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Is there a possibility sites just begin blocking Firefox? It's only ~8% of the desktop market share and ~4% across all devices. It doesn't seem inconceivable s

Is there a possibility sites just begin blocking Firefox? It's only ~8% of the desktop market share and ~4% across all devices. It doesn't seem inconceivable sites just give up supporting it if they're not getting the ad revenue.

elktea 6y ago
technically impossible, firefox would be forced to pretend to be another browser.
- nathancahill 6y ago
  What, you mean like this? (from Chrome) Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/78.0.3904.108 Safari/537.36
- slimsag 6y ago
  With fingerprinting it's not impossible. Quoting a recent Webkit thread[1] in which Google blocked all sign in from non-Safari WebKit browsers: > But if Google does this properly and uses more sophisticated browser fingerprinting techniques, Epiphany is done for. This could be an existential threat for non-Safari WebKit browsers. Nobody is going to be interested in using a browser that doesn't support Google websites. Google's expressly-stated goal is to block embedded browser frameworks and non-supported browsers from signing into Google accounts. The blog post says: "This block affects CEF-based apps and other non-supported browsers." It says: "We do not allow sign-in from browsers based on frameworks like CEF or Embedded Internet Explorer." [1] https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2020-November/031604.html https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2020-November/...
  - elktea 6y ago
    wow, if you're still using chrome it might be time to re-asses that.
- npteljes 6y ago
  Even if technically impossible, by simply not supporting it - which is already happening - FF will just lose additional market share. I'm at a point where I keep an additional Chromium installed along with my nicely configured FF, because of how many sites doesn't work.
stunt 6y ago
8% is a lot! and Firefox isn't alone, Safari is also on the same path.
lucasmullens 6y ago
They would still get ad revenue, it just might be notably less since the ads are less targeted.
aceazzameen 6y ago
Microsoft's Skype web client already blocks Firefox. But it's easily rectified by changing the user agent to Chrome or Edge.
Lio 6y ago
As an example, Slack doesn't support audio calls in Firefox on Linux. That just means I tell my colleagues I can't receive Slack audio calls and we use an alternative tool for that. There is momentum in a choice like that though and even if Slack were to add Firefox support tomorrow we probably wouldn't switch to using them for audio. They do offer an election based app for Linux but I'm not interested in that over head when I can just keep a browser tab open for Slack chat. For me you either support open standards or you don't get used.

elktea 6y ago

technically impossible, firefox would be forced to pretend to be another browser.

nathancahill 6y ago
What, you mean like this? (from Chrome) Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/78.0.3904.108 Safari/537.36
slimsag 6y ago
With fingerprinting it's not impossible. Quoting a recent Webkit thread[1] in which Google blocked all sign in from non-Safari WebKit browsers: > But if Google does this properly and uses more sophisticated browser fingerprinting techniques, Epiphany is done for. This could be an existential threat for non-Safari WebKit browsers. Nobody is going to be interested in using a browser that doesn't support Google websites. Google's expressly-stated goal is to block embedded browser frameworks and non-supported browsers from signing into Google accounts. The blog post says: "This block affects CEF-based apps and other non-supported browsers." It says: "We do not allow sign-in from browsers based on frameworks like CEF or Embedded Internet Explorer." [1] https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2020-November/031604.html https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2020-November/...
- elktea 6y ago
  wow, if you're still using chrome it might be time to re-asses that.
npteljes 6y ago
Even if technically impossible, by simply not supporting it - which is already happening - FF will just lose additional market share. I'm at a point where I keep an additional Chromium installed along with my nicely configured FF, because of how many sites doesn't work.

stunt 6y ago

8% is a lot! and Firefox isn't alone, Safari is also on the same path.

lucasmullens 6y ago

They would still get ad revenue, it just might be notably less since the ads are less targeted.

aceazzameen 6y ago

Microsoft's Skype web client already blocks Firefox. But it's easily rectified by changing the user agent to Chrome or Edge.

Lio 6y ago

As an example, Slack doesn't support audio calls in Firefox on Linux. That just means I tell my colleagues I can't receive Slack audio calls and we use an alternative tool for that. There is momentum in a choice like that though and even if Slack were to add Firefox support tomorrow we probably wouldn't switch to using them for audio. They do offer an election based app for Linux but I'm not interested in that over head when I can just keep a browser tab open for Slack chat. For me you either support open standards or you don't get used.