[nullindividual]

I'm not sure why this was voted so high or would be news to anyone. It's a single website and historically this is nothing new (IE used to be the only supported browser on nearly all sites, or the reverse became true once Chrome had enough traction while IE development languished).

Firefox is not that popular of a browser. Not news at 11.

[racl101]

Yeah, I was wondering about this. Who the heck is PG&E and why is it newsworthy if a single company doesn't support Firefox browser fully?

[porphyra]

It's a electricity and gas utility that serves San Francisco and the Bay Area. Many Hacker News readers are from this area.

People love complaining about PG&E since its prices are ludicrously high (one of the highest in the nation --- about 50 cents per kWh), while the service is quite poor (they famously caused some serious wildfires and have frequent power outages during storms, although admittedly the recent couple of storms were quite strong). Now that they stopped supporting a beloved browser, there is all the more reason for the Bay Area techies to complain.

[mistrial9]

close, but think bigger

Fast facts about PG&E The company provides natural gas and electric service to approximately 16 million people throughout a 70,000-square-mile service area in northern and central California.

[lolinder]

You're getting dogpiled on for not knowing this, but it's a reasonable question. If you're not one of the ~5% of the US population (0.2% of the global population) that lives in the part of California indicated on this map [0], the only interaction you might have had with PG&E is when they sparked a forest fire that caused smoke to cover most of the United States in 2018 [1].

[0] https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/tariffbook/ELEC_MAPS_...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Fire_%282018%29

[8organicbits]

> Who the heck is PG&E

For many people this is the power company. If you want electricity, you go through them. Needing to use specific browsers to get basic services is an accessibility problem.

[samtheprogram]

They are an electric provider in the United States. I last dealt with them while in California.

[jachee]

PG&E is Pacific Gas and Electric. It provides utility services to tens of millions of people. They’re one of, if not the biggest single utility companies in the country.

It’s not like MomNPop, LLC.

[earthling8118]

They may as well be for a lot of us. I'd never heard of Kroger before a few months ago, and apparently they're one of the biggest grocery store chains. Their size doesn't mean that everyone knows about them.

[im3w1l]

The people posting and upvoting likely see it as the possible start of a trend.

[whalesalad]

PG&E is a huge utility company in northern california.

[choilive]

... One of the largest utility companies in the US and part of the S&P500?

[gertop]

Why make it sound as if either of those things mean anything?

    PG&E provides natural gas and electricity to 5.2 million households in the northern two-thirds of California.

That's 2% of one country...

Even worse, this news affects 3% of that 2%.

Try looking outside your bubble every now and then!

[choilive]

5.2M households is roughly 15M people. 3% of that is 450k users. While not huge on the scale of the global browser install base, that is still a pretty sizeable chunk of users that this might impact.

Also, I'm not in CA and I know of PG&E - in fact many USA residents probably do because they make the national news cycle quite a bit. No need for such a patronizing comment.