The comic is set in a fictional internet service provider and draws humor from dealing with clueless users and geeky subjects.

[2] According to reviewer Eric Burns, the strip is set in a world where "[u]sers were dumbasses who asked about cupholders that slid out of their computers, marketing executives were perverse and stupid and deserved humiliation, bosses were clueless and often naively cruel, and I.T.

workers were somewhat shortsighted and misguided, but the last bastion of human reason... Every time we see Greg working, it's to deal with yet another annoying, self-important clueless user who hasn't gotten his brain around the digital world".

is shy and sensitive, loves most computer games and nifty art, and has a big-brother relationship with the Dust Puppy.

He was briefly absent from the strip after accidentally being blown with compressed air while sleeping inside a dusty server.

Originally, Erwin occupied the classic "monitor and keyboard" type computer with an x86 computer architecture, but was later given such residences as an iMac, a Palm III, a Coleco Adam on Mir, a Furby, a nuclear weapon guidance system, an SGI O2, a Hewlett-Packard Calculator (with reverse Polish notation, which meant that Erwin talked like Yoda for weeks afterward), a Lego Mindstorms construction, a Tamagotchi, a Segway, an IBM PC 5150, a Timber Wolf-class BattleMech,[# 10] and an Internet-equipped toilet (with Dust Puppy being the toilet brush), as a punishment for insulting Hastur.

He's not a bad sort, but his grip on his sanity hovers somewhere between weak and non-existent, and he once worked for Microsoft Quality Assurance Archived January 13, 2013, at archive.today.

His worst nightmare is being locked in a room with a sweaty Windows 95 programmer and no hacking weapons in sight.

Her technical abilities unnerve the other techs, but her obvious physical charms compel them to stare at her, except for Pitr, who is convinced she is evil.

His advanced age gives him the upper hand against Pitr, whom he has outdone on several occasions, including in a coffee-brewing competition and in a round of Jeopardy!

Unlike Pitr, he has no ambitions for world domination per se, but he is a friend of Hastur and Cthulhu (based on the H. P. Lovecraft Mythos characters).

Some people (both in strip and in the real world) wrongly assume that the character was named after the scripting language PERL.

However, the Dust Puppy, the "Evilphish", a delirious Stef, and a consultant in a purple suit have managed to get him to stop smiling first.

[# 19] In a 2008 article, reviewer Eric Burns said that as best he could tell, Frazer had produced strips seven days a week, without missing an update for, at that time, almost 11 years.

[citation needed] The strip and Loki Software teamed up for player skin and custom level contest for Quake III Arena in 2000.

When User Friendly began gathering momentum, there wasn't just little to nothing like it on the web -- it appealed and spoke to a much larger percentage of the internet reading audience than mainstream society would support outside of that filter.... in the waning years of the 20th Century, it was a safe bet that if someone had an internet connection in the first place, they'd find User Friendly funny.

[21] Since 2000, User Friendly had been published in a variety of newspapers, including The National Post in Canada and the Linux Journal magazine.

[24] Initially, Frazer posted on MetaFilter saying "I get a flurry of submissions and one-liners every week, and I haven't checked many of them at all, because I rarely had to in the past" but later admitted that he had taken quotes directly from the site.

[25][24] On his website, Frazer said, "I offered no attribution or asked for permission [for these punchlines], over the last couple of years I've infringed on the expression of ideas of some (who I think are) clever people.

[3] Writer T Campbell declared JD Frazer's work as "ow[ing] a heavy debt to [Scott] Adams, but his 'nerdcore' was a purer sort: the jokes were often for nerds ONLY-- NO NON-TECHIES ALLOWD [sic]."

He continued "He wasn't the first webtoonist to target his audience so precisely, but he was the first to do it on a daily schedule, and that kind of single-minded dedication is something most techies could appreciate.

"[29] Time magazine called User Friendly "a strip in the wry, verbal vein of Doonesbury...the humor is a combination of pop culture references and inside jokes straight outta the IT department.

"[30] The strip was among the most notable of a wave of similar strips, including Help Desk by Christopher B. Wright,[31] General Protection Fault by Jeffrey T. Darlington,[32] The PC Weenies by Krishna Sadasivam,[33] Geek & Poke by Oliver Widder,[34] Working Daze by John Zakour, and The Joy of Tech by Liza Schmalcel and Bruce Evans.

And it indicates that new internet users of the time were really hungry, downright starving, for entertainment.... his current work [speaking in 2005] is comparatively slick and professional.

But I suspect that his early work had enormous influence, because it encouraged thousands of people with few skills and little talent to jump into the webcomics field."

"[29] The webcomic Penny Arcade produced a strip in 1999 just to criticise Frazer, saying "people will pass up steak once a week for crap every day.

[43] Francis Glassborow cited the specificity of the humour,[44] which also lead Retro Activity to find the strip "difficult to recommend" along with the limited art style.

[45] Mike Kaltschnee also mentioned the weakness of the art, but was impressed at Illiad maintaining publication of a strip every day.

[46] "Webcomics: The Influence and Continuation of the Comix Revolution" described how the strip represented the counter-cultural aspects of the open-source software movement.

[47] Dustin Puryear observed how the strip represents the conflicts between the computer literate and newer less informed users.