How common is this that they would even care about it anyways? I've run Firefox exclusively for the last 2 decades and have never once run into a site that told me I needed to switch to Chromium for compatibility.
How common is this that they would even care about it anyways? I've run Firefox exclusively for the last 2 decades and have never once run into a site that told me I needed to switch to Chromium for compatibility.
In the past Vivaldi used their own user agent string and they ran into a bunch of issues. And they are a chrome derivative! They had to default to the chrome user agent. Here are the examples they cite in their announcement of the decision:
"On Google.com if you present a Vivaldi user agent and arrive via a redirect, the search text box will be misaligned
On Google Docs if you present a Vivaldi user agent you will receive a warning
On Facebook’s WhatsApp web interface if you present a Vivaldi user agent, you cannot enter the site and are advised to switch to one of our competitors
On Microsoft Teams (chat and collaboration website), presenting a Vivaldi user agent will stop you from being able to use the website
On Netflix, presenting a Vivaldi user agent results in a suggestion to install Silverlight to play videos… yes… really… Silverlight!"
(https://vivaldi.com/blog/user-agent-changes/)
When these mega-companies block new competitors it really ought to be seen as collusion. Google, Facebook, and Microsoft certainly have the resources to test and approve the occasional new browser.
They don’t even have the resources to test the most common browsers on every scenario of every page of every application, let alone fix every issue such testing would find.
Common enough that Mozilla has full-time engineers working on triaging compatibility issues, so they can either be fixed in Firefox or reported to webmasters. Here are the reports they get: https://webcompat.com/issues
A lot of systems seem to silently fail on Firefox - my broadband supplier's website failed at the last step of the onboarding process. I managed to get charged for installation (connection by the network operator, UK) twice, have onboarding emails sent, but not have the appointment in my account.
Used Edge, went through completely.
Can't guarantee it was Firefox/browser issues. But this is not that uncommon an occurrence.
I suspect it is the bank who are at fault.
Just today Ryanair wouldnt let me in on Firefox. 403 with a cloudflare error.
But on chrome it went through without a hitch.
I’ve been using Firefox for 20 years, and Ryanair for 10, I’ve never had to switch browser for it. My last flight was 2 weeks ago
I've never had one tell me; they just don't work, or they get stuck in a loop until they consume all my RAM and the gecko engine crashes. That is, assuming they even show me the page, instead of telling me to go away because they they think I'm a bot.
A few years ago I was maintaining the website for a major brand whose products you probably use. To my horror the website did not support Firefox. I gave them a very minimal estimate on what it would cost to support Firefox along with the estimated percentage of Firefox users in their target market. They were not interested.
Best to avoid talking percentages, talk the specific cost to fix the bugs vs the specific amount of lost profit.
YouTube is crippled in Firefox, has been for years. It doesn’t force you to use Chrome, just a little nudge
How so? I use Firefox for all leisure activities, including extensive YouTube usage, and have never noticed any issue. I’m running uBlock Origin and Sponsor Block. I’m logged into a dedicated Google account I made solely for browsing YouTube (so I can keep the viewing history without linking it too obviously to my main Google account).
In what way is it crippled?
Takes forever to load anything
Your experience may be different, but every time I hit the Cloudflare "checking if your connection is secure" turnstyle, it goes into an infinite loop on Firefox. It's the only reason I still have Chrome on any personal device. It may be tracker and privacy settings rather than just Firefox on its own, but I'm not going to run combinatorial experiments to figure out exactly what Cloudflare is looking for, especially since it's probably a moving target.
And honestly, I've only ever once encountered a website that required Widevine. And that site was a media site. So if you don't watch DRMed movies in your browser then you don't need Widevine in my experience.
I've found widewine a blessing because news sites that autoplay trash seem to be the only group that uses it (other than paid media platforms like Netflix and Spotify).
The blessing is I can just reject it and it blocks all their videos from playing/downloading.
I actually ran into such issues, in particular with commercial websits. Some browsers I use do not work for my online transactions for instance - annoyingly the local bank I use for logging into my account as well. It is basically the bank hijacking my money and forcing me into using a specific browser (or, at the least, very few; they improved compatibility a bit in the last years, but there were more issues in the past here). It is just a reality of the situation that some websites don't work well on certain browsers.
Why don't you consider switching banks? In 2008 I had to switch bank for exactly this reason.
I switched bank in 2021 and it was hard. No bank advertises "we do compliant chip tan" and no bank advertises "we do not buy an app framework that scans for customs roms".
Switching banks is hard, because all of them suck, are underdocumented and a moving target.