8 ms·

I remember that in the very early days of Firefox, some websites would refuse to serve pages to anything that wasn't Internet Explorer. I did not see the point

I remember that in the very early days of Firefox, some websites would refuse to serve pages to anything that wasn't Internet Explorer. I did not see the point to that and I was not amused. Firefox didn't have a problem displaying those pages, so I had to install a plugin so that Firefox could pretend to be Internet Explorer so that I could just see the web page. I'm glad those days are over.

bzbarsky 9y ago
And in the newest installment, https://github.com/google/closure-library/issues/883 https://github.com/google/closure-library/issues/883 is UA-sniffing that is now preventing Firefox from aligning with all other browsers on whether arrow keys fire keypress events, which causes _other_ Google things, which assume they don't, to break. Also Closure assumes that only things with "WebKit" in their UA might be running on a mobile device and that all browsers fall into the WebKit/IE/Edge/Gecko buckets (and will fail badly if a browser does not). And this is just one library.
bluedino 9y ago
In the days of Netscape, pages would tell IE users to "get a real browser"
- irrational 9y ago
  Aren't we still saying this?
- Benjamin_Dobell 9y ago
  IE 7 Tax https://www.kogan.com/au/blog/new-internet-explorer-7-tax/ https://www.kogan.com/au/blog/new-internet-explorer-7-tax/
  - gruez 9y ago
    I doubt that ever paid for itself in development cost vs "tax" collected. (yes i know it's probably a joke)
craigds 9y ago
Not quite over. These days I can't view my facebook messages on Firefox for Android without hacking my user agent to pretend to be Android 4. I'm happy that it's just a few irresponsible sites though. It used to be half the web.
- chadcatlett 9y ago
  Sadly I do something similar for Amazon Music. I don't have the bundled flash player in Chrome enabled and it won't use web based drm on Linux browsers, so I use a user agent extension that tells their site I'm on Windows and it works fine.
- mehrdadn 9y ago
  That's an entirely different issue I think? Do you have a different experience with Chrome?
- themarkn 9y ago
  Even at mbasic.facebook.com? This is how I do all my messaging these days.
  - simooooo 9y ago
    Just yesterday I was on the normal mobile site laughing at how it took 15+ seconds to load stuff. This is great.
  - froindt 9y ago
    I hate Facebook so much for this. Their apps are beyond bloated and track far more than I'm interested in sharing. It used to be no issue at all to send messages. But suddenly it's not possible to send a message without going to a clunky version of Facebook.
    - themarkn 9y ago
      My objections are not with Facebook really. I'm willing to make the tradeoffs that are required to participate in Facebook. I wish it were better, but Facebook is responding to incentives and is rewarded for its actions, so it's hard for me to hate them, or expect moral virtuousness. Facebook is just doing what capitalism tells it is ok. Hate for Facebook is wasted energy. We have to stop rewarding the behaviors that we don't wish to see repeated.
bowlich 9y ago
I ran into a site last year that refused to work if the browser reported the OS to be Linux. Worked fine with it spoofed.
disordinary 9y ago
One of the issues was that companies that targeted IE often developed their sites using vbscript rather than jscript, therefore they would not be compatible without a re-write. Now days there's plenty of Chrome only web apps.
- bigger_cheese 9y ago
  Netflix used to refuse to run in Firefox I had to install Chrome on my laptop just to visit one site - incredibly frustrating.
  - syshum 9y ago
    That was back in the days when Mozilla has a backbone and was standing up for users even though users were bitching Then they caved and now we have DRM in the standard.. sad days
    - mynameisvlad 9y ago
      > even though users were bitching > Then they caved Some people call that "responding to user feedback". It sucks that you don't agree with their decision, but trying to paint Mozilla in a bad light for listening to their users' demands is preposterous.
      - syshum 9y ago
        I am painting Mozilla in a bad light for Betraying the The Mozilla Manifesto .. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/details/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/details/
        mynameisvlad 9y ago
        Yes. And I am saying that it's preposterous because they did what any organization (and I mean any, this applies to companies, nonprofits, governments, etc) should be doing -- listening to their users. Their beliefs are great and all, but at the end of the day they are providing a product for the end user, so if their users are "bitching" that they want Netflix and other EME services available on Firefox, then the right choice is to make the user happy if possible.
InclinedPlane 9y ago
In those days each browser had their own quirky idea of how to render a website (even Firefox). None of which was really "right" but how IE did it was the de facto standard because IE had 90+% marketshare. If you had a site that could potentially be "broken" if the layout didn't render correctly the the easiest thing to do was to test that it worked how you wanted it to in IE and then add a note telling people it might be broken in other browsers (or not serve to them). It wasn't until after people really started focusing on standards compliance and cross-browser compatible frameworks that things got better. The "acid tests" for html/css/js standards compliance helped establish how far along the various browsers were at the time. Most browsers were absolutely terrible in that era, it wasn't until Chrome hit the scene and webkit started taking off that standards compliance started to become a big deal. Eventually most major browsers had decent or good standards compliance in their rendering and things like jQuery helped smooth over the rough spots of differences in browser behavior.
clouddrover 9y ago
> I'm glad those days are over. Those days aren't over yet. Google Earth says "Google Chrome is required to run the new Google Earth" or "Oh no! Google Earth isn't supported by your browser yet" if you try to use another browser: https://www.google.com/earth/ https://www.google.com/earth/
- simooooo 9y ago
  I'm sure they are in no rush to fix it either
- m-p-3 9y ago
  Or trying to access the web-based version of Remote Desktop in something else than Google Chrome https://remotedesktop.google.com/access https://remotedesktop.google.com/access But switching the user-agent isn't enough in other browsers, Google must be using some fuckery in the background.
  - 220V_USKettle 9y ago
    Or using the web version of Slack to make a call or screenshare.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - MertsA 9y ago
    Switching the user agent isn't enough because it's not blindly relying on the user agent. It's actually doing feature detection so if your browser doesn't support whatever features used for remote desktop it'll give you an error message without relying on whitelisting a particular browser. This is exactly how web applications that need to use non-universal features should work, sure, look at the user agent for blacklisted browsers but use feature detection for what you can so that a new web browser that supports it will work without needing to modify the whitelisted user agents.
- Ajedi32 9y ago
  At least that's not just because of a user agent string. Firefox doesn't support Native Client, and Google hasn't finished rewriting Earth in WASM yet: https://medium.com/google-earth/earth-on-web-the-road-to-cross-browser-7338e0f46278 https://medium.com/google-earth/earth-on-web-the-road-to-cro...
cozzyd 9y ago
Sometimes, in my up-to-date Firefox on Linux, I come across a web site saying I need the newest version of Firefox / Chrome / IE...
Feniks 9y ago
User agent sniffing is still around. If you're uding something different from the approved four, Edge/Safari/FF/Chrome, lots of sites will nag you.
shmerl 9y ago
They aren't over. Google use some weird WebRTC in Hangouts that doesn't work in Firefox and so on.
barbs 9y ago
From memory that plugin was "IETab" and actually rendered the page using IE somehow within a Firefox tab. The plugin page is still there though obviously obsolete by now. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ie-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ie-tab/
- Doxin 9y ago
  I remember there being some activeX plugin/module/whatchamacallit that'd run your website in a google chrome frame inside IE. Awful hack but it did work great.
  - Arnavion 9y ago
    Chrome Frame. It was shipped by Google itself.
kuschku 9y ago
Today, Google Search itself uses that. Try using Google.com from Firefox Mobile and from Chrome Mobile, and you'll see a major difference. To get 95% of the functionality working, you need to fake a Chrome UA. In 2018.
- ReverseCold 9y ago
  Just tried this with latest versions of Chrome and FF on Android. The Firefox one loads what looks like the desktop site from 2013 but with bigger font; the chrome one loads a regular modern UI. Faking the user agent header (yay, FF on Android supports all the desktop extensions) makes everything normal on Firefox.
bzbarsky 9y ago
Those days are nowhere close to over. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15636674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15636674 for a short list of examples that Mozilla's web compat team has hit just in the recent past.

bzbarsky 9y ago

And in the newest installment, https://github.com/google/closure-library/issues/883 https://github.com/google/closure-library/issues/883 is UA-sniffing that is now preventing Firefox from aligning with all other browsers on whether arrow keys fire keypress events, which causes _other_ Google things, which assume they don't, to break. Also Closure assumes that only things with "WebKit" in their UA might be running on a mobile device and that all browsers fall into the WebKit/IE/Edge/Gecko buckets (and will fail badly if a browser does not). And this is just one library.

bluedino 9y ago

In the days of Netscape, pages would tell IE users to "get a real browser"

irrational 9y ago
Aren't we still saying this?
Benjamin_Dobell 9y ago
IE 7 Tax https://www.kogan.com/au/blog/new-internet-explorer-7-tax/ https://www.kogan.com/au/blog/new-internet-explorer-7-tax/
- gruez 9y ago
  I doubt that ever paid for itself in development cost vs "tax" collected. (yes i know it's probably a joke)

craigds 9y ago

Not quite over. These days I can't view my facebook messages on Firefox for Android without hacking my user agent to pretend to be Android 4. I'm happy that it's just a few irresponsible sites though. It used to be half the web.

chadcatlett 9y ago
Sadly I do something similar for Amazon Music. I don't have the bundled flash player in Chrome enabled and it won't use web based drm on Linux browsers, so I use a user agent extension that tells their site I'm on Windows and it works fine.
mehrdadn 9y ago
That's an entirely different issue I think? Do you have a different experience with Chrome?
themarkn 9y ago
Even at mbasic.facebook.com? This is how I do all my messaging these days.
- simooooo 9y ago
  Just yesterday I was on the normal mobile site laughing at how it took 15+ seconds to load stuff. This is great.
- froindt 9y ago
  I hate Facebook so much for this. Their apps are beyond bloated and track far more than I'm interested in sharing. It used to be no issue at all to send messages. But suddenly it's not possible to send a message without going to a clunky version of Facebook.
  - themarkn 9y ago
    My objections are not with Facebook really. I'm willing to make the tradeoffs that are required to participate in Facebook. I wish it were better, but Facebook is responding to incentives and is rewarded for its actions, so it's hard for me to hate them, or expect moral virtuousness. Facebook is just doing what capitalism tells it is ok. Hate for Facebook is wasted energy. We have to stop rewarding the behaviors that we don't wish to see repeated.

bowlich 9y ago

I ran into a site last year that refused to work if the browser reported the OS to be Linux. Worked fine with it spoofed.

disordinary 9y ago

One of the issues was that companies that targeted IE often developed their sites using vbscript rather than jscript, therefore they would not be compatible without a re-write. Now days there's plenty of Chrome only web apps.

bigger_cheese 9y ago
Netflix used to refuse to run in Firefox I had to install Chrome on my laptop just to visit one site - incredibly frustrating.
- syshum 9y ago
  That was back in the days when Mozilla has a backbone and was standing up for users even though users were bitching Then they caved and now we have DRM in the standard.. sad days
  - mynameisvlad 9y ago
    > even though users were bitching > Then they caved Some people call that "responding to user feedback". It sucks that you don't agree with their decision, but trying to paint Mozilla in a bad light for listening to their users' demands is preposterous.
    - syshum 9y ago
      I am painting Mozilla in a bad light for Betraying the The Mozilla Manifesto .. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/details/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/details/
      - mynameisvlad 9y ago
        Yes. And I am saying that it's preposterous because they did what any organization (and I mean any, this applies to companies, nonprofits, governments, etc) should be doing -- listening to their users. Their beliefs are great and all, but at the end of the day they are providing a product for the end user, so if their users are "bitching" that they want Netflix and other EME services available on Firefox, then the right choice is to make the user happy if possible.

InclinedPlane 9y ago

In those days each browser had their own quirky idea of how to render a website (even Firefox). None of which was really "right" but how IE did it was the de facto standard because IE had 90+% marketshare. If you had a site that could potentially be "broken" if the layout didn't render correctly the the easiest thing to do was to test that it worked how you wanted it to in IE and then add a note telling people it might be broken in other browsers (or not serve to them). It wasn't until after people really started focusing on standards compliance and cross-browser compatible frameworks that things got better. The "acid tests" for html/css/js standards compliance helped establish how far along the various browsers were at the time. Most browsers were absolutely terrible in that era, it wasn't until Chrome hit the scene and webkit started taking off that standards compliance started to become a big deal. Eventually most major browsers had decent or good standards compliance in their rendering and things like jQuery helped smooth over the rough spots of differences in browser behavior.

clouddrover 9y ago

> I'm glad those days are over. Those days aren't over yet. Google Earth says "Google Chrome is required to run the new Google Earth" or "Oh no! Google Earth isn't supported by your browser yet" if you try to use another browser: https://www.google.com/earth/ https://www.google.com/earth/

simooooo 9y ago
I'm sure they are in no rush to fix it either
m-p-3 9y ago
Or trying to access the web-based version of Remote Desktop in something else than Google Chrome https://remotedesktop.google.com/access https://remotedesktop.google.com/access But switching the user-agent isn't enough in other browsers, Google must be using some fuckery in the background.
- 220V_USKettle 9y ago
  Or using the web version of Slack to make a call or screenshare.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- MertsA 9y ago
  Switching the user agent isn't enough because it's not blindly relying on the user agent. It's actually doing feature detection so if your browser doesn't support whatever features used for remote desktop it'll give you an error message without relying on whitelisting a particular browser. This is exactly how web applications that need to use non-universal features should work, sure, look at the user agent for blacklisted browsers but use feature detection for what you can so that a new web browser that supports it will work without needing to modify the whitelisted user agents.
Ajedi32 9y ago
At least that's not just because of a user agent string. Firefox doesn't support Native Client, and Google hasn't finished rewriting Earth in WASM yet: https://medium.com/google-earth/earth-on-web-the-road-to-cross-browser-7338e0f46278 https://medium.com/google-earth/earth-on-web-the-road-to-cro...

cozzyd 9y ago

Sometimes, in my up-to-date Firefox on Linux, I come across a web site saying I need the newest version of Firefox / Chrome / IE...

Feniks 9y ago

User agent sniffing is still around. If you're uding something different from the approved four, Edge/Safari/FF/Chrome, lots of sites will nag you.

shmerl 9y ago

They aren't over. Google use some weird WebRTC in Hangouts that doesn't work in Firefox and so on.

barbs 9y ago

From memory that plugin was "IETab" and actually rendered the page using IE somehow within a Firefox tab. The plugin page is still there though obviously obsolete by now. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ie-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ie-tab/

Doxin 9y ago
I remember there being some activeX plugin/module/whatchamacallit that'd run your website in a google chrome frame inside IE. Awful hack but it did work great.
- Arnavion 9y ago
  Chrome Frame. It was shipped by Google itself.

kuschku 9y ago

Today, Google Search itself uses that. Try using Google.com from Firefox Mobile and from Chrome Mobile, and you'll see a major difference. To get 95% of the functionality working, you need to fake a Chrome UA. In 2018.

ReverseCold 9y ago
Just tried this with latest versions of Chrome and FF on Android. The Firefox one loads what looks like the desktop site from 2013 but with bigger font; the chrome one loads a regular modern UI. Faking the user agent header (yay, FF on Android supports all the desktop extensions) makes everything normal on Firefox.

bzbarsky 9y ago

Those days are nowhere close to over. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15636674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15636674 for a short list of examples that Mozilla's web compat team has hit just in the recent past.