Why do people have to care about what browser you use?

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BlueSkyPagan
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Why do people have to care about what browser you use?

Unread post by BlueSkyPagan » 2022-06-15, 15:15

I use Pale Moon and a couple of derivatives based on it. Does anyone else catch flack from normal people who seem to know nothing about it other than a few articles that you can find on Google ominously warning you about security vulnerabilities?

It seems nowadays that the technology community has shifted from use a product at your own risk and peril to "if you don't use Firefox or Chrome we're going to put you on blast until you submit" which appears to be an intimidation tactic and such and I have actually left several communities over people and staff attacking me for my usage of not only Pale Moon but other projects that they seem to disagree with.

I know this is my first post here so let me stop and thank you guys for having a high quality forum and a browser that has been way easier to bootstrap and compile myself then the hodgepodge that is modern Firefox with this stupid rust crap. Thank you for offering a community in which I can safely vent my frustration!

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Re: Why do people have to care about what browser you use?

Unread post by andyprough » 2022-06-15, 15:41

Most of the people I know in real life (IRL) think Firefox is exotic and just try to limp along with Safari on their Apple devices. If you look at their dock though, they also always have Chrome. They don't care what I use, they think I'm a weirdo nerd who says stuff they can't understand but who can fix most of their tech related issues. I doubt that hardly anyone I know well IRL has ever heard of Pale Moon.

However, in my online Linux groups, Pale Moon gets a lot of respect. I think Pale Moon makes sense to Linux users because it is such an independent project, which they are used to. I've had a couple of people post links to a criticism of Pale Moon by a blogger named "digdeeper" that was a bit harsh. However, all the points he raises are easily refuted by FAQ posts by Moonchild, so linking to those FAQ posts always gains some respect for the project.

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Re: Why do people have to care about what browser you use?

Unread post by Mæstro » 2022-06-15, 16:14

Dig Deeper commends Pale Moon as the best browser, after his abortive fork failed. I do not defend him at all; I dislike his dismissal of schooling and hatred of uselessness, as though something’s worth were in its use. Nevertheless, he is our reserved, partial supporter, not hostile.
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Re: Why do people have to care about what browser you use?

Unread post by CourtneyAllen » 2022-09-06, 08:40

Many people I know like to use only trusted browsers. And if you suggest something new, it is perceived as negative and useless. Maybe people are comfortable using something that has been tested for a long time and with minimal risk.

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Re: Why do people have to care about what browser you use?

Unread post by athenian200 » 2022-09-06, 13:17

I have a take on this that I'm not sure if everyone will agree with and makes some fairly broad and sweeping conclusions, so take it with a grain of salt.

The reason things have gone this way is because of the iPhone, and then Android phones which were the more successful rival of iPhone over time. They bought "normies" into the tech space in a big way, even more so than AOL or Facebook did. Prior to that, the computing community was still dominated to some extent by professionals and hobbyists that used desktop and laptop computers, and who were a bit more rational, practical, and open-minded than the average person. Not to the extent it was during the 1990s and earlier, of course, but you still had to be the sort of person who would spend time in front of a computer or carry a laptop around to participate, and there was a huge swath of society that just wasn't interested. Generally people who were more social, image-conscious, cliquish, and lacked any kind of pioneer spirit or curiosity about new ways of doing things. There were a few early professionals that had PDAs and Blackberries of course, and a younger generation coming that was maybe taking pictures on their phones or sending text messages, and I think without the smartphone the process of getting the majority of people interested in the Internet would have been slower.

Then in around 2006-2008, multiple things came crashing down all at once. Facebook was launched, the iPhone was released, and Google launched Android. This was on top of a huge economic disaster where a lot of people lost their jobs, and a lot of smaller tech companies went under, reducing competition and centralizing power more. So you had smartphones and social media successful against a backdrop of economic uncertainty, and everyone wanted in on this even more so than they would have normally. So two new technological paradigms emerged at a time when there wouldn't have been much room for competition, and just as a new generation that was already focused on their phones a bit too much was coming of age, a generation that probably wouldn't have been employed in useful labor due to lack of employment opportunities rather than going to school at that time.

This is all obvious, but what I'm now going to talk about, is what this meant for those who were already involved in technology and who liked the pre-2008 Internet and using a desktop or laptop to browse sites that gave them a lot of options, opportunities, and different ways of looking at data. The answer is that after two or three decades where major tech companies had mostly focused on them as customers and tried to meet their needs, suddenly no one cared about them anymore because the smartphone had proven that "normies" could be a viable market, a "blue ocean" of untapped potential if you will. The Wii was also a part of this trend, though not as destructively. But take it all together... Facebook, Wii, the iPhone, Android. What direction does it look like things are going in? They want to market the technology to those who previously weren't interested. They take their existing market for granted, and know that those people are a minority who will be swept up in the "wave" and have little choice but to go along with the new direction as the product is tailored further and further away from their preferences. To put it bluntly, "mobile first" means "desktop last."

And now we can talk about why all these people care what browser you use. If you're talking about website owners and such, a fact that might interest you is that a lot of application developers are increasingly hostile to the idea of people using custom themes even on the desktop, arguing that it violates their rights and that they, the developer, should be deciding how the application looks, not the end user. That is one of the reasons why GNOME is moving away from customizable themes, and the GNOME devs are warning people that creating a way to mess with the way the interface is displayed and sharing it too widely could open people up to lawsuits. That is to say, there's a lot more money in computing now, and almost all of it is focused on security, branding, support, and accessibility. There is not much room in an environment like that for something that is primarily about customization, tweaking, or innovating. Everyone is risk averse and hostile to anything that produces uncertainty. Chrome is what they know and what they develop for, and the browser they know will display their content the way they intend, including ads. They don't want you using something else, especially not something that lets users modify how content is displayed or otherwise won't display their site as intended.

As for the rest of people, the ones who aren't invested in websites and apps that they want locked down to their specifications? Well, to some extent, normies are a bit more... judgmental about that stuff. They follow trends and like what's popular, and think anyone who isn't doing what's popular is "out of touch." There may have once been a time when you went online to get away from "popular/trendy people." Now you can't really do that, because you are as likely to find the proverbial "jock" and "cheerleader" types (a bit of a stereotype, but you know what kind of people I mean) on the Internet as you are anywhere else, and the product is built and tailored to those kind of people with that level of intelligence and curiosity, so anymore more intelligent than that average trendy/superficial type of person will be very bored (or even insulted) by what is on offer.

What essentially has happened is... normies became the primary target market for big tech companies, and they are now the primary audience. And they now predominate the Internet, influencing the culture, meaning that they brought all of the social problems from offline onto the Internet, and probably made them ten times worse, amplifying and accelerating processes of social decay via social media and global interconnectedness. Instead of using the Internet to sate curiosity and advance knowledge or society in any meaningful, instead... well, you've seen what they did with it.
"The Athenians, however, represent the unity of these opposites; in them, mind or spirit has emerged from the Theban subjectivity without losing itself in the Spartan objectivity of ethical life. With the Athenians, the rights of the State and of the individual found as perfect a union as was possible at all at the level of the Greek spirit." -- Hegel's philosophy of Mind

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Re: Why do people have to care about what browser you use?

Unread post by distantpluto » 2022-09-06, 16:03

athenian200 wrote:
2022-09-06, 13:17
I have a take on this that I'm not sure if everyone will agree with and makes some fairly broad and sweeping conclusions, so take it with a grain of salt...
[snip]
What essentially has happened is... normies became the primary target market for big tech companies, and they are now the primary audience. And they now predominate the Internet, influencing the culture, meaning that they brought all of the social problems from offline onto the Internet, and probably made them ten times worse, amplifying and accelerating processes of social decay via social media and global interconnectedness. Instead of using the Internet to sate curiosity and advance knowledge or society in any meaningful, instead... well, you've seen what they did with it.
I agree, especially that last paragraph :mrgreen: Quite an astute post overall.

It saddens me no end the apathy "normies" display toward privacy and web standards. But then, to so many now, Google is the (gold) standard to be judged (subjugated) by.
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Re: Why do people have to care about what browser you use?

Unread post by andyprough » 2022-09-06, 17:06

athenian200 wrote:
2022-09-06, 13:17
And they now predominate the Internet, influencing the culture, meaning that they brought all of the social problems from offline onto the Internet, and probably made them ten times worse, amplifying and accelerating processes of social decay via social media and global interconnectedness. Instead of using the Internet to sate curiosity and advance knowledge or society in any meaningful, instead... well, you've seen what they did with it.
This is not a new phenomenon. AOL chat rooms became wildly popular in the mid-1990's because people were using them for meeting offline for random sex hookups. The companies that made the most money on the internet in about the first decade of widespread adoption were selling pR0nographic images and videos. I wouldn't give the iPhone/Android generation too much credit for changing the paradigm - their real contribution to the chaos was to make their online political speech bleed over into ever greater levels of violence in real life.

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Re: Why do people have to care about what browser you use?

Unread post by distantpluto » 2022-09-06, 17:51

Off-topic:
andyprough wrote:
2022-09-06, 17:06
This is not a new phenomenon. AOL chat rooms became wildly popular in the mid-1990's because people were using them for meeting offline for random sex hookups. The companies that made the most money on the internet in about the first decade of widespread adoption were selling pR0nographic images and videos. I wouldn't give the iPhone/Android generation too much credit for changing the paradigm - their real contribution to the chaos was to make their online political speech bleed over into ever greater levels of violence in real life.
However, the difference in numbers between those visiting mid 90s AOL chat rooms (where they conversed in confined spaces with mutual people) to the rampant billions sharing social media and spouting every single banal thought that pops into their heads is quite significant.
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Re: Why do people have to care about what browser you use?

Unread post by Moonchild » 2022-09-06, 18:19

Off-topic:
It's a difference in scale and attitude of people.
For the latter, you may want to watch this advertisement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwxcPV2C8pQ
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Re: Why do people have to care about what browser you use?

Unread post by athenian200 » 2022-09-06, 19:06

andyprough wrote:
2022-09-06, 17:06
This is not a new phenomenon. AOL chat rooms became wildly popular in the mid-1990's because people were using them for meeting offline for random sex hookups. The companies that made the most money on the internet in about the first decade of widespread adoption were selling pR0nographic images and videos. I wouldn't give the iPhone/Android generation too much credit for changing the paradigm - their real contribution to the chaos was to make their online political speech bleed over into ever greater levels of violence in real life.
No, I'll admit it was not a totally new phenomenon, but the process definitely both accelerated, and reached a "new low" with the smartphone. It enabled the most thoughtless, unintelligent members of society to use the Internet in a way that AOL could have only dreamed of in the 1990s (though I don't doubt they would have pushed this if the technology had been ready back then). I'm well aware of "Eternal September" and how much the first generation of Internet users hated what AOL did. Maybe it would be better if I drew it out like this...

There was a USENET/BBS generation that was using the Internet mostly in the 1980s and up to the early 1990s. If you read anything archived from that time, you will notice a difference in tone from most of what predominated between the mid-1990s up to 2007 or so.

Then from about 1993 to 2007, you have the AOL/"Eternal September" generation, which is about when I started using the Internet. Those users were people who had started off using only Windows and GUI interfaces, and were horrified by the sight of a command prompt for the most part. Maybe they bought a computer solely to use the Internet for some questionable purpose. But at that point, there was still a degree of technical skill it was advantageous to develop, and enough influence from the first generation that at least some of these people went on to become "power users," and developed just enough skill to maybe tweak the Windows registry, navigate a menu, or fix a computer problem with a little bit of help.

Then... there's post-2007, the Facebook/Android/iPhone generation. That moment is pretty much the AOL generation's "Eternal September" moment, the moment when things were rapidly even further dumbed down and opened up to yet a larger crowd to the point that the change was noticeable to us, and our standards were not even as high as that of the original generation to start with.

The thing that's worth noting is that these times don't necessarily line up purely with age, especially with the last wave because a lot of people of various ages who had zero interest in computers before got online with the rise of smartphones. At this point, it requires almost no computer skills to use the Internet, and the next generation that was born after the smartphone is actually less technologically literate than the preceding generations. I've heard stories of community college classes trying to teach computer literacy classes where the youngest kids do not know how to use a mouse properly and have no touch typing skills whatsoever, being confused when asked to deal with anything other than tablet or a smartphone's touch interface.
"The Athenians, however, represent the unity of these opposites; in them, mind or spirit has emerged from the Theban subjectivity without losing itself in the Spartan objectivity of ethical life. With the Athenians, the rights of the State and of the individual found as perfect a union as was possible at all at the level of the Greek spirit." -- Hegel's philosophy of Mind

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Re: Why do people have to care about what browser you use?

Unread post by Lucio Chiappetti » 2022-09-06, 19:53

athenian200 wrote:
2022-09-06, 19:06
Then from about 1993 to 2007, you have the AOL/"Eternal September" generation, which is about when I started using the Internet. Those users were people who had started off using only Windows and GUI interfaces, and were horrified by the sight of a command prompt for the most part.
Well, I might have been using "Internet" more or less at the time (at least 1993 is the date I set up my institute first web server, that was a quantum leap, a favourable one), maybe a bit earlier (there are archived somewhere mail messages from me with the support centre of a major astronomical package whose sources we slowly ftp-downloaded overnight) if we equate "Internet" to a TCP-IP based network. There were however proprietary protocol newtorks before (Bitnet, Decnet), at least since 1987. I started with Usenet newsgroups a bit later.

I have been recently horrified when I started frequenting an Italian forum about Ubuntu. There is a lot of difference with the international technical forums I am used to. Most questions there are either exotic hardware installation, or questions about DEs and GUIs. And lot of people for which a DE seems the main way of interacting with their computer ... they consider what they call "the terminal" (i.e. command line oriented stuff) as a last resort, unfamiliar to them. And there are "freak" off-topic discussion. Not very favourable to non-mainstream browsers, or thr standard FOSS mindset. Definitely a different ecology than the ones I'm used to. :thumbdown:
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Re: Why do people have to care about what browser you use?

Unread post by Likestofish » 2022-09-06, 20:34

I recently watched a family member refuse to open a .pdf file because a newly installed Chromium-based browser, on a Windows desktop no less, changed the the appearance of the icon. They simply couldn't wrap their head around this, even though they work in an enterprise environment. And yes, at home this family member uses Apple devices. It's very much like Moonchild's blog post a little while back about tribes. I don't even tell friends or family what browsers I personally use, and it's not on Windows, either. It really would just confuse or annoy them.

It was a good thing to have to learn how to use the comnmand line back in the 80's, it really was, just like quite a few of the things you took in school and hated, you find very useful later in life.

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Re: Why do people have to care about what browser you use?

Unread post by Mæstro » 2022-09-09, 03:06

athenian200 wrote:
2022-09-06, 19:06
Then from about 1993 to 2007, you have the AOL/"Eternal September" generation, which is about when I started using the Internet. Those users were people who had started off using only Windows and GUI interfaces, and were horrified by the sight of a command prompt for the most part. . . . But at that point, there was still a degree of technical skill it was advantageous to develop, and enough influence from the first generation that at least some of these people went on to become "power users," and developed just enough skill to maybe tweak the Windows registry, navigate a menu, or fix a computer problem with a little bit of help.
I still am horrified at a terminal interface for all but a few rote commands like pwgen. I always prefer a graphical interface if I can get it, and I defer to one of my friends, six years younger than me, who tells me what to paste for the terminal to work. I struggle with smartphones (others’, not mine: I do not own one), for I find touchscreens awkward, and I dislike how they prefer portrait to landscape mode. If I were transported to 1994, I doubt I would own a computer. Usenet appears sometimes as the apparent source of long FAQ on some topic, usually to do with linguistics, but I am still fuzzy to how it works. I like my GUI for everything, and can manage my computer with attention to detail through it alone.
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