Feb 20
I was watching my wife using her Macbook this weekend and she happened to have a couple of windows open, one with Firefox, one with Safari.
I asked her why she had both going, and she replied that:
- She didn’t even know that she had both running
- She didn’t know which window was from which program
- “I have never understood where there is more than one browser. Aren’t they all the same?
This hit home that for non-techies browsers really ARE pretty darn similar these days. I can rail of reasons why I need to run Firefox for extension X, Y, Z, but I like to run Safari for speed on the mac, and then I download WebKit nightly …. blah blah.
For someone like my wife, the browsers look all the same to her. This shows that for the next versions of our favourite browsers, I hope that there is some really interesting innovation that my wife can look at and see how that helps her out as she tries to traverse the web.
February 20th, 2007 at 12:57 pm
Heh… my mom did one better: she had two versions of Firefox running on her iBook, and two versions of Adium (”the duck”). She also managed to drag the Safari icon off the dock, so she wasn’t even using Safari.
This tells me a few things:
- Computers are still pretty difficult for non-technies, even Apples
- Auto-upgrade programs like Safari and Adium are still not fool-proof
May 19th, 2008 at 12:35 am
me neither…
June 25th, 2008 at 7:58 am
….I ma too..