This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I love Firefox. Love it.
But I keep coming across sites that don't function properly with it. Is this Firefox's fault? No - Firefox follows standards nicely. But growing numbers of sites don't, and this is a big problem at a micro and macro level.
Chrome seems to have such a foothold that it is getting away with embrace/extend/extinguish and I think it's a very sad thing.
That was Internet Explorer 20 years ago and look where we are now.
I personally can't remember the last time I had issues with a site on Firefox in the last few years since I switched.
This is an especially common problem on Android. I have found many sites whose mobile version simply does not work in Firefox. It's very frustrating.
I keep seeing this sentiment on these posts, often with a suspicious number of up votes that don't seem to correlate how many up votes everything else in the topic get.
Literally the only place I have EVER seen this issue was a state toll road website, which was using a timezones that didn't actually exist but chrome added (and documented on the Internet to trick people into using it). A simple email to the website with an explanation and the correct timezones name and the problem was fixed.
Pretty sure a lot of this sentiment is either astroturfing, or people passing on astroturfing trying to be helpful.
Yeah, I’ve been exclusively using Firefox dev edition for the last 2-3 ys. I can’t remember one site not functioning properly apart from the odd visual bug from time to time.
I tried to bring this up as an issue back on Reddit, and I got downvoted into oblivion.
I think sometimes switching your use agent to Chrome can bypass some issues.
So many tech minded people, but at same time, so many of us fail to consider others POV and priorities.
JUST DON'T VISIT THAT WEBSITE! - sure bro, that means i won't be able to pay the bills this month because the only traditional way of doing this is visiting a physical kiosk at working hour. Did i mention that i gotta work?
Similar with messaging apps.
YOU NEED BETTER FRIENDS LOL - trust me I've tried. i also need to send my resume using this app to whoever interviewing me. no, no email. yes, i tried teling that. no, i won't be that guy preaching about software freedom when all i want is a fucking job.
There is an addon that does this automatically.
Some pages load weird like a pop-up on mobile that should take over your view window is a side bar instead. Still fully functional but slightly harder to read.
But you know what makes it way harder to read? Ads
We should add another E... Embrace, extend, extinguish and enshittify.
It blows my mind how many people do you not understand how essentially useless Chrome is now and how much it has changed.
What I don't get is that my browser experience is legitimately better overall, I don't know what was keeping me from switching all these years. Familiarity perhaps.
i've been on Firefox in the last 8 years. i don't even know what's going on in Chrome and other browsers lol.
Remember when Firefox started dealing damage to IE's insane monopoly, and then Chrome came along and shanked them both?
I hope Chrome finally eats dirt after basically becoming knockoff IE 2.
Literally every new HTTP standard is coming out of Google's dev team. That is not a good thing.
As long as Chrome was convenient people preferred it. Now that they are showing their true face and squeezing it in favor of being more ad-friendly I hope people realize there are better choices.
I’d largely like to agree. My main issue is as others have said, some websites don’t work on Firefox due to Chrome basically being the standard. It’s annoying. And I do think people should still switch and try their best to stop using Chrome. Because IF we could get to a point where Firefox has a larger audience than it already has, the problem may end up stopping due to developers having more of a need to make sure their stuff is cross compatible with other browsers.
I've been using Firefox as my main browser for a long time. Sites that don't work in FF are very rare. If it's something I really need to access, I just use chrome/edge for that particular site. But as I said, it happens rarely, and there's an easy way to work around it.
I actually encountered the opposite. A site I've been using for roughly 7 years actually has massive issues on chrome that makes it unusable.
On Firefox? No problem at all.
some websites don’t work on Firefox
Are you sure? Is there a list of these websites? I've been primarily using FF for a decade and haven't encountered any.
Same. Usually it's a case of "the site is broken on both", or a hard refresh is needed, so switching browsers feels like it works
Almost every web developer I've met tests if their site works in Firefox and other browsers. The problem is when websites (aka Google sites) deliberately design their sites to not work in Firefox to get people to switch to Chrome
I've been using Firefox since the beginning. I do not understand any of the complaints people have about it. And I cant remember the last time I visited a website that wasn't compatible with it. It was definitely before the pandemic and probably longer before that.
I agree, run Firefox as your main and then a privacy focused fork of Chromium as your second if you need it for specific website.
Personally I barely ever encounter issues with websites running FF.
Am I the only one concerned Google may try to pull a fast one and block Mozilla from using the Widevine DRM?
Time to boycott widevine and insist websites switch to an open standard ... (though honestly good luck with that, Google might very well win that battle)
Not that easy since the W3C mandates everyone use Widevine or something similar. There was such a shitshow over this that the EFF pulled out of the org.
Google has the internet by the danglies via this little whatsit and the W3C can do nothing about it, because Google accounts for a sizable amount of their funding, and dropping Widevine/EME would break everything.
Also, Google could just more simply stop funding Firefox: Mozilla gets a lot of money from Google just to be the default search engine. Then again, maybe Firefox can switch to Bing or Duckduckgo, though I don't know if those would pay as well as Google.
Google is not funding Firefox only for the search engine being default. Google needs to keep Firefox alive because it is their sole competitor. If Firefox (Mozilla) goes down, Google can be accused for monopoly practices which is something they want to avoid.
If you are concerned about things like PWAs like I was, try it out anyway. PWAs require a bit more setup, but are a lot more flexible in Firefox. For example, PWAs with http connections have a huge banner in Chrome, and just an icon in Firefox. Everything I've noticed is that firefox is just as snappy as Chrome
I thought PWA’s didn’t work on Firefox. That’s good to know, because I’ve been using chromium specifically for PWA’s.
It's weird how lots of devs treat chrome as a standard, even though when developing I have a lot more issues with Chrome browsers than Firefox browsers
Firefox is my daily driver, but oooh how I miss native tab groups like they have on most chromium browsers right in the tab bar. Extensions like simple tab groups just hit differently and are inferior...
It would be nice to spend one day on Lemmy without seeing a half dozen posts telling me to switch to Firefox nor 100 comments on every post that's even vaguely browser-adjacent about how ever since they switched to Firefox their life has been nothing but joy and rainbows
The people who know what UBO or a firefox even is is the vast minority. Google could single handedly completely fuck over the free internet and a majority still wouldn't give a fuck as long as they get that sweet sweet one click convinence. The average consumer who plays on their phone and tappy taps on their laptop have zero clue how their devices actually work, or that there are more privacy friendly options. They just want their shit to work, privacy and daddy google violating their basic human rights be damned.
Oh and also some websites make it a huge pain in the ass if you aren't using chromium. I think its a bit of a conspiracy but could be wrong.
Also stop shilling firefox and start shilling Librewolf
uBlock Origin
Any numbers from Mozilla about increase in usage or anything?
I switched from Chrome and it was seamless. After a few weeks I didn't notice any negative difference.
Without this fiasco, i would've still use chrome. Yeah, now i use firefox.
It's a shame that Firefox is still heavily reliant on Google. It's not chrome but we really do need some competition in this space that doesn't feed the monster and is also not safari lol.
