Oh no uses Firefox Anyway…
Google copying mrkrabs lol
I use chromium for one thing, and it’s casting live sports to my Chromecast. My plans to implement a HTPC have just been expedited.
I’m warning Google that Google Chrome may soon be disabled on my devices.
Until you do more than warn they don’t care.
Linux Phones and Degoogled Phones surge in response.
It already is on mine, no trace of chromium or it’s forks.
Discord, slack, bitwarden, steam, Microsoft teams, visual studio code, balena etcher . Anyone else know of any electron apps or heavily modified version of chrome?😄
Discord bitwarden steam and teams all work fine for me in ff, i don’t use the others
https://github.com/gamingdoom/datcord
Works like a charm.
Teams has switched to Microsoft’s own edition of the same concept, “Edge WebView2”. Now that Edge is just being Chrome wearing a rubber Scooby Doo mask, I don’t expect the differences are vast.
Another fun iteration is Plex’s desktop client, which uses QtWebEngine… however surprise! still the Chromium engine underneath.
Signal’s desktop app is plain old Electron though.
Of the ones on your list, worth noting that Discord and Slack work fine with FirefoxPWA.
Holy shit I had not heard of Firefox PWA but I will use the shit out of this
I use the shit out of Firefox PWA. I just wish Mozilla would get off their asses and make it work out of the box vs having to install a third party app.
I do wish there were more native apps but alternatives to electron is always a good thing in my book.
Except for Microsoft, Microsoft can stop pretending their solution is demonstrably different from electron and chromium.
Unfortunately for work I may have no choice:-(. Several of our daily work products I’ve tried on Firefox without success. Those also don’t have ads.
I wish there were better alternatives. I may try out LibreWolf but I could not imagine it somehow being easier, though with enough effort put in the end result may be all that matters. Until the first update (possibly forced on the server end even if I don’t on mine) that breaks everything and I cannot do my work for the day, in which case I will absolutely go crawling back to Chrome, bc they have us by the short hairs there.:-(
I went through the same thing with MSIE. Corporate mandates and stuff. Businesses are sometimes wrong.
No, they are always right! (Especially when they are wrong…)
My company just plain old won’t install Firefox without a good reason.
I’m stuck using chrome or edge. Once the ad block stops working on chrome, I move over.
I really hate the corporate IT.
I was at a job that was slowly transitioning from a medium sized company to a larger one, initially we were allowed just install and use whatever on our machines, but gradually IT started implementing policies where if we wanted to add something it had to go through a request system and usually it would be denied.
As a software developer this was just infuriating, it would hold up work, force us to use shitty software (like Chrome and Edge) and there would often be fuck ups where installing a new version of software would require removal of the old one and installation of a new one - which would trigger the approval process again.
Like - I get it - some people can’t be trusted, but we were some of the key devs for the companies product, we know what we’re doing.
I was rather happy to leave that part of the company behind when I left.
On my work computer I don’t have admin rights but still I could install Firefox with no problems. It installed itself for local user only.
My company just plain old won’t install Firefox without a good reason.
If you have other potential employers in mind, the IT environment at your current employer and other potential employers is maybe one factor to keep in mind in making decisions as to where to work.
There are some IT policies that are no-gos for me at potential employers. I ask during the interview process.
Use chrome only where you need it.
What pisses me off is how many websites don’t work right with Firefox now. There’s been several times where I’ve had issues with a site functioning on Firefox and had to switch to a chromium browser.
I was recently trying to add tickets from ticketbastard to Google wallet to be able to use them offline. I have chrome disabled on my phone. Surprise surprise it doesn’t work with any other browser except chrome. The ticketbastard app just throws an error and nothing happens. Took me a lot of searching to realize it was because chrome was disabled.
I read that most sites work just fine if you spoof your user agent to windows and standard chrome
That’s what I do and I haven’t had a problem since.
This breaks any site that uses CloudFlare’s Turnstile for me. It will loop forever and never let me through if my user agent is set to Chrome.
Such as?
The only problem I run into is sites that use Bluetooth or USB APIs to talk to a local device. Both Firefox and Safari don’t implement them due to security concerns.
I see this FUD all the time but nobody ever gives examples. Can you point to some specific sites that don’t work with Firefox?
Start page
Duolingo
Dev tools were borked on FF for me. Entire tab was blank
It’s not FUD but there’s usually more to it than just “Firefox”. Usually has something to do with security plugins. There are sites that do not work properly with Ublock or Noscript installed, even when you turn them off for the site. I’ve experienced it many, many times. It happens to me most often ordering food, because a lot of local restaurants sites are janky as fuck, but I’ve also had issues with more well known sites. Southwest airlines has been problematic for a couple years now. My credit union also had issues with parts of their online banking app, but that thankfully got fixed after a year or two.
TL;DR - it’s a real thing.
TradingView
The payment provider my local council uses doesn’t work on Firefox, or Safari. I have to use shitty chrome on my phone. I refuse to install it on my computer.
Report it on https://webcompat.com/
I was worried about this when I originally switched from Chrome to Firefox earlier this year but I can honestly say I haven’t found a single site that I personally use that I had to go back to Chrome for. Any issues I had with any site were related to ad blocking using uBlock or DNS based blocking I also do.
It happens to me with some payments stores. Always need to go back to chromium based pos browser
dialog boxes will just fuck off. I’ve never gotten webRTC to work properly, though that might be configuration skill issues, and or webRTC implementation skill issues, since it seems to only work on browser, not across two different ones.
I’ve seen sites just load asinine layouts, borked kerning, completely fucked text handling. Just goofy shit.
In some cases i’ve seen sites have no download buttons on firefox. I don’t know why, it’s confused me a few times though.
T-mobile would be the last specific one. I couldn’t navigate to certain pages within to make plan adjustments.
The local Uber eats clone here has the submit order button off screen. Reuters on Android sometimes has the top bar of the webpage shift down over the content. A video conferencing site used by my medical provider won’t connect the video. The 3rd party comment section on our local news site sometimes lays out the controls off screen. The Lemmy PWA on Android used to crash on startup (recently fixed yay!!)
FF is my daily driver and 99% of things work fine, but I’ve definitely found a few sites where they clearly didn’t test it. I still have Chrome installed for those rare occasions I need it.
And I don’t even necessarily blame Firefox for this. I used to do web dev back in the day and I remember making my shit work across multiple browsers. Maybe Firefox is doing it right and Chrome is doing it wrong, but everybody targeted Chrome because it has a zillion percent of the market.
I have a friend who sends me tiktoks that refuse to load with firefox on my phone. I consider it a blessing
Libredirect extension will redirect to public proxitok instances so you could watch them without going to tiktoks site directly
proxitok is such a good name holy shit
I only have Chrome installed for the rare occasion where a site doesn’t work in Firefox. I feel like we’ve gone a bit backwards as of lately in building websites that are browser agnostic.
I just read about this extension today. Seems interesting. The description says It’s supposedly doing more than just switching the UA.
Does this happen in you work environment or on your private managed system? I raise this question because I started to realize that governing firefox apparently is a hard task. Never did I experience a faulty site on my private desktop devices but on my work stations. Im currently running firefox 115.13.0esr.
My home system. I’m not doing any extra security on it, either.
You shouldn’t be required to do so. You also neglected my presumption. Thank you for replying.
Yeah, we saw this coming. When Manifest v3 first talked about.
Google an ad company are killing ab blockers. Yeah, that sounds right.
killing ab blockers
I might finally get a six-pack!
🖕
I rlly hate how some sites don’t work on Firefox
The more people use Firefox, the more web devs will be forced to ensure their website works on Firefox.
True
I’m showing my age, but back when IE was basically the only browser and Firefox (Firebird back then) launched, people often lamented that things didn’t work in Firefox. The solution? People used Firefox and web developers were forced to make their shit work in Firefox. When Chrome came out, suddenly we had three real options and the way to make everything work? Open Standards.
Now, Chrome is in the position IE was back before Firefox came around. How ever will we make sure things work in Firefox??? Use Firefox. If enough people dump Google’s malware browser, the web has to go back to supporting multiple browsers through open standards.
Real
Thing is Google’s influence on Firefox is making it a worse company and browser as AI and privacy invading features take over.
Have you reported issues for them? It’s in the menu somewhere. If Mozilla get a lot of reports for particular sites, they reach out to the webmaster and try to work with them to improve Firefox support - usually by removing proprietary Chrome-only features or by removing reliance on Chrome bugs that don’t exist in Firefox.
You can also report the issue at https://webcompat.com/, just search to see if it’s already been reported first.
You can do that?
Yeah. Just double-checked on my computer. Open the menu then click “Report broken site” near the bottom.
Same. For me, the big one’s my bank that requires its users to use Chrome, else it won’t let you log in. I got around this by using an agent-switcher extension in Firefox.
User agent switcher. I have zero issues since using it.
Gonna try later
Let this be my warning to Google that I will never go back to their browser when they do. Challas! ✌️
I reckon they’re absolutely shaking with fear by your warning.
I am user. Hear me roar!
Firefox my beloved.
Yeah I’m using Fennec, which doesn’t have that. But as long as it’s a flick of a switch to disable, I don’t really mind. Still a million times better than manifest v3.
If you use a DNS solutions you can block all the telemetry shit. Frankly FF has been phoning home in a lot of undesirable ways for many years even before this, like most browsers.
Firefox is no longer an adversary to Google for the browser market, if it ever was. FF has become a vassal of Google that with its tyranny is dictating the course of the internet, such as WEI that as far as I know it was abandoned at least for now.
🧐
Not entirely true.
You’re overreacting. Firefox knows their users. I am a huge “stan” for Firefox, but I will delete it like a time traveller if they make it impossible to ignore ads. I will salt the earth and poop on Firefox’s grave and actively avoid it everywhere… However. If I’m wrong, there will be a Next Thing…
Saying this about any corporation’s product is guaranteed not to age well.
Mmm mmm mmm, Bill Cosby tells me to love my puddin’ pops!
…i feel sleepy…
I’m grateful for FF, but they also annoy me at times. Just little stuff probably not worth bitching about in detail. But also a peek at the potential for problems that you’re talking about.
So of course I’ll bitch about it.
I call it the “stop whatever you think you’d rather do right now and pay attention to our product” type shit.
Imagine you have a combination wrench and whenever you take it out of the toolbox it starts yammering at you about how great of a wrench it is and all if its shiny features. Fucking ridiculous, right?
So why do we tolerate software that does that?
Way too much software does this pushy shit. Just stay outta my face and do your actual job, software.
We’re so fucking used to ads we don’t even always realize we’re getting pushed propaganda
Because people have the attention span of a goldfish and if you aren’t reminding them every 5 seconds of the features they have available they’ll forget they do in fact use them and then complain to support because they can’t spend 5 seconds on the help page.
I say this, not in defense of mozilla, but in frustration at having to deal daily with these kinds of issues. You can put giant screen-size arrows on where to go / what single “do the thing” button to press and people will still forget 5 seconds later.
Good point. That’s true, there is definitely that side of it. I think what you’re talking about is less obnoxious than the stuff that feels forced and make-the-boss-happy promotional. Push notifcations for no reason, etc. It’s a spectrum from necessary to uneccessary, and there’s too much of the latter IMO.
Firefox is a foundation, not a corporation. And I’m already using Fennec instead of the official release.
No. Firefox is a product. Mozilla is a corporation AND a foundation.
Yeah, it’s strange just how readily the blinders go up wherever Mozilla is concerned. They’re a corp, just like any other; if they had the money and leverage, they’d be just as aggressive as Google. Have people already forgotten that time they laid off 200+ employees and then gave all the execs bonuses?
But they haven’t threatened to undercut ad blocking yet, so as a comparison they are better.
Absolutely, but Mozilla is pretty much owned by Google anyway, and falling in love with these companies as wide eyed fanboys never looks good when they eventually turn.
I wouldn’t say “owned”, but the rest… yeah:-(
Who provides the majority of their funding?
Anyone else been having issues of not being able to load YouTube videos past the first few seconds on Firefox using ublock? I couldn’t find any recent information online. I don’t know if this is part of the war on ad blockers, or unrelated.
It’s been a side effect of the server side ads apparently, but reloading the page fixes it for me.
I watched several videos today on Firefox with ublock origin and no issues. Haven’t run into issues with ads yet.
Yeah, yesterday. I just kept refreshing. FF + unlock + not signed in, seems to trigger it
Proprietary software sucks, use an open source browser like Librewolf.
Chromium is technically open source, but yeah, screw Google chrome
I’m aware, however Chromium (or rather Ungoogled Chromium) should only be used if a website doesn’t work on a Firefox based browser.
What im scared if of publishers taking this as a reason to simply start banning Firefox and other browsers.
An ecom site decides to block 5% of web traffic and potential sales?
Now tell the marketing team you are turning away 1 in 20 potential customers because (well, not really sure why) and see what they have to say.
Yeah but can’t you just get a thing that tells things that you’re using chrome when you’re not
It takes more than changing your user agent to msk which browser you use. It’s trivial to know which browser you’re really using if they really want.
Yeah I’ve got an extension for it, it just changes the user-agent string.
I use it on YouTube because for some totally not suspicious reason Firefox won’t play videos but when I spoof it to Chrome everything works fine.
I’ve noticed significant YouTube quality degradation when using Firefox, but no issues with Chrome.
Got a link for the extension by any chance?
User-agent is being deprecated, so it won’t work forever.
Also note that if people keep their UA as Chrome permanently, hit counters will count them as Chrome users, and the number of Firefox users will go down.
What is that relevant to? Genuinely curious.
The comment I replied to was mentioning user-agent. User-agent is being deprecated (replaced by client hints) so changing the user agent will eventually stop working.
At the moment, the stats for browser usage rely on user agent as recorded by stats software used by various sites, so if you make Firefox pretend to be Chrome, you’ll be contributing to the Firefox user percentage going down.
Right but why is that relevant? What good or bad does a number going down do? If Firefox wanted to keep track they could just count the number of downloads right?
The issue is that sites will have even less reason to support Firefox if the number of people using Firefox goes down.
Not always doable as they could be relying on non-standard features that are only in Chrome.
Not exactly the same thing, but my employer requires us to use Chrome for all internal stuff, as they’re using Chrome Enterprise Premium as part of their endpoint security solution, and of of course that only works in Chrome.
There’s already plenty of business web apps that require chrome. I specifically use a business focused web app that not only requires Chrome, but ONLY CHROME ITSELF and no chromium derivatives. That’s the first time I’ve come across that. I had previously seen chrome requirements, but they worked just fine on ungoogled chromium. Not this one, nope. Regular Google Chrome and nothing else. wtf is that garbage.
You can get past these with a user agent, lying about which browser it is. However, they aren’t testing for other browsers, so their site maybe as buggy as hell. As yet Firefox doesn’t do a WINE and match Chrome, bug for bug, so sites work as intended. Google have cause IE6’s return.
It was indeed buggy, which was when I reached out to support. They immediately asked if I was using not Google Chrome itself, but a Chromium offshoot like Brave or Vivaldi. I was using ungoogled chromium, so they told me it won’t work. I switched to regular google chrome and it worked great. I wonder what on earth they’re using that’s part of Google Chrome that makes it work and not part of any other chromium projects.
I’ll just side load it. Fuck you Google
The one and only thing keeping me on Chrome… well, Ungoogled Chromium… is the webassembly performance which is just abysmal in comparison on Firefox, sadly.
meanwhile firefox lists it as recommended and also lets you use it on firefox mobile.
Almost as if a browser company that’s not also an advertising company has no reason to fight ad blockers.
I’ve got some bad news for you. Mozilla bought an ad company.
i mean they bought a privacy preserving ad company to offer an alternative for companies to google, which is what they should be doing.
because like it or not people depend on ada for their sites.
And my nerd bros try to get me to donate
You can always fork firefox. People used to use website not requiring javascript at all and it worked well. Some people still use even w3m f.e. when graphics card driver goes bad after update and they need to watch some docs on the internet. Most current browser have most features you would ever need
You can always fork firefox
You could fork Chromium too.
Forking is indeed the way forward when Mozilla loses its way a little more. For myself, I switched to Librewolf about 6 months ago, along with replacing Thunderbird with Betterbird after using it since the Phoenix days.
I cannot remember what prompted the move to Librewolf, it may have been the AI stuff they were pushing at the time, or possibly the update that forced the tabs into my titlebar without having to go into about:config to fix it. Or the fact that Firefox was constantly pushing me to sign up for an account. There were quite a few gripes that added up over time lol
Betterbird restored some removed things I liked pre-supernova as well as a native systray icon under Linux and that was enough motivation to make the switch.
It is time for a new browser to enter the market. Either Ladybird or something built with Servo seems likely.
It has made mobile browsing usable again for me.
Same. Firefox Mobile had been a laggy mess when I used it a few years ago, but a combination of some really aggressive advertising and the announcement of manifest v3 caused me to give it another shot about a year ago. It’s a dramatic improvement in phone browsing.
Glad I have firefox as well but also looking forward to a cool new project called Ladybird. https://ladybird.org
Not sure if its the right one but glad there are more projects out there trying to jump into the game. (I know extensions are a long way off for it but i see it as hope.)
Also please consider running pihole or adguard home. Or any other full home DNS add blocker. It will help.
Looks like what I’d want to use, but to reach broad support it needs a Windows client as well.
if it’s* the right one
Ladybird looks great! Very much looking forward to an alpha linux release so I can use it and give all kind of feedback.
