Comment by saghm
8 hours ago
My favorite story of just how little people who aren't as tech savvy don't differentiate between different parts of the browser UI (which naturally leads to clicking things that are best left unclicked) is when my grandmother told me her "internet was broken" and asked me to fix it. I was mentally preparing for a call to Verizon or something, but no, when she finally showed me, it turned out that one of the bookmarks on her toolbar in Safari had gone missing (presumably she accidentally deleted it). After I added it back and she clicked it to see that it opened properly, she was satisfied that I had fixed the internet. To her, when she opened Safari, it was all just "the internet"; she didn't differentiate between the local browser UI and the web, let alone different elements on a single webpage being from different sources.
It was even worse in the 90s/00s - on Windows, the IE browser icon was literally labeled “The Internet”
iirc there was a story in The Onion about someone who “accidentally deleted The Internet” on their Windows system and the whole Internet stopped working. They were so sorry, maybe it was in the Recycle Bin, there was still hope for the world, lol
This, Jen...is The Internet.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=iDbyYGrswtg
There’s this: [All Online Data Lost After Internet Crash | The Onion](https://youtu.be/lvpuT3aoypE?si=UI8wTzkNXdEKMO4x) which is pretty funny but doesn’t contain the idea of moving the internet into the trash bin… I feel like I remember that from somewhere too though
This isn't about users not being tech savvy enough. Ad Blocking has always been a safety issue. Many of the ransomware infections in enterprises were actually drive by ad driven exploit networks.
Sandboxes get better, yeah, but this is akin to leaving your door open in a neighborhood with violent crime and then saying I built this awesome laser guided Kevlar chamber that scans introducers upon entry instead.
Low resolution conflation of things is a very understandable outcome. It’s a lot of vocabulary to absorb to speak precisely about UI in general. I’m glad your grandmother has someone like you in her life.
I once was asked why the internet went away when he closed Internet Explorer. I really didn't know what to say.
My girlfriend worked in IT and people would frequently complain that Microsoft was down whenever something went wrong.