Currently a university student, and somewhat frequently, I see Firefox installed on people’s laptops but they also have Chrome installed and are using Chrome, or Edge, or Safari. Rarely do I see Firefox actually being used but I see it installed frequently. Does anyone have a clue as to why they have it installed?
Yea I know Chromium monopoly and open source browser and whatnot but the average Andy does not know what any of that is.
to surf the web?
It’s software used to browse the Internet.
I have Firefox, Chrome, and Brave installed but use Firefox most of the time. I have Brave for websites that need chromium. I have chrome because I’m too lazy to uninstall it. I think you’re probably looking too far into this. It’s easy to install something. Disk space isn’t really at a premium. They easily could’ve installed it in a whim.
Why not ask them directly if you’re curious?
The only thing that’s different between Chrome and Firefox for the average user is that WebGL doesn’t work (yet) in Firefox, which I know is technical, but it means some websites that need more graphics processing won’t work in Firefox. Since WebGL is fairly new, I haven’t run across it much, only once or twice.
Huh?
I’ve built simple WebGL renders in Firefox several times. The websites for TWGL and three.js, the two most popular JS libraries for WebGL rendering that contain several demos, also load and work correctly and have for years. It clearly works in Firefox to a significant extent.
There must be something Firefox is not quite compliant with, or less performant at, than Chrome, though. If you look at Patreon’s website since their logo change, it runs fine in Chrome but chugs in Firefox. I don’t know if it’s WebGL related but I wouldn’t be surprised.
Normies/tech illiterate people are lazy to uninstall software, they have no reason for that. Just look at their taskbar or desktop icons: a lot of useless crap. It was probably preinstalled, or they installed it for one reason, then just forgot about it.
you just called put every Mac user in the world
english please
meant to say call out
It is wild how many people here are offended by me asking a simple question and down voting me. Privacy, open source, customization like CSS, etc those are all gibberish to non tech savvy users.
I’m trying to see a reason to use Firefox from the perspective of a person who has the mentality of “I got nothing to hide” and “computers are difficult” and love the Google services that come integrated into Chrome.
It’s important to note that you must be willing to learn what things are when interacting with technology.
People want to help, but they don’t want to help someone who might ignore their advice because “it’s too hard!”
Firefox is much faster than Chrome, it uses less memory and it works with everything; unless the website operator has some vendetta against Firefox and intentionally codes their website to work slowly on Firefox. (Google is notorious for this, you should ignore Firefox performance issues on Google owned sites)
With the right plugins you can even defuse the bad code and it is never an issue. uBlock Origin for example is a good plugin.
If its at University a lot of online classwork requires Chrome, especially proctored test-taking. They might have installed Chrome for that and just kept using it to avoid any problems and having to switch back and forth between browsers.
They only know Edge because MS shills it hard and Chrome due to years of using it with OEM installs on Android, familiarity with Google services.
Since ads can be really terrible on mobile, then FF + uBO can be suggested to them.
Not being google’s removed ?
Does Windows software still do that shit where they bundle a bunch of irrelevant crap with whatever you’re trying to install? I don’t think normies actively think about browser choice and I’ve definitely found browsers that were installed on systems via what I mentioned above in the past.
Not a tech illiterate user, but Firefox is installed on my girlfriend’s pc because I’ve used it once. So maybe that’s a consideration?
I use Firefox with ad blockers to watch YouTube. Chrome seems to be allowing them to block my ad blocker
I’m a normie who uses firefox because it’s the default in my Fedora machine. On windows I just use edge. While on my Android phone, I use it because I like having extensions.
Are you a normie if you’re using Linux though? (I’m on Silverblue…. Not a normie)
I think most people who have found themselves on the fediverse are probably not normies, even if they might think so.
They hear someone recommend it, maybe on foot of a conversation about privacy concerns, and give it a try.
Doesn’t mean they’ve got to grips with it, but if they haven’t uninstalled it, they probably retain the intent to try.
I’ve gotten most of my friends to switch to it by showing them cool customization features
