this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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I use Firefox. If I’m on the web and a site does not work with Firefox, I leave that site.
Do they think somehow people like me will change our minds? And more to the point, do they think website authors will want to limit their own audience for the benefit of some company?
Unless I’m misunderstanding this, maybe I need an ELI5
People like you and me are unfortunately a small minority. Most people go along with it, so they set about steamrolling over us through coercion or just not doing business with us
Will you change your bank when it refuses to work with Firefox? What if most other banks do the same?
This is how things are in Android now – online banking, online games and even subscription media services are mostly unavailable to those who would like to use non-official OS.
Many websites already refuse to work with anything not-chrome-based – so website authors often don't care.
Banks see that as 'security', so they are ok with 'losing' a small percentage of customers who want 'insecure' devices. In fact they would hardly lose anything, as their customers usually depend more on the bank, than the bank on any particular customer.
For media providers, that is another 'anti-piracy' measure (DRM) – they will also happily sacrifice Linux users, as insignificant fraction of users, probably less then 'actual pirates' on Windows or Mac. Netflix already won't stream in high quality to Firefox on Linux.
For online game providers this will be easy anti-cheat measure – they will also not care about that insignificant fraction of user.
Each of those service providers would loose maybe 5% of their user base (probably less… as most users would eventually accommodate), but the affected users would use major number of services they care about.
I see many people on Lenny say “blah blah doesn’t work on Firefox” and have yet to see an example. I’ve been using Firefox since the early or mid 2000s (started when they added extensions) and I SCARCELY have had issues. Only one I can remember, a credit card web site like 11 years ago.
After a big Firefox update last year, Chase kept telling me they wouldn't allow acces via "outdated" web browsers, then redirected me to download another browser which included Firefox. This went on for several months until Chase finally updated themselves. During that time, if I wanted to access my account I had to use a different browser.
Yes, this was temporary, but another issue I have is Firefox on my Samsung phone. I am not tech savvy; I do my best to protect myself, but past the basic protections I am overwhelmed.
I would LOVE to use Firefox on my phone instead of Chrome, but every time I have tried, Firefox has been slow as fuck as compared to Chrome; slow enough to be practically unusable. I never found a solution and ended up going back to chrome while trying to adjust all my phone/browser settings to request as much respect and privacy as possible.
YIs that factoring in using ublock origin on mobile Firefox? Because surely that speeds things up?
For what it's worth, I've been ride or die for Firefox, and I use Chase's online banking for years and it never blocked me. I'm not sure what caused the issue for you, but I don't think that was the typical experience
Most likely user error. I’ve been doing tech support for nearly 30 years and 99% of the time when something “doesn’t work” or is “broken,” it’s user error. 99.9% not to suggest all users are stupid, sometimes it’s not an easy fix, not an obvious issue, but nevertheless, the tech works perfectly when used properly and maintained.
I, too, have been using Firefox for decades and can think of no sites that have any problem other than very very old sites I used that were IE-only, built with Frontpage, and that was also early 2000-ish. I think most of the complaints about Firefox are nonsense and explainable as user based problems rather than tech.
Yeah. I use Firefox too, and when a site doesn’t work, I open it in chromium
In 20 years I haven’t had a website not work in Firefox. With the exception of some that had nothing to do with compatibility and was because of being stuck committed to frontpage or some shit where it’s easy for a moron to do but at the cost of being married to MS applications. Whole other story.
Apple sold this feature as an alternative to captchas.
In order to sign up for Lemmy, I had to pass a captcha check to prove I'm human. Now that bots can trivially be better than any human at captchas we have to find something else. Is attestation a good option? We can debate that, but it's definitely on the table. And I expect Firefox will implement it (even if only via a plugin) if it becomes widely adopted.