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.

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

> 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.

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

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.

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

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

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