Firefox @lemmy.ml

2y ago

I hate chromium

145 comments

It’s time to get rid of user-agent strings that declare anything other than desktop, mobile, or html version.
- 99% of sites only need to know your screen aspect ratio and maybe available input devices, can't think of a good reason to share anything else
  
  Knowing OS is useful for download links.
  
  Since we have CSS what would be the purpose of the server knowing the aspect ratio?
  
  as a front end web developer, I've found it useful to know what user agent is requesting a page in order to load conditional styling. For example, to compensate for Safari's god-awful outlines support (pre-version 16).
- The biggest offender is, surprisingly, cloudflare. They will straight up refuse to serve you any site if your user agent is not one of the mainstream ones. It's not even "find the traffic light to prove you're human", but a page basically saying "fuck you, go away".
  
  Well their job is to block weird bot-looking traffic...
- If I was a Firefox dev I'd start looking into building in user agent spoofing right into the browser.
  It already opens Facebook pages in a special isolated tab. They could have apple.com open in it's own special "safari" tab. I wonder if there's anything preventing them from doing that. I guess it could be bad because it would make their market share appear even smaller.
  
  The irony of Firerfox officially agent spoofing while everyone else uses some variant of "Mozilla" as their UAS is too much.
  
  I think user agent scrambling is part of privacy.resistFingerprinting, but it's a controversial feature and breaks a lot of webpages
  
  https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/
  kek
- User agents are not unfortunately not the only way to identify a browser, there are other ways to fingerprint a platform.
  
  JavaScript as it is today also need to be thrown in a trash of history. Website should not contain additional code. If someone wants to send me an app hacked on top of website rendering, it should be a popup asking me first if I want to run this.
- i don't want them knowing desktop or mobile either. we all have good enough phones now to handle a proper website on mobile -- mobile sites are fucking garbage.
  steve jobs during the original iphone keynote did a whole segment on how you could load the full rich widescreen NYT website and zoom in and out and look at that rich text rendering. apps are ass, mobile sites are ass.
  
  especially when they don't even have all of the features of the desktop site

Actually, the top one is the logo of the chromium browser engine, but the bottom one is not the logo of the Gecko browser engine. That's the logo of SpiderMonkey, Firefox's Javascript engine (Chromium uses V8).
This is the logo for Gecko:
- Firefox doesn't even use Gecko anymore, it uses Quantum. I think it still uses spidermonkey though.
  
  This is not correct.
  Firefox still uses Gecko for its HTML engine. Quantum was a project to incorporate some learnings from Servo, and other larger performance projects, into Firefox components, including Gecko.
  Just an aside, but Servo was never intended to replace Gecko, and was only intended to be a R&D project for improving some Firefox components. This was due to the long-tail of web compatibility that would be required to make Servo a suitable replacement for Gecko.

It's especially moronic that Cloudflare thinks everyone using Tor is trying to DDOS every site.
Do you know how fucking slow Tor is? You couldn't DDOS an Arduino with it.
- Probably because there are A LOT of people using that tor exit node that have visited that site recently. So, cloudflare sees it as a potential DDOS
- Onion sites get DDOS attacks constantly. That's why Dread has so many backup links.
- afaik, cloudflare has an option to disallow tor traffic. so the website owner decided they don't want tor
- Not only tor. Any user agent string that has no valid info is marked as not trusted/bot/gtfo

Do we, as an industry, have such short attention span, that we forgot how Microsoft abused their monopoly in the 1990s to force everyone to use Internet Explorer? Now that Google is doing the exact same thing, nobody seems to mind.
- Because the tech gigacorporations have literally spent the last three decades brainwashing us into accepting shit like that and even convincing us that it's better this way.
  
  Not better. No one thinks anything is better, just that we don't have a choice but to take what they serve.
- I remember using Netscape (my Google keyboard didn't know that word) before Firefox and SeaMonkey. I mostly used SeaMonkey to edit HTML and Firefox for my casual browsing.
- Those of us who had to develop websites and make them even vaguely functional in IE6 haven't forgotten.
  Dark times, those were.

I get the joke but I don't have any problems visiting websites. Neither with firefox nor with mull
- Go to https://business.apple.com/#/main/users
  Reset your user agent string. It will tell you that your browser is unsupported. Switch your user string to chrome and everything will function as expected.
  IT people probably run into more problems with non-chromium browsers.
  Edit: it has to be visited on a desktop regardless. ABM does not like mobile browsers.
  
  IT person here, Firefox works fine for everything that matters.
  
  What the hell is wrong with apple?
  That's not firefox' fault
  Btw: what's abm?
  
  Here is the problem with changing the user agent (IMO). It just re-enforces the idea that Chrome/Chromium browsers are the only browsers and therefore sites should just be coded for them. Which they are currently the most common for people to be using since even Microsoft gave up on IE and the original Edge. But the fact that Microsoft and Google are still the most dominate OS'es means that we are just seeing IE all over again. With sites being coded to only expect Chromium, then they are just set to not even allow them to be loaded by anything else.
  The fact that so many of the sites do in fact work with Firefox/Safari when the user agent is set to falsely report that it is Chrome/Chromium should be kind of concerning. Just leads to false narratives that other options are not worth using due to being bad products. Kind of like how in the US we are conditioned to believe that there are only two parties to choose from and all other options shouldn't be allowed or are never okay to support.
- My wife was recently in school. Almost all the services she used decline to render unless you're using Chrome.
- I 100% expect websites to soon start breaking their interface on Firefox. With Chromium blocking the best adblockers, they will be incentivized to nudge people to Chromium browsers.
  Didn’t we already see Youtube sneaking in a 5 second delay for Firefox users?
  
  Come on, don't you people read what other people write?
  
  There was a reddit post that claimed that, and it was debunked in that same reddit post. Some website made a "news" article about it, citing said reddit post. Bigger news orgs made articles about it citing that website.
  There are so many "news" websites that basically don't do any fact checking and use social media as their sources.
  My other pet peeve around social media "journalism" is when someone writes an article about a hot take on a political topic and their source is some tweet with like 2 likes and retweet. Like, that's not a radical opinion many people share, stop making it seem like this is a common sentiment amongst the left/right.
- But I did have issues with some Web SDRs on http://www.websdr.org/ when using Chromium-based browsers
  And I wasn't the only one, looking at F.A.Q.:
  Q: I'm using Chrome and don't hear audio (on some sites)!
  A: Since version 71, Chrome does not allow every website to start playing audio, in order to stop annoying advertisements. Chrome tries to guess whether you want audio or not, but doesn't always get it right. On some WebSDR sites, you'll get an "audio start" button, on some you don't.
  If you don't get audio, try the following:
  At the top right, click the 4 vertical dots, and then Settings.
  At the bottom, click Advanced.
  Under "Privacy and security," click Site settings.
  Select "Sound"
  Select "Add" and enter "http://*"
  ^(thanks ^to ^K9GL ^for ^these ^{instructions)}
  Note that the above effectively disables Chrome's "autoplay" policy for all http sites.
  ^Although ^stopping ^automatic ^sound ^from ^{advertisements} ^is ^a ^noble ^idea, ^I ^think ^Chrome's ^autoplay ^policy ^is ^{fundamentally} ^wrong. ^Instead ^of ^trying ^to ^guess ^what ^the ^user ^wants, ^the ^browser ^should ^simply ^ask ^the ^user ^whether ^he/she ^wants ^to ^allow ^the ^page ^to ^play ^sound ^(and ^remember ^that ^for ^later ^visits, ^of ^course).
  
  😅😂
- The only think I can't do in FF is flash an esp32. It's the only reason I have chrome installed.
  
  There are multiple dedicated ESP32 flashing programs available for most operating systems, there should be no reason to use any web browser to flash a microcontroller.
  The fact this even needs to be said says a lot about modern web browsers, and software development in general.
- redmedical will force me to open the rotting corpse of edge everytime i try to enter a meeting.
  
  Would MSEdgeRedirect help with that?

I use lynx btw.
- Now that's a name I haven't heard in ages.
  
  Who's Jocker Black and why do you recognise him?

my company give choice to use Firefox and Chrome and it is mandatory to install those browsers on those computers. But, 95% use Chrome.
- My company has basically forced us to use Chrome. It’s mentioned repeatedly throughout our training period.
  I haven’t tried Firefox at work yet though but I’m sure it’ll work just fine.

It's "how it feels" or "what it feels like", not "how it feels like"
- Thank you! Also "how it looks" and "what it looks like". I see people messing those up all the time
- 🥸🥸🥸🥸

Brave isn't doing much better with captchas lately due to having adblocking built in, google is just on a crusade against anyone blocking stuff.

It's so absurd. It feels like half of the websites out there actively don't want me to visit them.
- I don't have any problems using Firefox every day on every website that I need. I use it on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android.
  The only browser that I actually have problems with websites regularly on is Safari on my Mac.
  
  within the last couple days my Firefox browser has stopped working. It used to be my default, but now whenever I call on Firefox the screen just comes up black. But guess what? Chrome works fine. they're forcing me to use Chrome now 😡

evergreen article https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/4/16805216/google-chrome-only-sites-internet-explorer-6-web-standards

What is the second browser from the bottom on the right?
- Librewolf
- As the other two said, Librewolf. It's basically a very privacy-focused fork of Firefox, where just about all privacy settings are on by default.
- @bobo @SoccerGod
  Now that is driving me crazy, it looks so familiar, but I just can't place it.👿
  Found it!
  It's Librewolf, a Firefox fork.
  https://librewolf.net
- Amarok https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amarok_(software)
  
  Haha now that you mention it, they do have similar logos.

Duck duck go?
- Their browser on Android relies on Chromium, on Windows it uses Edge's webview thingy and on macOS Safari afaik
  
  I see

I don't know which websites do that browser discrimination.
- Youtube
  
  I don't have any problem with YouTube, and I don't even see any ad. Can you send links? Because the last rumor was just a 5 timeout delay for ad blockers users, not specially for Firefox users.
- Pornhub
  
  I suppose you are just trolling. If not, send any links with evidences please.
- Sunroom

What's the problem with Firefox? Certainly can't be the speed or ram usage.
- YouTube intentionally slows down on non-chrome browsers
  
  The image says "visiting websites", not "YouTube". And Google does this for several years already, not just since 2023. The new 5 second delay is also happening in Chromium based browsers if you use an adblocker, it just isn't immediately rolling out to everyone yet. See A/B testing methodology.
  
  Are they doing this for everyone? I’ve seen all the posts about it but haven’t had any issues myself. I’m using Firefox and uBlock
- There's no problem with Firefox. The problem is with managers of websites. Because Chromium-based browsers combined account for something like over 90% of global browser market share currently (source: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share), many sites decide to just throw any non-Chromium browser users overboard. The whole thing is quite ridiculous. It makes no sense that Firefox has such a low market share either.
  
  Firefox is better, but it’s no surprise it isn’t mainstream.
  1- A lot of businesses default to Chrome or Edge on their machines. Even if individual employees want to change it’s not like they have the ability to do it. Thats a huge amount of locked in Chromium traffic.
  2- The vast majority of personal users are not tech conscious. Consider that only about 1/4 of people use ad-blockers. If the majority of people don’t bother installing ad-blockers why would people think they would install a new browser that has fewer immediately obvious benefits?
  Online tech discussions have a tendency to vastly over estimate the tech savvy, and the expectations of most users. Just because you or I configure our computer experience, and think it’s a simple exercise doesn’t reflect most people who leave everything on default settings and simply live with whatever is thrown at them. This is just like the discussion on Netflix cracking down on account sharing, techies predicted a massive wave of piracy without understanding that most people don’t know how to, and are unwilling to learn how to pirate.
- it's too privacy focused, independent, and earnest at the moment

Is that the logo for Amarok?
- No librewolf, but I totally do see the Amarok confusion lol
- Amarok is what converted me to Linux Desktop, especially the iPod support in 2008. For me that was the year of the Linux Desktop.

KHTML

Edge is not an acceptable browser, wtf?
- Its Chrome
- The meme is about how chromium has monopolized the browser market, and Edge is chromium.

145 comments