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.

  • MagneticFusion@lemm.eeOP
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    7 months ago

    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, extensions, 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.

    • Melody Fwygon@lemmy.one
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      7 months ago

      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.

    • HotPurplePeach@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Ok, I’d say it’s biggest selling point is not being owned by Google - the company with the business model of violating privacy. But if you don’t care about that, think about how short is the battery life on your phone. It doesn’t have to be that way. That’s because of Googles and Facebooks of the world that convert your money that you spend on charging your phone to make money on the data they collect.

    • RubberElectrons@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      It’s tough to answer with anything nontechnical… Best I can cook up off the top of my head is that we all expect the internet to work the same, whether we’re visiting YouTube, or a blog, or… Whatever.

      How are those pages coded? Like any human language, we all agreed on what certain mouth sounds mean and do, and don’t agree with just one person getting to define how the language works.

      Similarly, why does only Google/chrome get to define how a website’s code works? I don’t know how old you are, but there was a time where sites were just broken based on if you’d used Internet explorer 6, or literally anything else.

      Lot of background, but that’s why we care about which browser engine to use. Firefox uses less ram, follows the web’s standards better, and actually gives you control in a way Mozilla can’t undo.