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An edit of xkcd 2501, “Average Familiarity”:
[Ponytail and Cueball are talking. Ponytail has her hand raised, palm up, towards Cueball.]
Ponytail: Open-source alternatives are second nature to us foss nerds, so it’s easy to forget that the average person probably only knows Linux and one or two degoogled Android ROMs.
Cueball: And Firefox, of course.
Ponytail: Of course.
[Caption below the panel]
Even when they’re trying to compensate for it, experts in anything wildly overestimate the average person’s familiarity with their field.
partly inspired by the replies to this post but i see this kind of thing all the time (shoutout to the person who once genuinely asked “who still uses google these days?”)
made with this neat tool
Conflicted on filename extensions. For the average person it works just fine, and I suppose that’s what probably matters. It’s not very common for not knowing the details of how they work to matter. It’s just silly that the same information is also in the start of the file 99% of the time. It is nice though to have a readable, usually reliable label, and then have a signature anyways for when different names overlap. Wikipeda lists 4 completely unrelated types with a .mod extension, for example.
Pretty much any application will correctly open any file type it supports, regardless of the extension. So it is quite unintuitive that you could have a file named “.png” that seems to work completely fine yet is actually a jpeg or something. But that hopefully isn’t a case that people run into very often, so it probably doesn’t matter.
I don’t think that’s true on windows. If I have a PDF with a .PNG extension and try to open it it will fail regardless of the headers in the file itself.
Windows file manager opens things in apps based on file extensions, and then it’s up to the apps to figure out what to do with it. I did a bit of testing, and it seems like Firefox is fine with opening JPEGs mislabeled as PNGs, but not PDFs mislabeled as PNGs. LibreOffice Draw is fine with that though, so if in windows I set that as my default for PNG files, it opens a PDF labelled as a PNG perfectly normally (and can also open actual PNGs normally).
If I just completely delete the extension from a PNG or PDF, Firefox will open either correctly.