Yes. Unfortunately. "a virus? How did I get that? What's an anti-virus? You must be wrong, I just do a little bit of web browsing and downloading music." (this was in the windows xp days that I'm specifically flashing back to)
Lemmy has a really biased idea of what the average computer user can do. Imagine Janet in accounting, who calls help desk to reset her password every morning, and takes 30 minutes to remember how to check her email. Or the late GenZ just entering the workforce, who was surprised that their desktop wasn’t a touchscreen, and doesn’t know how a file structure works, because literally every device they’ve used growing up has been either a tablet or a Chromebook. That’s the average user.
My boss once asked me to take a look at her computer that was super slow and barely functional, and the thing that surprised me the most was that she had been running Chrome without any adblock since ever, and when I asked her about adblock, she answered: "adwhat?". Mind you that she's still a millennial, and only a few years older than me.
I had to use my parents desktop a when I flew home for a bit.
Surfing the internet is fucking stressful if you don't have adblocks.
So overstimulating!!
I'm also on windows and for some reason I had to use Edge.
The Edge home screen is the VERY REASON google killed it back in the 90s. Clean clear search screen.
Allows you to think what you are doing with out getting bombarded with ads and posts and ads and markets.
Reminded me how terrible the search experience was back in Alta Vista and Yahoo days