Joozero said on June 17, 2009 12:31 AM PDT:
It's the same as "the monitor is the computer", this is the usual answer ;)
said on June 17, 2009 12:41 AM PDT:
and the hard disk is usually mistaken as the cabinet ;)
My wife always says "Turn on the Internet" when she wants me to start FF
I ran into this myself when a client complained of a bug that happens when he clicks the "Google back button". Took me a while to figure out that he means the back button on his browser...
Odd but true. Maybe it could be interesting for browser developers to think about this misunderstanding and use it.
A good (and ambiguous) ad for Google Chrome: "Upgrade your search experience. Try the new version of Google Chrome."
0micr0n said on June 17, 2009 1:35 AM PDT:
*Facepalm*
None of my non-technical friends ever mistake a search engine for a browser. They always say, "Oh, I downloaded Firefox/Chrome/Opera the other day, I like it much better than IE".
gravi_t said on June 17, 2009 1:37 AM PDT:
The answer is in the question itself: they asked people in NY (which is in the USA).
disclaimer (for US people): if you're American and not dumb, my above comment obviously is not about you, so no need to get offended. Might I also add that it is quite ridiculous that the disclaimer is twice as long as my actual comment.
@gravi_t:
Not knowing the definition of a browser doesn't make you dumb, but ignorant, less technology knowledgeable etc. Can you name an important work of Igor Stravinsky without using a search engine or an encyclopedia?
said on June 17, 2009 2:01 AM PDT:
Considering that the majority of users don't know what a browser is; couldn't them knowing, as opposed to not knowing, be a potential problem for Google? In the sense that more experienced users tend to ignore advertisement all together... or use Adblock Plus.
Just a thought.
SteveL said on June 17, 2009 2:49 AM PDT:
My seven year old doesn't really differentiate firefox from google or "the web". You start FF, you start google, you go to the lego animations on youtube or flash games on miniclip. he does know that the stuff is "elsewhere", namely that if the network goes down the fun goes away. What he doesnt know is exactly how network partitions arise, and who is usually behind them (his dad)
ahab said on June 17, 2009 3:03 AM PDT:
It's a quite common to answer the most common use of a tool, in response to "what is a...?"
E.g. when a spoon is mentioned hardly anybody will tell you the spoon is for ladling fluids, but most people will tell you it is for eating food.
Or of a car, its general property of being able to transport people isn't used to explain what it is, but it's used to "drive to work".
So when people is asked what a browser is, they interpret it as what do you use it most for. And as virtually nobody only uses a browser read HTML files on his/her computer, it's not so strange they associate browser with searching the internet throught their favourite web search engine (which very often is by default loaded into their browser).
Sheldon said on June 17, 2009 3:25 AM PDT:
Educators, like myself, who love teaching with technology, will hopefully change this.
PS One of my favorites is; "Internet Explorer is THE INTERNET, right?"
venkat said on June 17, 2009 5:06 AM PDT:
As this is really funny how it can be such misleading from Wikipedia too.
said on June 17, 2009 5:32 AM PDT:
fax that email to me.
said on June 17, 2009 5:32 AM PDT:
Жесть!
said on June 17, 2009 5:33 AM PDT:
the interweb is great for porn, do i double click?
I thought a browser was a chocolate cake... or the hair over your eyes... or someone who's always praising his boss...
Daniel said on June 17, 2009 8:35 AM PDT:
I think what happened is that it probably said google somewhere near the man and people just thought he was doing PR for google and associated google search with browser.
Mmeerman said on June 17, 2009 9:57 AM PDT:
My friend confused her computer with a monitor. The other day she brought het monitor and told me i should look at her computer.
said on June 17, 2009 12:04 PM PDT:
Well, repeat this in Germany and you get answers like: "the program where the internet is in it"
But I don't think that people would call it search machine.
said on June 17, 2009 12:09 PM PDT:
This ad might work:
"Upgrade your internet now with the brand new *Google Chrome* - where there's a whole world to search and explore."
said on June 17, 2009 12:25 PM PDT:
Lo mismo pasa aqui, si no ven a Google por defecto en su pagina de inicio creen que no entran a Internet.
If you work in IT support with end users, this type of misunderstanding is par for the course. You could have asked what application people used to check their email and they will say "Yahoo!" or "Gmail" or "Hotmail". The majority of folks I support have very little understanding about the differences between applications on their computer. "What did you use to create this document?" or "What kind of document is it?" is still a confusing question to a tremendous number of people, and they often answer "Windows" when they mean MS Office because they don't distinguish between those things the way that people who are paid to care about do. MS waste an enormous amount of money on marketing and branding applications like Office because most people have zero clue about any of it except when they see an ad for it or see someone else using a version they don't use and they want a fancy geegaw that that version does.
People also routinely called Firefox "Foxfire" and Internet Explorer "the Internet" or "Explorer" or, "That blue E" or "The blue icon".
*shrugs* There's really nothing new being discovered here, just a confirmation of what most of us already know.
Hunnter said on June 17, 2009 2:27 PM PDT:
This is a very dangerous thing to Microsoft.
The bundling of IE in Windows was originally to try prevent such a thing from ever happening, because if they lose the desktop, they lose "everything". (little over exaggerated, but you get the idea)
Each year they slowly lose market share on the web.
Unless they REALLY kick things into gear with IE9 and up, they will just lose out.
And you ever wonder _why_ it was called "Internet" Explorer?
Once they got people thinking the Internet = the little blue icon, they had won the war. (when it only browses an extremely small subset of the Internet, The WWW)
Just like smallerdemon above mentioned, actually.
The days of the desktop are slowly dying, everything is moving to the Internet, from Cloud based office applications to games.
And with Opera Unite just launching in alpha, shows a lot of promising ideas. I hope to god that they put as much as they can in to this and make it as simple as possible, but allow for complex customization too.
And with all these social networks growing, it is slowly taking over e-mail too, which is kind of a good thing, e-mail has stagnated for years.
This is why i am so excited about Wave, it could (hopefully) reinvent the concept of e-mail. But i won't get too excited in case it bombs.
Oh well, Gmail is still as awesome as ever.
The future of the web, despite the ever-growing eye of Big Brother, will sure be an exciting one.
taoufix said on June 17, 2009 2:37 PM PDT:
"My friend came over to my house and erased all my other browsers and installed it and said you use this now!"
Priceless :D
They really ought to do some TV advertising for Chrome.
salsa said on June 17, 2009 6:36 PM PDT:
This is not a survey of New Yorkers, but of New Yorkers who will stop to be recorded answering a stranger's question, which I think is a small fraction of New Yorkers in general-- the ones who aren't busy.
How many people did Scott try to ask?
said on June 17, 2009 10:14 PM PDT:
@Hunnter,
A "bag" used to hold "laptop" is called a "laptop bag".
I don't see anything wrong in Internet Explorer as long as you can explore the Internet with that particular application.
P.S - I am using Chrome since IE removed inline auto-complete from the addressbar.
said on June 18, 2009 3:37 AM PDT:
Most people I know outside the IT industry don't know the difference between Microsoft, Intel, Windows, Office, their PC manufacturer, a browser and a search engine (and for all I know, their left elbow). It's all one big appliance to them.
If they got their first computer configured one way (e.g. with Office preinstalled on Windows) then that's what they think they all look like, and how their next computer should look.
@Hunter wrote: "And you ever wonder _why_ it was called "Internet" Explorer? "
- Because Microsoft name most of their applications directly after its function. Next question.
Dejf said on June 19, 2009 6:00 AM PDT:
The more stupid the customer is, the easier it is to sell him anything. From this definition, there is no reason for the big companies to educate people. Just use M$ phrase about forgetting everything you ever knew about computers, as you no longer need with new hyper version of their OS.
Smackitta said on June 20, 2009 11:14 AM PDT:
i use blogspot as a browser ! :)
MB said on June 20, 2009 11:57 PM PDT:
Those 2 "Anonymous " in a row are clueless as to what the earlier poster was trying to teach us.
And, No, MS don't name their products after their function. Only a slackjaw would say they are 'windowing' or 'officing' or 'X-ing'.
Fck, what a bunch of monkey cousins.
--
This is really very funny.......how can people say that a browser is a search engine !!
said on July 10, 2009 1:20 AM PDT:
The strange thing is that Mac users aren't the least bit better at this, despite the OS being much more application-centric than Windows.
The dock has one big icon per app instead of small ones per window in the taskbar. The upper left corner of the screen always has the app name in bold.
Doesn't help, the average user clicks around until finding a window that looks familiar and have no idea which programm it belongs to.
said on July 10, 2009 7:38 AM PDT:
I worked in tech support until my husband took a job in a new town and I couldn't find similar work right away; my new job did not involve tech and not everyone knew my background. A colleague was taking me on the usual tour of the office and he explained that "you get on the internet with the blue thing on the normal screen" (meaning the IE shortcut on the Windows desktop). I didn't even know what to say, so I just tell that story to fellow tech geeks.
said on July 10, 2009 9:56 AM PDT:
Isn't it a shame that people use something without the
slightest idea what they are doing? If you judge the computer using population by their computer skills you find that they are idiots! And they world is ruled by information technologie. And they don't even know that! Scary, scary, scary …
Matt said on July 10, 2009 10:42 AM PDT:
The more shocking part of this post is that anyone actually uses Chrome. lol...
said on July 10, 2009 5:19 PM PDT:
Watch this if you are able to understand some german. Kids interview politicians for a kids tv-station. The woman is Germanys attorney general, she did not know what a browser is when the kids asked her...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X92GtG1G_hY
I have clients now who can't differentiate between a browser's "address bar" and a search engine's text field (i.e., google search). They don't even realize you can type a URL into an address bar directly.
Echoing comments above, many people don't seem to understand the difference between a system file browser ("windows explorer" or mac's "finder") and a file browsing dialogue in an application.
It is kind of a generational thing though, in my experience.
said on July 11, 2009 12:33 AM PDT:
THIS IS SAD.
said on July 11, 2009 4:14 AM PDT:
I was trying to help someone register for a service, and I had a very simple URL for him to use. Just type it in, it's very short and the registration was just as straightforward. It took over 21 minutes to get this person there because they would not just type it in the address bar. Twenty-one minutes of "What do I click on? Can I search for it in Google and get it that way?" Then I realized that they didn't know what an address bar was. I ended teaching them how to find and use it. Ugh.
said on July 11, 2009 4:29 AM PDT:
I wonder if anybody watched this and had a little revelation. lol. congratulations to you, welcome to the internet.
said on July 11, 2009 6:24 AM PDT:
Many people cannot even differentiate between "going online" and "starting a browser". They believe that clicking on the IE icon (that's the browser they're using, of course) will somehow get them on the internet. They do not grasp the concept of a network connection with web surfing being only one of the countless ways to use it.
I find it strange that some people cannot seem to understand this concept. I've tried each and every way of explaining it to them, but it's like talking to a wall. It just doesn't get through.
I don't expect them to become experts in network technology, but I think it is possible to understand the difference between a browser and a network connection. But these people also often have difficulties with abstracting and applying their knowledge to similar problems.
@Anonymous (7/11 6:24 AM PDT)
AOL is almost certainly complicit in this. In the days of dial-up, America Online was the sole experience of thousands of people. They opened an application which then connected to the internet (audibly), and then they were free to do all sorts of things. Many of them never made use of AOL's actual browser, but rather only its web apps; and show them that, once connected, they were free to use other software, like IE or Netscape, and they'd be astonished.
So, the modern extrapolation of this (the internet isn't on unless the browser is open) should come as no suprise.
said on July 11, 2009 9:22 AM PDT:
The computer is the internet, the internet is the web, the web is the browser, the browser is the search engine. kthanx.
said on July 11, 2009 12:23 PM PDT:
Well most people start their browser at work and then see the big google logo appear as it is the start page. The confusion is no surprise...
R.S. said on August 7, 2009 12:46 AM PDT:
ever since reading this, i ask people i meet, whats a browser? my 14yr old cousin doesn't know. my 30-some yr. old aunt doesn't know... my mom thinks i use ie. i use chrome. its just u cant "uninstall" ie. :(
What is a browser?
cousin: a webpage...
aunt: i don't know... (at least shes honest)
It is pretty amazing that so many people don't know what a browser is. I guess they are too sheltered from the internet and technology.
said on October 23, 2009 7:54 AM PDT:
I this this advertisement would work - Fuck you buy us -
My mom runs ubuntu, I am so proud of her.
