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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
Okay but litterally everyone knows about Firefox.
I’m willing to concede some people don’t know about Linux. But I’ve never met anyone who didn’t know about Firefox.
The vast majority of people I work with in my organization have absolutely no idea what Firefox is or that there are other browsers. You, me, and everyone here is living in a bubble.
Not too long ago, in the internet explorer era, Firefox had a huge market share. Something like 30%. Even if they didn’t use it themselves, they probably knew someone that did.
They may not remember it, but at some point they knew.
They may say they don’t know firefox, but if you ask them “do you remember there were some people that didn’t use internet explorer before chrome?” They’ll probably remember, even if they don’t remember the name.
There are quite a lot of people in the workforce now who are so young they won’t remember that!
Hah no they don’t. My partner doesn’t even really know what a browser is, or where the distinction between phone/pc and ‘the internet’ lies. Sure she might have heard of the word ‘firefox’ but no way she can explain what it is or does.
that’s the true ‘average’ person. they don’t know. they don’t understand. they don’t even want to know. they just use this magic thing that shows stuff from the internet. they don’t even know what a bookmark is, they just ‘google’ for everything. even google, ffs.
Years ago I watched a friend type google.com into the search/address bar of chrome, click the link, then begin to search. Painful.
Reminds me of the time SEO put a tech blog article as the top link for “Facebook login” and they got a shitload of people complaining about how they couldn’t log into this new Facebook and wanted the old one back.
https://nyulocal.com/the-internet-inept-mistake-readwriteweb-for-facebook-hilarity-ensues-482cc4d1ba68
“Why does your google look like that”
No. People who are 30+ maybe. But there are tons of people in GenZ (my generation) and Alpha that don’t even know what folders or symlinks are. And Firefox is a nieche browser since 10 years or so.
Putting folders and symlinks in the same category is wild. Most people I know (basically every non-elderly non-toddler person) knows what a folder is. Yet only some of the programmers I know know what a symlink is. Not even a chance for non-programers.
At most they’ll know what a shortcut is. Which is not the same as a symlink.
I guess I’m a programmer now
I don’t know you. My comment doesn’t apply to you, sorry.
Knowing what a symlink is doesn’t make you a programmer. It’s just that I don’t know any non-programmer that knows what it is.
I didn’t know that symbolic links were a thing until like 2 years into using Linux daily. I didn’t know there was a difference between symlinks and shortcuts until I saw this comment!
To save others a trip to Wikipedia, both a symlink and a shortcut store a path to another file or directory. The biggest difference is that symlinks are resolved by your file system, whereas shortcuts are resolved by whatever program accesses them. So if your software doesn’t know what a symlink is, that doesn’t matter. It tries to access the symlink, and your file system says “oh hey they want that jpeg” and serves them that jpeg. Whereas if your software doesn’t know what a shortcut is, it’ll try to access the shortcut and be like “wtf this is just a file path, I was expecting a jpeg”
They can also store relative file paths, while shortcuts can only store absolute filepaths. So if your symlink references a file that’s in the same directory, you can move that directory and the symlink still works. Can’t do that with a shortcut.
Everyone uses VLC still right? … Right?
I wouldn’t be surprised if gen alpha hasn’t heard if it because schools primarily use Chromebooks and the only browser is chrome