is there any
relationship between a
person's
politics and the web browser they choose
to use it seems like a crazy thing right
I I just posted this article over at
conservative nerds dolo Doom uh go go
read the article over there if you want
all the all the charts and and
everything else we're about to to look
through but it's it's a worthwhile
question to ask there have been so many
uh I want to say conflicts and and
disagreements within the tech World
about politics over the last few years
where where one company over here will
discriminate against people of a
particular political persuasion over
there and certain groups will feel
alienated or pushed out of the way and
and we will hear talk of people moving
from one platform or one or one piece of
software to another but but what does
that really look like is that really
happening so when I sent out and created
the great tech industry demographic
survey of 2024 where I surveyed 7,200
people across a huge huge cross-section
of communities within the tech world
people who worked in the IT industry and
who or who considered themselves to be
computer nerds fans of tech YouTubers
Tech podcasters authors writers social
media people and the like all over the
political Spectrum all over the the tech
Spectrum Linux users Mac users Windows
users everywhere we got it all over the
place over 7,000 7,200 people several
times bigger than than most of even the
largest of the of the big political
election polling that gets done you I
don't know most people realize how small
the polling size is for some of the the
biggest polls that are outlin like the
gallop polls a lot of times are like
like a, 1200 some odd people and we got
a lot of data 46 questions over 7,000
respondents all over the map and what we
came away with among a lot of other
things that we're already
learning is that yeah yeah a person's
politics and a person's choice of web
browser is directly related and in a
surprisingly surprisingly big
way uh let's just dive right into it
here uh this is this is a graph uh this
is a graph obviously it shows the people
in blue and for those of you listening
to the podcast go go watch the video on
luk.com or just follow along on the
article at luke. locals.com so you can
see all the charts but in blue we have
people who are left leaning politically
in red people who are right leaning
politically and in green people who
identified as right in the middle they
were
centrists when people say hey do you
prefer
Firefox overwhelmingly
overwhelmingly left leaning people said
yeah I preferred Firefox I mean well
over 60% of all left leaning people were
like I prefer Firefox that's my browser
and when you look at all the other
browsers uh that we offered here as
options and again we did not offer in
this poll every single browser we simply
offered a cross-section of the most
popular plus a a smattering of the uh uh
of kind of the the alternative browsers
so we have Firefox Brave Chrome Safari
Vivaldi Edge and
Opera and what was amazing to me was
when you look at that chart left leaning
people went for Firefox and then kind of
nothing else there was a little bit for
brave a little bit for Chrome almost
nothing for Safari tiny bit for Vivaldi
and Edge and then almost nothing for
Opera but then you look over at the the
centrists and the Centrist start to move
they start to move away from Firefox and
you can see the the bar for Firefox
dropping for centus and the the brave
bar almost doubles and chrome it grows
increasingly up as well and Safari it
just explodes and Vivaldi grows Edge
actually goes down interestingly
enough but then you get over to the
right leaning people people who say they
are politically on the right and you see
quickly overwhelmingly they don't they
don't like Firefox as their number one
browser anymore they like
Brave overwhelmingly over 40% of them
are like yeah Brave and and and to a
lesser degree 30 some odd percent for
Firefox and then and then kind of a um a
mix for for the remainder of the
browsers it is amazing and and I I want
to be very very clear that
this this data the survey this data
comes from was from again it
professionals and computer nerds which
means that while this provides us a very
detailed look at the tech World it does
not represent the broader populace it
does not represent in other words non-
nerds while there may be similar
correlations in the general populace
outside of the tech world that is well
beyond the scope of this particular
survey uh this is for nerds or people in
the tech world or Tech
enthusiasts but this is this is who we
are representing in this survey so if
you're looking at this and you're
thinking well this doesn't feel like it
lines up with the broader populace well
these are for nerds and in fact when you
start to figure in the fact that this is
the tech populace that is making these
choices and by and large well over 60%
of the Nerds on the left politically are
saying they choose Firefox over
everything else and you start to compare
that against the broader Firefox numbers
which are in the couple percentage
points you start to realize that Firefox
might not have much of any
representation in the broader populace
it may be limited we'd have to sit down
and really crunch the numbers on this
but but at first glance that means that
nerdy left-wing people may represent the
vast majority of people who even use
Firefox at
all we'll need to dig into that some
more uh But continuing on let's let's
dial into just the two big browsers for
a minute here this is Firefox and brave
again look look at those look at the
switch that happens there it it's almost
reversed it's it's a mirror image of
each other almost almost uh left-wing
users go hardcore for Firefox and
right-wing users go hardcore for brave
and centrists are in the middle they're
literally
centered and it's an extreme
difference I mean the the difference is
overwhelming um one other thing that I I
want to want to want to point out here
that I found fascinating was regulating
people tend to be more spread out uh in
their web browser usage right they use
more of the minor browsers than the
leftists do I I I think that's that's
absolutely absolutely fascinating um in
fact here I'm GNA I'm going to pull this
up here and show the same data using a
different chart here just to show how
different this is the left leaning users
tend to have a
and and I I couldn't come up with a
better word to use here but it's an
entertaining word to use but they lack
diversity when it comes to web
browsers left leaning users go they go
all in hard on Firefox and they tend to
shy away from any minority browsers
whereas right-wing users right leaning
politically users of web browsers tend
to dabble uh you start to see growth
among Vivaldi uh uh uh Safari even and
and and growth along those lines and not
so much in Chrome uh you don't see a
whole lot of growth in Chrome but you
see that big growth in gra in Brave it's
a much more spread out usage than than
you see with left left-wing uh uh web
browsers so right-wing web browsers are
more diverse web browsing wise than
leftwing web browser people that I think
that's worth pointing out because it's
weird
now
um this is worth thinking about for a
minute
because these results May kind of feel
obvious because at first glance this
data makes a ton of sense um over the
last few years matzilla the parent
company behind Firefox has made a habit
of courting left-leaning users and
pushing away those on the political
right uh investments in leftist causes
and I and I link to some of the articles
that talk about this sort of thing some
by me um some that are just blog posts
from the companies um statements
advocating for censorship of
conservatives a lot of you may remember
the let's do more than deplatforming
when when the the the head of Mozilla or
one of the heads of Mozilla was calling
for um the removal of people with
conservative ideas from the Internet
it's a weird thing to do uh and of
course there was the the ouster of
Brendan Ike as their CEO uh so Bren
Brendan Ike contributed to a cause that
was that was definitely much more
right-wing politically um and it caused
a huge Firestorm and uh resulted in him
resigning from Modzilla but kind of
resigning by force from as the CEO of
Modzilla and then Brendan IE goes and
founds Brave and so it kind of makes
sense that you see a lot of people that
I think were probably using Firefox or
something else say oh well there's the
conservative guy he's going over and
he's making that web browser well if a
conservative dude that just got
cancelled for lack of a better word from
Modzilla creates his own web browser
that's probably the web browser for me I
mean I think that's what a lot of a lot
of conservative leaning and and right
leaning people tend to think so they've
moved over to Brave that of course is is
is just speculation right that's just
thinking oh well that seems to be what's
happening or that's what we guess might
be happening or that's what I did so I
assume other people did well now we have
numbers uh we have we have real hard
numbers that show exactly that that that
may not be the cause for this Dynamic
shift but it makes sense that it would
be um what we do have here though is a
clear correlation between a person's
political leanings and which web browser
they use and I find that fascinating I
find it fascinating that we have a very
clear-cut example right now of people in
one demographic opt to use this piece of
software that does this task and people
of a separate political leaning saying
I'm going to use a completely separate
piece of software to perform the same
task because because they don't trust
each other notice you're not seeing left
leaning people choose Brave you're just
not uh you're not at I mean I mean
12.6 people who identified as left
leaning said that they preferred the
brave web browser clearly some do but
42.3% of right-leaning people said yeah
I prefer
Brave I mean that's a that's a big
switch and and centrus again fall like
perfectly in the middle almost I mean
not exactly but really close uh and
that's that's startling to at least for
the top two once you break out of
Firefox and brave and you start looking
at um you know you know Safari and
Vivaldi and Edge and Opera and chrome
the numbers get a little bit different
but none of those really seem to have
the same numbers the same the same hold
over the Nerds and it professionals that
Firefox and brave do whatever is
happening in the browser Wars as far as
the Nerds are concerned Firefox and
brave have won
now I know that brave utilizes the
Chrome Chrome's rendering engine right
so in a lot of ways uh it's like you
could say oh it's a version of Chrome
but just the same right leaning users
prefer Brave over chrome by a massive
margin massive massive uh now what'll be
interesting to
see is um as time goes on what will
happen with this
split will this split continue to spread
outside of the tech world will this
split change within the tech world will
it become more extreme than it already
is I'm I'm not 100% certain but we'll
keep tracking it in order to keep keep
tabs on all of this because as of right
now I I believe this is the only study
that's been done along these lines to
date uh so so but now we know now we
know where people who are left leaning
and people right who are right leaning
stand Visa current web browsers it's
kind of fascinating anyway uh head on
over to conservative nerd. locals.com if
you want to read this article it's free
for everybody uh feel free to share it
click on those uh those graphs share the
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if you share the graphs just because it
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it's crazy it's craziness all right
everybody thank you for everyone who
helped support the work we do thank you
for everyone who took the time to uh
answer the ma this massive survey I know
it was huge but the data that we're
getting from it is absolutely
spectacular I'll be publishing the
spreadsheet the Anon with Anonymous data
of everything so that all of you can not
just check the things that I'm reporting
on but that all of you can go in and see
if there's additional cool things that I
missed uh additional correlations that
are worth calling out I'm sure there are
lots with 46 different questions and a
huge amount of data possibilities for
each
question who knows man there's a lot of
stuff in here I've still got a lot of
diving through to do you should see how
many tabs I have on my master
spreadsheet right now where I'm grouping
data together and looking at it in
different ways and it's nuts all right
everybody uh with that ladies and
gentlemen boys and girls across the
intertubes I do declare and
broadcast