zlacker

It's proven that mass marketing works. Tell me how a minority of informed and caring users can avoid on their own that a single large scale bad actor pours millions over millions of dollars to convince the uninformed masses about whatever they want. It even happens in actual elections when some factions use misinformation campaigns to alter the average voter's perception! So not an easy task to solve without help.

>>j1elo+(OP)
Totally. In most things, you need to have the ability to trust that users will make (or at least see) the right choice even over multi-million marketing initiatives. Given today's people and today's marketing, I'd say we're properly fucked.

>>j1elo+(OP)
>Tell me how a minority of informed and caring users can avoid on their own that a single large scale bad actor pours millions over millions of dollars to convince the uninformed masses about whatever they want.

Firefox.

No, not Firefox of today; I'm talking about Firefox 20 years ago that defeated IE6 by sheer force of nerds alone.

Of course, the landscape is vastly different now and Firefox today is about the most not-nerd thing next to Chrome. If there's a a browser here to save us anywhere, I'm not seeing it.

>>Dalewy+z3
> Firefox 20 years ago that defeated IE6 by sheer force of nerds alone.

Firefox was significantly better than IE though: it was faster, had more features, and things like that. This is what made Firefox popular, not "sheer force of nerds".

Chrome, when released, also had some significant improvements to Firefox. In particular, it was loads faster. This changed with "Firefox Quantum" (59 IIRC), but "too little, too late" I guess.

>>arp242+z6
Firefox was better than IE6, but it was the sheer force of nerds that dragged it across the finish line because neither the enterprise nor the general population otherwise cared.

>>Dalewy+Ea
What does that even mean? People used Firefox because it was better. It's that simple. No one forced anyone to use anything.

>>arp242+3i
People used Firefox because it was installed on their computers by the neighborhood nerd. Something similar must happen now. People have to cease using gmail, google search and google maps.

Alternatives need to be built and advertised.

>>arp242+z6
Firefox was not faster than IE. We lost on pageload, cold and warm start, new window, pretty much everything.

Firefox was better because it had tabbed browsing, integrated search, pop-up blocking, and extensions, but I was responsible for monitoring our perf back then and I can say for certain that we were not faster.

>>arp242+3i
People used Firefox because their nerd friend or family member helped them download and install it. We got to 100 million downloads almost exclusively on word of mouth. It's not enough to have a better product, people have to learn about it and we did that with SpreadFirefox and other efforts I helped initiate so I'm very familiar with this. You don't have to trust my appeal to my own authority here, but I doubt you've got anyone closer to Firefox's early growth than me so maybe worth listening.