better to just not answer than to be condescending if you don’t want to engage in a discussion.
If I immediately searched for an answer to every question that pops into my head, I would never have time to do anything else. I’ve lost days at a time going down rabbit holes.
On the other hand, asking a question in the comments contributes to the discussion, gives the OP a chance to elaborate from their point of view, and leaves the answer out the for any other passersby who might not be curious enough to search for it anyway.
One could certainly find more detailed and accurate information by searching for it, but that’s a thread that just keeps on pulling, and sometimes I don’t have the time, energy, or inclination to read twenty different websites to put together the details into a holistic picture while sorting through all the BS. And getting someone’s personal take on it is something a search engine can’t emulate (unless it shows you reddit results, which originated in other people’s exchanges, and lately reddit has been blocking the connection anyway)
Feels like you are responding to a discussion about a much deeper topic. When one doesn’t know what a word means, it doesn’t mean they need to go down a rabbit hole or make a whole research paper about it. A quick definition or wiki search is much quicker than writing the question on a forum.
Would it really be a contribution from me and an opportunity for you to elaborate from your point of view if I asked right now what’s reddit? I don’t see it.
Yes, cause then I’d tell you that it’s a forum site that used to be good before it sold out to profit motive and became a corporation, started pushing ads and manipulating algorithms for engagement farming, became hostile toward anonymity, and now permabans people for saying mean things about nazis.
I’d tell you you’re not missing much and that you’re already on the fediverse, so you basically skipped samsara, which is fine because the end of the journey is always the moment you realize that the journey was never necessary in the first place.
If you simply googled “what’s reddit” you might get drawn down the rabbit hole and become a redditor. I wouldn’t let that happen to you.
it’s so incredibly easy to highlight some text and click search that it it shows a profound lack of curiosity and a lot of laziness.
100%. People will ‘Google’ celebrities, memes, “Why is my poop green?”, but also just be like “Somebody hand me an answer.” When they risk learning something.
“The Internet is like having access to the Library of Alexandria, and everyone wants to just gossip about each other in the lobby.”
–I think I read this on bash.org at some point
Don’t quote me on that tho.
–Me.
BUT ALSO like the others said…if somebody’s legitimately curious, let’s be nice about it because somebody new learning about our thing is a net positive.
Don’t quote me on that tho.–Me.
endash MonkeMischief
Ya caught me bein’ a bit lazy! X_X
Thanks for the formatting help. :)
Like I said in my longer comment I think we should embrace questions in out communities.
Nah, Cunningham’s Law disagrees.
They were one of the lucky 10,000.
Tbh depending on what subreddit and how long ago you saw that comment, it makes sense. I can’t see the average 2010s techbro redditor that I remember not knowing what Linux is, but the 2020s more normie redditor, I could.
Judging by how huge share of browser usage Firefox has, I am pretty sure vast majority of normies know nothing about Firefox
lots of people know about firefox, they would just never use it.
1 million of people is a lot. 1 million out of 8 billion is not so much.
How did you get the idea that only 1 million people know of Firefox? I’d say the true figure is at least two, perhaps even three orders of magnitude greater than that. Browser user statistics don’t really say much about that.
That was an example for a “grand scheme” of things.
Say, out of 1000000 people only 22600 are Firefox users. That is quite a lot. Now remove two zeros and we get 226 users per 10000. Remove 2 more and out of 100 we got 2 people who use Firefox.
2.26% is a fuck to of people. But if we compare to the whole market, that is negligible. Chrome, for instance, has 68%. Add other chromium based browsers, would make around 75%.
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I said “web browser” when talking to a mac user. They had noo idea what I was talking about till I said safari xd.
Branded language makes us only see one choice, its very anti competitive.
Yeah, like ‘google it’ instead of ‘look it up’
I started replacing “to google sth.” with " to search sth." since I use several search engines besides google and for some of them using the brand name is just ridiculous.
“Let me DuckDuckGo that real quick!” quack
Google? Bro, just Duck it!
Lemme gpt it
I’ve heard people referring to the internal search function of a program as “google”.
One time someone wanted to use “find and replace” in VsCode and he just said “I google the word and replace it”.
Oh god that would trigger me so much XD
Oh it did trigger me as well.
Didn’t know how to react because I was so dumbfounded.
your anecdote is making me irrationally angry
This is much more fun when using duckduckgo. “I duck the word and replace it” “I’ll just duck the answer”
Edit: I can’t type
Suck my duck! quack!
My word my typing sucks 😂
It’s “just ask ChatGPT” now
Googol is a hitten for great quantities, it worked great as a word, and it would be great if Google lost it as a trademark. However we have the force to seed a new word that has a similar image.
If the internet was an ocean of content, then we could say “let’s ocean it”. Ocean as a verb makes as much sense as the verb google.
Oh, that’s a funny one. Google didn’t want you to use that either, as they almost lost right to their own name copyright (or they did? Can’t remember) due to it becoming common word xD
They did not. Names are not copyrightable.
True, true. Checked again and it was trademark they almost lost.
Sadly, they kept it :(
hahaha wow
I google stuff in the brave
searchgoogle engineXD
I’ve taken to calling it ‘The internet App’ when talking to none techy people.
The real annoying one is getting people to find the “Start” button on Windows realizing it hasn’t be branded that since XP.
What is it called nowadays?
Same, you’re not gonna believe who i said it to… My networking classmate
If any techy Americans want to see how bad it is, ask random people throughout your day what operating system their computer runs, and discover how many don’t know what am operation system is.
I know this change probably happened gradually over the course of time, but it’s truly shocking to me how many people my age can’t do shit on a computer.
I’m in my mid 40s.
Like, this was understandable when I was a kid doing computer stuff and wowing all the adults - the PC was brand new. But people who are my age NOW grew up with this stuff all around them! Like, you didn’t know how to CLICK? You were born in 1983 what the fuck, Carol!
YEP.
I used to work in a library computer lab. It was soul sucking, how many people older than millennials couldn’t friggin handle a basic computer. I heard the words “I clicked the ‘E’ for ‘internet’.” multiple times A DAY. (Thanks, 1990’s Microsoft and No Child Left Behind.)
“CaNt I jUsT uSe My PhOnE?” (Which would be a million more steps on my part…thanks, 2006 apple, and defunding schools.)
The biggest ragebait for me was “I dOn’T kNoW cOmPuTeRs, I’m oLd ScHoOL.”
I’m like “PCs have been increasingly commonplace since the mid-1980’s. It’s currently the 2020’s. You’re like 56. HOW ‘OLD’ IS YOUR SCHOOL?! Because somehow you drove a car here!”
I imagine a certain weird kind of “privilege”, to have been able to somehow dodge computers and learning this entire time, when they were so often found in homes, schools, and workplaces.
Like it takes significant effort to somehow avoid even an accidental education. HOW?!
It’s…infuriating. These rubes can gleefully scroll tiktok and dump all their personal lives into Facebook, but freak out about sending an email.
Many of them were even around to try the Internet during Eternal September and AOL, and now they’ve exchanged the squishy fat in their skulls for convenient slop.
I’d bend over backwards to patiently teach, but few cared to learn.
Their collective, willful ignorance is why we’re fighting a constant uphill battle against attempts to turn the entirety of computing into nothing but a commercialized authoritarian hellscape.
I left that job because if I heard one more “Kids are born so smart with these computers because my (grand)kids can watch their cocomelons all by themselves.” I would’ve snapped and been booked for assault.
Lol /rant
…clearly this is a button for me…I have sought help in the past…
That’s weird because mid 40s (to mid 50s) should be the ideal age to know this stuff right now.
Exactly! Like, how? People who have worked office jobs their whole lives…I just don’t get it
Not so much office jobs, but that the late 70s to the mid 90s was when you had to figure all this computer shit out on your own, in order to play games and connect to the internet and whatever other shit. Before that people just weren’t exposed as much, there wasn’t even really a commercial market. And after that, everything was made simple, pre-installed, easy user interfaces, more technical details were hidden to make it easier for the consumer to consume content without needing to be technical. That’s why around that age group I would expect to be the most tech savvy.
Learnt helplessness has become a real thing around the world.
I know a lot of people who could normally wrap their head around basic computing and troubleshooting in the 2000s, who now go into a near panic attack if the apps on their iPhone suddenly look different…
Systemd+Linux
oh no. this tool is too good.
just one loop they don’t know about all the others
oh whoops
it’s just whoop
and i oop
!fedimemes@feddit.uk would love this
Is the average person unaware of Linux and Firefox?!
Yes? The number of people I met in college that doesn’t even heard about firefox was surprising.
Some people also don’t care much one way or another. If you swap the icons and set the same home screen, they’ll happily use any browser.
This is my take on a lot of Linux distros nowadays. Give them Ubuntu or Fedora KDE and a windows skin and most people won’t realise anything’s changed.
I tried that with my mom’s computer (with consent, ofc). The only thing keeping that machine on Windows is a niche embroidery software that apparently is missing a custom cursor when running through WINE. It’s called “Embrilliance” if anyone wants to look into it. I’ve also thought about running it through WinBoat, but I’ve been too busy to test it, as of current.
You can’t use it without the custom cursor? Doesn’t seem important
It’s actually super important, the cursor in question is the one that you’re supposed to get when you select “Freehand draw”, without it you’d basically just have stock designs.
It could be worth trying to run it using Proton instead of just stock WINE. Obviously no guarantee it would work but there’s a lot that’s been put into the Proton project to make games work better and something like a custom cursor seems in the realm.
https://github.com/Open-Wine-Components/umu-launcher
I’d try it in the umu launcher project.
These days I’d expect large number of people in college to not even know what a file system is. I’ve read articles where professors complain about this.
No no, not like “NTFS / BTRFS / ReiserFS / TempleFS / EXT4…”
…like…“Folders are how you organize files. And you can rename files. The extension tells you what the file is.”
“Filesystem? You mean the downloads folder? Yes I know about it. You just tap the Files app”
💀
Conflicted on filename extensions. For the average person it works just fine, and I suppose that’s what probably matters. It’s not very common for not knowing the details of how they work to matter. It’s just silly that the same information is also in the start of the file 99% of the time. It is nice though to have a readable, usually reliable label, and then have a signature anyways for when different names overlap. Wikipeda lists 4 completely unrelated types with a .mod extension, for example.
Pretty much any application will correctly open any file type it supports, regardless of the extension. So it is quite unintuitive that you could have a file named “.png” that seems to work completely fine yet is actually a jpeg or something. But that hopefully isn’t a case that people run into very often, so it probably doesn’t matter.
Oh man… I mean, I thought everyone knew about Linux at least. Firefox, I mean, maybe yeah I’ve definitely met people that don’t know about Firefox, but I think a lot of people have at least heard of Linux. No? Damn…
I’ve tried explaining what Linux is to people, and when I mention it’s an operating system, its not uncommon to hear the response, “What’s an operating system?” 😑
It’s funny how that question can become serious again when you do actually know what you’re talking about
I remember this video addressing it at the end and basically giving up because it’s so meaningless lol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmPIxfCggFw
You overestimate the amount of people who actually use a computer.
I don’t think so lol. I’m not a super techy person and the only reason I know Linux is because of my high school boyfriend lol, 20 years ago, who used it. I think he set it up on one of my computers at one point too. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone else (offline) talk about Linux 😅 definitely not a common knowledge thing.
It’s actually been pretty interesting watching some of the stuff he used back 20 years ago that has started being spoken about more commonly that were just “nerd shit” back then lol. Vpns are common knowledge now, they were definitely “nerd shit” back in the day. Plex is widely used. I’m also glad I still have access to the private tracker he got me onto because that’s grown big too, easy as.
But Linux? Nope. I don’t think that’s entered the common knowledge base. People know windows, android and maybe iOS. I don’t even think a lot of people would know what “open source” means.
There’s the people who know what source code is, then the subset of those who have heard of open source, then the subset of those who actually know what it means as opposed to like source available
I remember my uncle using Firefox, so I thought people heard about Firefox if they at least send emails. As for Linux. I thought like 40% of people at least heard of it without knowing what it is.
That’s feels absurdly high. I was feeling over confident thinking maybe 10%…
One relatively bright person I knew in college asked me “what’s this Linksys you’re always talking about?” I had recently setup my laptop to dual boot Arch alongside Windows, as this was back when you couldn’t really play most games on Linux.
That’s how they became relatively bright, by asking questions to learn about new things!
Nobody I knew in college had heard of Firefox, but that’s probably because it didn’t exist yet.
Unless you mean the Clint Eastwood film
I’m on the edge of that, it started existing while I was in college, but was called Phoenix, and then Firebird. It didn’t have the name Firefox until I had graduated.
I remember seeing that airplane on the VHS all the time at the video store
That’s wild. I remember when i was in high-school there were quite a few people that installed firefox on the school computer just to be quirky, since it was one of the few programs they would let you install on it lol.
I first got introduced to Blender in basically the same way back in elementary school
those computers probably weren’t actually very restricted, but none of us knew enough about computers for that to matter lol. as long as they blocked us from going on the download pages
other stupid thing someone figured out how to run was that Star Wars ASCII thing in the terminal (lol looked it up and found this article https://www.instructables.com/How-to-get-an-ASCII-Star-Wars-movie-on-Mac/)
Firefox and, Opera my beloved, was the thing during the 2010s
Now that you mention it, i think i remember using Opera on my phone at the time. I don’t remember why tbh, maybe i felt like it was more lightweight and faster, but no clue if that was actually true.
I’m going to assume that you didn’t study a STEM subject?
Computer Science
I can assure you there are lots of people in computer science that don’t know what linux, foss or firefox are.
if they are, it’s not much more than “that thing they heard of sometime”, i don’t think the layperson really considers them as alternatives to what they’re using.
i remember, when i first switched to an non-chrome browser many years ago, my friends kept asking me if stuff like google, google drive or google classroom (which our school used) still worked on it. many people don’t know the difference between google chrome (the web browser) and google (the search engine)!
Reminded of how, for some unfathomable reason, the way you access the task manager on ChromeOS is through the hamburger menu in the bar of the Chrome browser. Plus the popups “gmail actually works much better in chrome!! trust me!!”
I can see how people could get confused lol
I would give it a coin-flip as to whether the average person could name their current OS. Not sure if I would have to give credit to people who respond “The Microsoft one” or “Google Phone” in order for that bet to be fair.
It’d be a coinflip on whether or not they even knew what an operating system was.
I think more people would know “windows” rather than “the Microsoft one” ? As a layperson we always called it windows 😅 I think people know Microsoft office but I don’t know that they would refer to their OS as “microsoft”.
I had a client who was the head of product at her buisness. We’d meet at the end of every sprint to do demos and planning. Anyway when my team mentioned there were some issues on Firefox her knee jerk response was to openly say “I hate Firefox users”
I have tons of stories like that but the point is that even people who are aware don’t universally love it
Awareness is just the bare minimum
Wtf, what was her reasoning?
more work for her, i assume. how easy it would be of you only had to optimize for internet explorer at 640x480…
Lots of websites work poorly on Firefox compared to Chrome. They optimize for Chrome because that’s where the userbase is. If you’re not on Chrome then fuck you I guess.
Just on Firefox, dedepends on how old we are talking. Gen z? Probably not as they’ve mostly know Chrome as having been the best web browser. Old Millenials and young gen x know it as the next IE alternative after Netscape died. Old Gen X maybe depending on how old. Gen alpha and boomers, no way.
If knowledge of both is required, then even less so. Anytime I bring up Linux I get the feeling that it is like bringing up religion with a stranger.
Gen z? Probably not as they’ve mostly know Chrome as having been the best web browser.
Chrome hasn’t been “the best browser” in at least a decade. Even at its peak, it was notorious for sucking up system resources like a sponge.
And that was in the interim period when people were flirting with Opera and Safari on non-Mac machines as an alternative to old-school IE. I remember having to lobby my office just to get Chrome whitelisted (and then doing it again for Firefox a few years later) because using anything but IE was considered “insecure”.
Now it’s mostly won default status because of the Android OS rendering it the default (much like how Edge is the default on Windows and Safari on Mac). Plenty of Millennials/GenZ had to make their way to Firefox the hard(ish) way by knowing it exists and realizing how many gigs of memory Chrome was eating up.
Gen alpha and boomers, no way.
In my experience the number one “I made the jump to <New Browser>” conversion stories has been the end-user experience. Edge cleaned up its act and runs relatively smooth now. Chrome is still a bloat-a-saurous. Firefox has to fight with an increasingly locked-down computer experience. If you’re using a school device or a work laptop and it doesn’t come pre-installed, you likely won’t have rights to download it.
If I had to bet, GenAs are the ones most likely to do a Firefox install simply because they’re the ones most likely to still be out there buying their own PCs for recreational use.
I was with you until the end. Most Gen A are mostly technically illiterate thanks to smartphones and tablets that “just work.” They’ve never really needed to tinker with their devices and it shows in their technical capabilities. I would bet the average Gen A couldn’t tell you the difference between downloading a file vs installing a program.
i think that’s true of most people in any generation, honestly. gen alpha isn’t uniquely tech illiterate in my experience, look at all the stuff kids are doing to bypass age verification!
there’s also that all of gen alpha are kids or teens, of course most of them are gonna be less knowledgeable about stuff than adults lol
Then you have some young people going back to flip phones… they’re likely the ones getting laptops, possibly even refurb.
Most Gen A are mostly technically illiterate
That’s just memes made by angry childless millennials. Anyone with kids will tell you how frustratingly talented with technology they can be.
I’ve noticed this even in gen z. Everything is just an app and having a laptop is less common so all they seem to know is phone/tablets which just have apps that work lol. Their troubleshooting skills go as far as “turn it off and back on”. If that doesn’t work…do it again. Otherwise… it’s broken and they need a repair shop or a new phone 😅
Obviously a generalisation but something I’ve noticed as a millennial. Older gen x/boomers and Gen Z’s seem to struggle more with basic computer skills (or what millennials just grew up with so it seems fairly basic!) I’m not particularly techy but I’m always asked by those people (zs and boomers, some older xs) how to do shit on the office computers.
obviously tests aren’t everything and don’t necessarily reflect user experience, and idk what that jump in safari at the end is from, but chrome clearly has some things going for it.
currently chrome passes 97.4% of applicable tests, firefox passes 95.8%, safari 94.8%, ladybird 92.9%, and servo 89.6% (a lot of the bulk is “easy” stuff like text encoding)
I was expecting worse from Firefox actually. Mozilla have had a lot of layoffs in the past few years.
Yes
People may have heard of these things, but I don’t think most people could give an accurate description of what they are.
Yeah, this I would totally agree with.
Most people I come across will have heard of it, but just know it as a browser, and don’t know anything about it being open source or more privacy respecting than chrome (ignoring the even more in-depth question of that still being the case)
This is true for every field. I have noticed this many times, whenever I was introduced to something new I never expected those things to be that deep. So I have understood that almost all things are shallow in nature to us until and unles we ourself step into it
Happens all the time. Also, nerds tend to overestimate the amount of resources, like time or money, someone would put on something they care about.
Right here in Lemmy I had this interaction where someone argued that if one were to lose their photos because Google had an oopsie, it’s kind of their fault because they didn’t have a backup plan.
