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Are Mac users really that different?

I was doing some e-mail juggling this evening, futzing around with my Gmail settings. Google recently joined the rest of us in the 21st century and decided to offer IMAP in addition to POP3 for Gmail accounts, so I’ve been migrating my stuff over, trying to maintain the level of order and cleanliness my POP3 account in Thunderbird had. This all means that occasionally these days I must visit Gmail’s web interface.

Today I was confronted with the following error message above my inbox.

Peculiar, but at least it shows the dudes are Google are on the ball, and are using spiffy Firefox extensions like Firebug. So I click “Fix this” to find out what they think I should do, and I’m taking to a brief guide which is inexplicably forked according to operating system—not by browser, mind you.

How bizarre is that? The instructions for “Mac Users” are the exact same steps for “Windows or Linux Users,” only the Mac crowd isn’t given the choice of leaving Firebug running. Why separate the instructions by operating system? In this context it wouldn’t even make sense to separate by browser, given that Firebug is an extension for Firefox and Firefox alone. (OK, Iceweasel and Bon Echo too, but let’s not get into that right now.)

I guess the Gmail team believes that Mac users are so used to simplicity that they can’t follow more than two steps worth of instructions.

Yeah, that sounds about right.