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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
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.
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”
💀
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.
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/)
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?” 😑
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.
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.
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.
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 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…
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