Yet another reason to never use Chrome
this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2024
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Firefox needs to work on ensuring seamless compatibility with more websites, web apps and so on, because I'm personally very bored with my kids' schools and related services sending out emails and forms with links that simply won't open in FF but are clearly expecting Chrome or Edge where they work fine. Yes, this is on the lazy developers, but if FF want wider scale take-up outside of geeky niche groups then this is the stuff they must fix.
What you're talking about is webcompat and is a very complicated issue. Also I've talked to some Mozilla devs who gave me multiple examples of Chromium rendering something wrong, and they'd have to intentionally break Firefox to render it incorrectly too, just so the end user would get a more consistent experience. Of course these issues happen more and more when things are only tested for one browser.
This is Chromium monopoly. At this time instead of W3C standards, Chromium itself becomes the standard.
Maybe there could be some sort of compatibility flag in Firefox which detects non-standard pages designed for Chrome. We could call it... hmm... something like Quirks Mode?
I can't think of a single example where a web page doesn't work on FF.
if FF want wider scale take-up outside of geeky niche groups
Lol. I remember when FF was the most popular browser.
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Firefox needs to work on ensuring seamless compatibility with more websites, web apps and so on
Care to share some examples Firefox has trouble with? The only issues I have with websites is due to my aggressive use of Noscript.
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Okay that's fine, but when websites are effectively writing
if user_agent_string != [chromium]
break;
It doesn't really matter how good compatibility is. I've had websites go from nothing but a "Firefox is not supported, please use Chrome" splash screen to working just fine with Firefox by simply spoofing the user agent to Chrome. Maybe some feature was broken, but I was able to do what I needed. More often than not they just aren't testing it and don't want to support other browsers.
The more insidious side of this is that websites will require and attempt to enforce Chrome as adblocking gets increasingly impossible on them, because it aligns with their interests. It's so important for the future of the web that we resist this change, but I think it's too late.
The world wide web is quickly turning into the dark alley of the internet that nobody is willing to walk down.
As a developer, I can foresee websites using features other than navigator.userAgent to detect Chrome, because it's easy to change its value. For example: for now, navigator.getBattery is available only in Chromium, and it doesn't need permissions to be checked for its existence through typeof navigator.getBattery === 'function' (also, the function seems to be perfectly callable without user intervention, enabling additional means of fingerprinting). While it's easy to spoof userAgent, it's not as easy to "mock" unsupported APIs such as navigator.getBattery through Firefox.
Slack calls disabled for firefox users, but if you change the user agent to chrome it works...
Almost like it does work on Firefox but for some reason they don't want you using it. Honestly it's so damn weird, why do that? Is there some incentive for them?
Firefox can't fix all the broken sites in the world, but they do investigate issues reported to https://webcompat.com
You can help by reporting sites that don't work for you.
Can you send me an example? I don't think I ever really encountered those sites and I use FF almost exclusively for ~20 years.
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Honestly I'd say the Internet isn't safe, and it's because of Google, fuck you Google. It's not just the wine I've been drinking, it's true dammit.
Welcome back to Firefox everyone! At least if you're as old or older than I. 😁
Also Firefox mobile has nearly all of the extensions as the desktop version so it's more similar across all of your devices. Personally, I use LibreWolf on desktop and Mull on mobile, but they're just tweaked versions of Firefox with some bloat and telemetry removed and preconfigured to be more private.