9 ms·

Just got this notice from my bank: No more Firefox

133 points by vord1080 4y ago

guilherme-puida 4y ago
It's Internet Explorer all over again.
- whoibrar 4y ago
  Wonder what will be the next javascript of today ?
  - kalupa 4y ago
    javascript, just like it was before today.
  - pipeline_peak 4y ago
    wasm
ratsmack 4y ago
My bank (B of A) started complaining about Debian's firefox-esr being too old and out of date, so I loaded the bleeding edge version just to access my bank account, but use the esr version for general browsing.
- mikewave 4y ago
  I for one am glad to run a version that Eric S. Raymond has officially blessed.
  - ratsmack 4y ago
    Hopefully you're joking... :-), if not, it means Extended Support Release. (The first time I saw it, I thought the same)
  - blooalien 4y ago
    Joking or not, enjoy your upvote for givin' me a good giggle when I sorely needed it. :)
dmart 4y ago
I wonder if people realize how low Firefox marketshare has fallen, or if people are stuck in a 2010s-era idea of what the web browser landscape is like. I also think the prevalence of Firefox among the (overall tiny) desktop Linux demographic tends to warp developer perspectives. It's under 4% - for all intents and purposes a dead browser. I certainly wouldn't devote any engineering hours towards supporting it.
- pipeline_peak 4y ago
  Not to mention, the core development team has been cut. Mozilla is rebranding itself into a “Social Justice For Tech” marketing firm. There are two significant platforms left Chromium and WebKit. I hope that isn’t the future, but browser dominance is such an obscure, indirect problem to the industry that no company would bother touching it.
  - vord1080 4y ago
    Not sure where you got the idea that the core development team has been cut, Firefox development remains strong. For example, here's a 1,000+ line patch that just landed two days ago. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1779952 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1779952
    - pipeline_peak 4y ago
      I shouldn’t of said cut, but they did layoff 250 members 2 years ago and among those were the Servo team. https://www.protocol.com/amp/mozilla-layoffs-2646950077 https://www.protocol.com/amp/mozilla-layoffs-2646950077
      - Twirrim 4y ago
        That's not the core dev team, at all. Servo was a research group, building an experimental browser engine, parts of which did end up transitioning across to Gecko.
bob1029 4y ago
This is pretty lame BS. I am literally right in the middle of building a public web app (also for a bank) that does not have any sort of arbitrary user agent constraints. As long as your browser supports reasonably-modern things like flexbox and media queries, my app is just going to work on your machine. Even if it doesn't support these things, I don't see any reason to artificially get in the way of something you might otherwise be able to string along regardless. I roll 100% vanilla JS/CSS these days so that I can avoid getting entrapped in the kinds of hells that likely entrapped these mbna web developers. It is quite possible they use some JS framework that has a tight dependency on a certain cohort of browser vendors & versions.
- RandyRanderson 4y ago
  Note: MBNA Canada is owned by TD.com (one of the 5 major banks in Canada) and not the US MBNA. In my estimation, it's likely that they've looked at the numbers and are essentially 'firing' FF customers b/c they don't drive enough rev. CIBC (another bank here) has been doing this for at least 15 years by offering seemingly 'cheaper' banking services using the same systems but different brands (eg PC financial). The downmarket brand seems cheaper on the surface but they take away all the costly things the flagship brand gives away (eg in-person banking, no fee transactions, etc) and charge [more] for them. Our telcos here do the same thing with MVNOs (eg Rogers, the flagship brand, owns Chatr, for poor ppl).
walrus01 4y ago
Anecdotally, if you use firefox on android to sign in to a wells fargo account you will get a shitload more captchas and extra verification steps to actually login than if you use chrome, or their officially published app. This is not how the web was supposed to be.
- gnicholas 4y ago
  I've gotten a ton of captchas when using Brave. One time I was trying to create an account and I just got an unending stream of them. I literally gave up after 15 or so. If it had said I was going to have to do 20, I might have continued. But there was on light at the end of the tunnel, so I gave up.
  - imtringued 4y ago
    Sorry, but you aren't human, we have proof thanks to our extensive surveillance network, please renounce your citizenship and human rights today.
- imtringued 4y ago
  You're supposed to use Chrome while logged into a Google account or be sent to captcha hell.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
somat 4y ago
My bank(name and shame, yeah it's chase) does not work with openbsd. unless I change the user agent then it works just fine. sigh Some days(usually after a few drinks) I set my user agent to a simple "firefox" and every time I do it is depressing how many things break.
ncann 4y ago
Serious question: I love FF because of many reasons, but "additional voice at the web standard group" is quite far down the list for me. The top reasons I'm using FF right now are the features, namely high customizability on everything, TreeStyleTab, Picture in Picture mode with subtitle support, container tabs, all the privacy stuffs, and so on. How hard is it to have all these features with another engine like Webkit or Blink? Would there be a chance of FF keeping these features but switch out the engine it uses so that it takes less engineering effort to maintain?
- ajvs 4y ago
  Firstly Mozilla is never going to switch to Chromium engine because it'd indicate giving up most of what makes it unique. Second to redo all their unique features would take a number of years, particularly all the privacy aspects that the Tor Browser relies on. Compare it to Brave for example, they've had years to work on their browser and it's not got any of the aforementioned Firefox features and a fraction of the privacy ones.
  - wooque 4y ago
    Brave has even better privacy and anti-fingerprint measures than Firefox https://privacytests.org/ https://privacytests.org/
    - Blasters 4y ago
      Brave has more privacy feature out of the box. LibreWolf which is Firefox with changed settings is superior. besides the site only shows if a privacy feature is present not how good it is.
      - wooque 4y ago
        LibreWolf is more slower than even Firefox. Getting 10% better privacy for half the performance and possible incompatibilities on the web is not worth it.
altilunium 4y ago
Chromium-based engine : Chromium, Chrome, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, Edge, Naver Whale. Firefox-based engine : Firefox, GNU Icecat. Firefox is slowly becoming the pariah of web browser.
- altilunium 4y ago
  I'm building a web app, and tested the app against all those browser. The behavior is really different, especially regarding the implementation a newly developed web api and the depreciation plan of ancient javascript api. For example, xhr depreciation [1]. As for chromium, they are quite responsive in responding the developer inquiries regarding a browser-specific API implementation. [2][3] Sadly, it's IE vs Netscape all over again. [1] : https://xhr.spec.whatwg.org/#the-open()-method https://xhr.spec.whatwg.org/#the-open()-method [2] :https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-discuss https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-discuss [3] : https://www.researchgate.net/publication/353527090_Rancang_Bangun_Aplikasi_Note-Taking_Berbasis_Wiki https://www.researchgate.net/publication/353527090_Rancang_B... (it contains my communication excerpts to the Chromium team, regarding xhr deprecation plan)
  - blep_ 4y ago
    The yellow warning box on [1] is referring specifically to one flag, not to XHR generally.
- squarefoot 4y ago
  > Firefox-based engine : Firefox, GNU Icecat. Plus many others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Web_browsers_based_on_Firefox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Web_browsers_based_on...
ryankrage77 4y ago
What they really mean: "We're no longer developing for/testing Firefox, and if you run into a technical issue we will not offer any support". Firefox will probably continue to work fine.
- oogali 4y ago
  This is likely in response to some internal product/development team being told to go faster. I’m guessing that their feedback was that cross-platform UI testing is occupying a significant chunk of their time. Leading to some MBA type thinking they could cut the testing time in half if they eliminate browsers that don’t consist of 99% of the user population.
t0bia_s 4y ago
Few weeks ago my bank force me to use password and SMS code for transactions because of EU regulations. But if I would use app (which I won't), I don't have to use any passwords. Which EU regulation tell banks to use SMS and password to make transactions without app?
- stevesimmons 4y ago
  Strong Customer Authentication (SCA), "a new set of rules that will change how you confirm your identity when making purchases online". A Google search will surface help pages from most European financial regulators and payment processors and banks. For instance, [1-3]. The rollout was delayed a couple of times so cutoff dates mentioned on older pages may well have shifted. In the UK, the cutoff date was 14 March 2022. [1] https://www.fca.org.uk/firms/strong-customer-authentication https://www.fca.org.uk/firms/strong-customer-authentication [2] https://www.ukfinance.org.uk/our-expertise/cards/card-payments https://www.ukfinance.org.uk/our-expertise/cards/card-paymen... [3] https://www.visa.co.uk/partner-with-us/payment-technology/strong-customer-authentication.html https://www.visa.co.uk/partner-with-us/payment-technology/st...
- preisschild 4y ago
  My bank offered SMS code authentication as alternative before, but since new EU regulations came out 1-2 years ago, Im forced to either use a physical card-reader OTP generator (which, to be fair, is free, but clunky, so I can't easily put it in my pocket) or use their app that doesn't even work on my device (i use a hardened custom android distro, but have no root and bootloader is locked)
PraetorianGourd 4y ago
In the time it took the OP to screenshot this and post it across several social media channels, they could’ve closed their account and joined a bank without such BS restrictions. But gotta get those upvotes. And of course I realize the OP could have done both, but I am trying to balance rolling on coke with drinking whiskey so please accept my acknowledgment
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- preisschild 4y ago
  I always welcome public shaming of such companies.
ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
Classic Canadian mediocrity spotted again.
imtringued 4y ago
Chrome is horrible, it is so unstable and crashes all the time.
KingOfCoders 4y ago
As a 30y FF user I wish Mozilla would focus on innovation and building the very best browser to get back market share.
- squarefoot 4y ago
  Not possible. Google owns the network and wins hands down for being able to advertise Chrome wherever and whenever they want, while Mozilla is forced to buy ads. Being better than Chrome is not enough anymore.
dzmitry_lahoda 4y ago
i stopped using firefox as it was not fixing some performance issues. also there are plugins which on chrome, but not ff. and also they never made bookmarks feature complete. i have donated not less than 100 usd to mozilla in total i guess. part because of rust. and brave is more innovative in p2p and web3 area. it has tor. so brave was my final reason to switch.

133 points by vord1080 4y ago

guilherme-puida 4y ago

It's Internet Explorer all over again.

whoibrar 4y ago
Wonder what will be the next javascript of today ?
- kalupa 4y ago
  javascript, just like it was before today.
- pipeline_peak 4y ago
  wasm

ratsmack 4y ago

My bank (B of A) started complaining about Debian's firefox-esr being too old and out of date, so I loaded the bleeding edge version just to access my bank account, but use the esr version for general browsing.

mikewave 4y ago
I for one am glad to run a version that Eric S. Raymond has officially blessed.
- ratsmack 4y ago
  Hopefully you're joking... :-), if not, it means Extended Support Release. (The first time I saw it, I thought the same)
- blooalien 4y ago
  Joking or not, enjoy your upvote for givin' me a good giggle when I sorely needed it. :)

dmart 4y ago

I wonder if people realize how low Firefox marketshare has fallen, or if people are stuck in a 2010s-era idea of what the web browser landscape is like. I also think the prevalence of Firefox among the (overall tiny) desktop Linux demographic tends to warp developer perspectives. It's under 4% - for all intents and purposes a dead browser. I certainly wouldn't devote any engineering hours towards supporting it.

pipeline_peak 4y ago
Not to mention, the core development team has been cut. Mozilla is rebranding itself into a “Social Justice For Tech” marketing firm. There are two significant platforms left Chromium and WebKit. I hope that isn’t the future, but browser dominance is such an obscure, indirect problem to the industry that no company would bother touching it.
- vord1080 4y ago
  Not sure where you got the idea that the core development team has been cut, Firefox development remains strong. For example, here's a 1,000+ line patch that just landed two days ago. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1779952 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1779952
  - pipeline_peak 4y ago
    I shouldn’t of said cut, but they did layoff 250 members 2 years ago and among those were the Servo team. https://www.protocol.com/amp/mozilla-layoffs-2646950077 https://www.protocol.com/amp/mozilla-layoffs-2646950077
    - Twirrim 4y ago
      That's not the core dev team, at all. Servo was a research group, building an experimental browser engine, parts of which did end up transitioning across to Gecko.

bob1029 4y ago

This is pretty lame BS. I am literally right in the middle of building a public web app (also for a bank) that does not have any sort of arbitrary user agent constraints. As long as your browser supports reasonably-modern things like flexbox and media queries, my app is just going to work on your machine. Even if it doesn't support these things, I don't see any reason to artificially get in the way of something you might otherwise be able to string along regardless. I roll 100% vanilla JS/CSS these days so that I can avoid getting entrapped in the kinds of hells that likely entrapped these mbna web developers. It is quite possible they use some JS framework that has a tight dependency on a certain cohort of browser vendors & versions.

RandyRanderson 4y ago
Note: MBNA Canada is owned by TD.com (one of the 5 major banks in Canada) and not the US MBNA. In my estimation, it's likely that they've looked at the numbers and are essentially 'firing' FF customers b/c they don't drive enough rev. CIBC (another bank here) has been doing this for at least 15 years by offering seemingly 'cheaper' banking services using the same systems but different brands (eg PC financial). The downmarket brand seems cheaper on the surface but they take away all the costly things the flagship brand gives away (eg in-person banking, no fee transactions, etc) and charge [more] for them. Our telcos here do the same thing with MVNOs (eg Rogers, the flagship brand, owns Chatr, for poor ppl).

walrus01 4y ago

Anecdotally, if you use firefox on android to sign in to a wells fargo account you will get a shitload more captchas and extra verification steps to actually login than if you use chrome, or their officially published app. This is not how the web was supposed to be.

gnicholas 4y ago
I've gotten a ton of captchas when using Brave. One time I was trying to create an account and I just got an unending stream of them. I literally gave up after 15 or so. If it had said I was going to have to do 20, I might have continued. But there was on light at the end of the tunnel, so I gave up.
- imtringued 4y ago
  Sorry, but you aren't human, we have proof thanks to our extensive surveillance network, please renounce your citizenship and human rights today.
imtringued 4y ago
You're supposed to use Chrome while logged into a Google account or be sent to captcha hell.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

somat 4y ago

My bank(name and shame, yeah it's chase) does not work with openbsd. unless I change the user agent then it works just fine. sigh Some days(usually after a few drinks) I set my user agent to a simple "firefox" and every time I do it is depressing how many things break.

ncann 4y ago

Serious question: I love FF because of many reasons, but "additional voice at the web standard group" is quite far down the list for me. The top reasons I'm using FF right now are the features, namely high customizability on everything, TreeStyleTab, Picture in Picture mode with subtitle support, container tabs, all the privacy stuffs, and so on. How hard is it to have all these features with another engine like Webkit or Blink? Would there be a chance of FF keeping these features but switch out the engine it uses so that it takes less engineering effort to maintain?

ajvs 4y ago
Firstly Mozilla is never going to switch to Chromium engine because it'd indicate giving up most of what makes it unique. Second to redo all their unique features would take a number of years, particularly all the privacy aspects that the Tor Browser relies on. Compare it to Brave for example, they've had years to work on their browser and it's not got any of the aforementioned Firefox features and a fraction of the privacy ones.
- wooque 4y ago
  Brave has even better privacy and anti-fingerprint measures than Firefox https://privacytests.org/ https://privacytests.org/
  - Blasters 4y ago
    Brave has more privacy feature out of the box. LibreWolf which is Firefox with changed settings is superior. besides the site only shows if a privacy feature is present not how good it is.
    - wooque 4y ago
      LibreWolf is more slower than even Firefox. Getting 10% better privacy for half the performance and possible incompatibilities on the web is not worth it.

altilunium 4y ago

Chromium-based engine : Chromium, Chrome, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, Edge, Naver Whale. Firefox-based engine : Firefox, GNU Icecat. Firefox is slowly becoming the pariah of web browser.

altilunium 4y ago
I'm building a web app, and tested the app against all those browser. The behavior is really different, especially regarding the implementation a newly developed web api and the depreciation plan of ancient javascript api. For example, xhr depreciation [1]. As for chromium, they are quite responsive in responding the developer inquiries regarding a browser-specific API implementation. [2][3] Sadly, it's IE vs Netscape all over again. [1] : https://xhr.spec.whatwg.org/#the-open()-method https://xhr.spec.whatwg.org/#the-open()-method [2] :https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-discuss https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-discuss [3] : https://www.researchgate.net/publication/353527090_Rancang_Bangun_Aplikasi_Note-Taking_Berbasis_Wiki https://www.researchgate.net/publication/353527090_Rancang_B... (it contains my communication excerpts to the Chromium team, regarding xhr deprecation plan)
- blep_ 4y ago
  The yellow warning box on [1] is referring specifically to one flag, not to XHR generally.
squarefoot 4y ago
> Firefox-based engine : Firefox, GNU Icecat. Plus many others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Web_browsers_based_on_Firefox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Web_browsers_based_on...

ryankrage77 4y ago

What they really mean: "We're no longer developing for/testing Firefox, and if you run into a technical issue we will not offer any support". Firefox will probably continue to work fine.

oogali 4y ago
This is likely in response to some internal product/development team being told to go faster. I’m guessing that their feedback was that cross-platform UI testing is occupying a significant chunk of their time. Leading to some MBA type thinking they could cut the testing time in half if they eliminate browsers that don’t consist of 99% of the user population.

t0bia_s 4y ago

Few weeks ago my bank force me to use password and SMS code for transactions because of EU regulations. But if I would use app (which I won't), I don't have to use any passwords. Which EU regulation tell banks to use SMS and password to make transactions without app?

stevesimmons 4y ago
Strong Customer Authentication (SCA), "a new set of rules that will change how you confirm your identity when making purchases online". A Google search will surface help pages from most European financial regulators and payment processors and banks. For instance, [1-3]. The rollout was delayed a couple of times so cutoff dates mentioned on older pages may well have shifted. In the UK, the cutoff date was 14 March 2022. [1] https://www.fca.org.uk/firms/strong-customer-authentication https://www.fca.org.uk/firms/strong-customer-authentication [2] https://www.ukfinance.org.uk/our-expertise/cards/card-payments https://www.ukfinance.org.uk/our-expertise/cards/card-paymen... [3] https://www.visa.co.uk/partner-with-us/payment-technology/strong-customer-authentication.html https://www.visa.co.uk/partner-with-us/payment-technology/st...
preisschild 4y ago
My bank offered SMS code authentication as alternative before, but since new EU regulations came out 1-2 years ago, Im forced to either use a physical card-reader OTP generator (which, to be fair, is free, but clunky, so I can't easily put it in my pocket) or use their app that doesn't even work on my device (i use a hardened custom android distro, but have no root and bootloader is locked)

PraetorianGourd 4y ago

In the time it took the OP to screenshot this and post it across several social media channels, they could’ve closed their account and joined a bank without such BS restrictions. But gotta get those upvotes. And of course I realize the OP could have done both, but I am trying to balance rolling on coke with drinking whiskey so please accept my acknowledgment

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
preisschild 4y ago
I always welcome public shaming of such companies.

ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago

Classic Canadian mediocrity spotted again.

imtringued 4y ago

Chrome is horrible, it is so unstable and crashes all the time.

KingOfCoders 4y ago

As a 30y FF user I wish Mozilla would focus on innovation and building the very best browser to get back market share.

squarefoot 4y ago
Not possible. Google owns the network and wins hands down for being able to advertise Chrome wherever and whenever they want, while Mozilla is forced to buy ads. Being better than Chrome is not enough anymore.

dzmitry_lahoda 4y ago

i stopped using firefox as it was not fixing some performance issues. also there are plugins which on chrome, but not ff. and also they never made bookmarks feature complete. i have donated not less than 100 usd to mozilla in total i guess. part because of rust. and brave is more innovative in p2p and web3 area. it has tor. so brave was my final reason to switch.