26 ms·

Firefox will no longer be a supported browser – service.mbna.ca

108 points by ckcheng 4y ago

ckcheng 4y ago
Description: "image alt text Firefox user alert—After August 1, you must use Chrome, Edge or Safari to access MBNA online banking. Sorry!"
MattGaiser 4y ago
In most of my jobs, as soon as Firefox presented any kind of issue or inconsistency, support for it was dropped. In my first job, we had an inconsistency in how Firefox handled datalist vs how Chrome did. Firefox support officially ended at standup the next day. That being said, I do have a (largely dormant) MBNA account if anyone has specific checks they want to do.
- torstenvl 4y ago
  > That being said, I do have a (largely dormant) MBNA account if anyone has specific checks they want to do. You mean... if anyone has specific checks they want to have you do? Not my practice area, but letting someone circumvent anti-terrorism banking laws seems like something you'd definitely want to seek legal advice about before acting.
- postalrat 4y ago
  Dropping support the day after you find an issue just means it wasn't supported. Pretty bad signal for anyone depending on your support.
  - MattGaiser 4y ago
    In that case we only had major municipal users and I only remember one being impacted, so it was easy enough to tell them to ditch Firefox for Chrome.
    - postalrat 4y ago
      Maybe stop telling them you support chrome and instead tell them chrome works with your site.
- vlod 4y ago
  I web develop first using Firefox and I can't ever remember a time that it failed to run on chrome. Not sure if you remember the "good old days" when people coded only for IE (because what's the point... the rest be damned). We had EXACTLY this same attitude. MSFT then let IE6 stagnate. Most likely we won't have the same fallout with chrome (as there are quite a few derivatives), but do we really want to just have one code base? (chromium). Having competition is good. We should do whatever we can to stop Firefox dying, IMHO.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
pkilgore 4y ago
More details[1] [1] https://www.quippd.com/writing/2022/07/19/MBNA-stops-supporting-firefox-in-august-best-alternatives-to-their-credit-cards.html https://www.quippd.com/writing/2022/07/19/MBNA-stops-support...
- joeframbach 4y ago
  There aren't really any details there either. Still no idea why the bank claims Firefox can't be supported.
  - MiguelX413 4y ago
    I see many details like screenshots in the link.
    - somebehemoth 4y ago
      Please point those details out. I see a single screenshot that does not show anything failing to work in FF.
ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
- MattGaiser 4y ago
  I agree with you (as a Canadian) that excellence isn’t really part of our culture. However, this has long had American precedents. Both Airbnb and Groupon built for Chrome as of 2017. https://thenextweb.com/news/please-build-websites-web-not-just-google-chrome https://thenextweb.com/news/please-build-websites-web-not-ju...
  - DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
    > I agree with you (as a Canadian) that excellence isn’t really part of our culture. Canada excels in diplomacy and things-like-that though.
    - ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
  - ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
    Yes it is shameful but it's not a public utility like a bank doing it.
    - MattGaiser 4y ago
      MBNA is hard to call a public utility. They are a niche credit card provider for all sorts of smaller rewards programs in Canada. And you won’t find governments doing much better on this front. I get your point, but if big tech isn't willing/able to handle multiple browsers, MBNA is not going to be able to do it.
kgbcia 4y ago
it's a shame , competition is important.
- solardev 4y ago
  Webkit/Safari is the closest thing to competition that Chrome has. Firefox is so rarely used it that it doesn't really factor into any decision making anymore. If Safari (especially iPhone) doesn't support something, that's a big deal. If Firefox doesn't support something, people shrug and move on.
  - prophesi 4y ago
    Even so, letting the "competition" just be 75% Chrome and 25% Safari still isn't a good thing.
    - betwixthewires 4y ago
      "Competition" requires competitors to actually compete. Firefox is clearly not interested. If you want me to use a competitor, build one that doesn't fuck me over. Begging me to use something because "the other guy is too big!" is just not going to fly when I have to actually use it for practical purposes.
      - SECProto 4y ago
        > "Competition" requires competitors to actually compete. Firefox is clearly not interested. I exclusively use Firefox because of ublock on mobile. Other browsers cant compete. I have no issues using FF, and major annoyances when I use chrome on someone else's computer (wrong shortcut to open a new private tab, can't press backspace to navigate back 1 page in history, etc)
        solardev 4y ago
        You can use what you want, but that doesn't really make Firefox relevant... I think a lot of Firefox users also tend to be power users who have unusual settings and blockers, like you. To companies who own websites, that's even less incentive to support them.
solardev 4y ago
At work, we just deprecated Firefox last week too, after encountering some HTML Canvas performance bugs that have been around for years. Firefox was less than 3% of our user base, even less than Edge, and we just didn't have the resources to keep debugging for one browser. Everything else is Blink and Webkit. RIP...
- TranquilMarmot 4y ago
  Same here. We just kept running into bugs with Firefox, especially with a lot of "newer" technologies like WebRTC. It hurt to deprecate because I used to be such a Firefox fanboy. The last few years there's been a compounding effect of Chromium/Blink adding features that aren't supported elsewhere and Firefox just having a slew of very outdated bugs that haven't been fixed for years that have made it difficult to use. The percentage of our users who use Firefox has also steadily declined... most likely because we have to throw up "Unsupported browser, things may not work" warnings all over the place because the number of random bugs users keep running into.
  - BeefWellington 4y ago
    I'm curious as to what these specific issues you guys are mentioning are. I browse the web largely with a Chrome UA string on Firefox and I don't think I've ever seen an actual problem. If I don't use a Chrome user agent though, I get a lot of "This site will only work in Chrome/Edge" or "This site doesn't work in Firefox" popup nonsense, which is especially funny when the sites function otherwise completely fine.
    - solardev 4y ago
      The same Canvas code runs fine on Webkit and Blink, but really really slow on certain Firefox builds (dependent on OS and CPU architecture). I'm not at work and don't have the bookmarks handy, but you can search their issue tracker and see dozens of open issues along those lines, stretching back more than 5 years and still unresolved. I'm sure Firefox works fine for most sites, but if you're one of those that it has an issue with, well... just like IE, below a certain % of usage share, we just have to make the decision to not support it. Actually, this was a learning experience that caused one of our devs to switch from Firefox to Chrome too. We didn't realize how far behind Firefox had gotten until we had to debug the issue and read through their tracker. Mozilla just ignored the threads after a while and they kept building and building. We haven't put up a warning banner yet but probably should. It's like IE all over again lol.
twirlock 4y ago
e3bc54b2 4y ago
I have another similar story. Firefox didn't behave nicely and after multiple days of investigation (I am not well versed in front end, neither are most people in my org) we decided to just let it be broken and advises customers to use Chrome. I still personally use Firefox, at home and at work and will continue to do so. But the writing is appearing on the wall and it doesn't look pretty.
- xyzsparetimexyz 4y ago
  What site?
josephcsible 4y ago
It's one thing to not officially support a browser. It's another to say "we're going to try to figure out if you're using this browser, and if so, intentionally lock you out".
- richbell 4y ago
  Generally speaking it's due to not wanting to test multiple browsers (laziness). However, at $BIG_CORP, we had a massive internal website that did exactly this. Naturally, people bypassed this by changing their user-agent. When the product owner realized this, he flew into a rage on Slack and threatened that people bypassing the block could be help criminally responsible for damaging infrastructure. I never figured out what his reasoning was.
  - hestefisk 4y ago
    Could be the site was configured to use IE6 NTLM authentication, which other browsers don’t support. Could be to maintain an audit trail of who accessed what, eg for SOX compliance reasons. It was / is not uncommon for big corporations with an SOE / golden image with Windows vXX and IE vXX to do this. Not saying this to defend his / her dickhead behaviour, though. It’s very different (and extremely lazy) for a public web site.
    - olyjohn 4y ago
      Chrome and Firefox have both supported NTLM for years.
  - Ygg2 4y ago
    Yeah, and by pushing out features, Google is building a moat. You must be this rich to enter, otherwise you will get left in the dirt. Mozilla isn't fully blameless but Web is turning into OS 2.0
  - justinclift 4y ago
    > I never figured out what his reasoning was. Probably being a control freak, then making shit up to try and force ppl to follow his dictates.
Markoff 4y ago
Why support niche browser nobody use? This is on Mozilla management spending money on everything but browser and their devs introducing nonsense features nobody asked for instead basic ones, heck their Android version still didn't have pull down to refresh and pretty much no extension support.
mmastrac 4y ago
Hmm. I have an MBNA MasterCard. I'll see if I can apply my miniscule leverage.
- Mumps 4y ago
  I'm closing mine over this. Like any customer movement, enough disgruntled people just need to actually follow through.
KingOfCoders 4y ago
- cpurdy 4y ago
  Weird. This is not at all my experience. I haven't been using Firefox for 30 years, since it hasn't existed that long, but I've been using it since it was first working.
  - KingOfCoders 4y ago
    Weird. I was using Mosaic on DECs at the beginning of the 90s (when WWW came to university around 1993), then Netscape (commercial "fork" of Mosaic) on SGIs (at my first startup) and then Firefox on Linux. [Edit] I still remember Coherence also [1], yes I'm that old ;-) [1] "Cameron made a joke every 30 secs - noone laughed in the audience though I found them all funny." https://svese.dev/i-want-to-meet-cameron-purdy/ https://svese.dev/i-want-to-meet-cameron-purdy/
    - wharfjumper 4y ago
      Ironically an "online casino" has hacked the CTO coaches website.
      - KingOfCoders 4y ago
        Thanks, oh yes the irony, can you email me?
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > Mozilla was hijacked by political activists who wanted to change the internet and spend hundreds of millions of dollars on non-browser things. Mozilla, like most nonprofits, has always been run by activists who wanted to change the space the org was focussed on, and it started out spending lots of resources on non-browser things, too.
  - 4y ago
cpurdy 4y ago
Firefox has consistently been the only browser protecting people from the Facebooks and Googles of the world. There are a few sites that don't work in it, but it tends to hew closer to the standards than the proprietary lock-in browsers.
- solardev 4y ago
  I don't think people really value online privacy all that much. They choose to use Facebook and Google despite everything. And there's always Chromium spinoffs like Brave and Edge with much better compatibility and similar protections. Firefox offers nothing special anymore. And while Google isn't exactly benevolent, Chrome doesn't spam you with ads the way Firefox constantly does with its suggestions and whatever the hell Pocket is.
  - orev 4y ago
    Those people probably don’t fully understand how pervasive the tracking is. If they did, they would care. When Apple launched the tracking prompt in iOS, Facebook took out ads warning people how bad it was going to be for them, and the results proved their fears right. When asked, almost everyone chooses “no”, and I suspect many of the “yes”es are misclicks.
    - solardev 4y ago
      My takeaway from that is that people will choose privacy if it doesn't cost them anything and is easy. But if it inconveniences them, whether it's having to click through five menus to disallow cookies or having to use Firefox, most just won't bother. People always say they care if you ask them, but if you look at their behaviors, almost nobody actually does. It's just a nice to have, not a necessity.
      - oarsinsync 4y ago
        > My takeaway from that is that people will choose privacy if it doesn't cost them anything and is easy. Agreeing with the above, an alternative take on the rest is that people will not choose privacy if it is expensive and difficult. This doesn’t mean that it’s not a necessity, just that they can’t afford it and/or can’t work out how to get it. The organisations involved in invading end user privacy employ large numbers of psychologists to deliberately design things that make being privacy-conscious difficult (mentally taxing / expensive / path of most resistance). When the population at large is (unknowingly) fighting against an highly armed adversary, it feels uncharitable to claim that they don’t care. We’re losing a war the vast majority don’t even realise is happening.
picsao 4y ago
Normille 4y ago
Firefox shot themselves in the foot by having such a painfully slow mobile version. For years, almost every review on Google Play complained about its sluggishness. Yet Mozilla seemed content to keep describing it as "fast" as if that alone fixed the problem. They also, for some unaccountable reason --and, again, in the face of countless complaints dating back years--- removed the 'text reflow' function, which basically made half the web unreadable on mobile [for me, anyway]. And, as mentioned above, their stupid 'curated extensions' policy was the icing on the cake. Firefox come across like Apple these days "We know what you want, better than you do"
- TheCapeGreek 4y ago
  Haven't followed the mobile browser scene so correct me if things have changed, but the main draw for FF on mobile (at least on Android) has been: - Autoplay in the background without YouTube Premium - Extensions - specifically uBlock Origin, making it an option (the only?) for ad blocking on mobile. - Sync your FF data between desktops and mobile - great if I need to access something on the go without a password manager. I hate its sluggishness as well but the pros are pretty hefty IMO. For those using F-Droid, there's also Bromite, an ungoogled Chromium with ad blocking built in. Haven't used it too much.
- alserio 4y ago
  At least you can install ublock origin on Firefox mobile. You cannot do that in chrome and safari
  - Normille 4y ago
    Yes, you can. I use Yandex browser [Chromium-based] on Android. Like all mobile browsers, it's a piece of crap. But it's the least piece of crap one I've found so far. The only mobile browser that offers text-reflow[0] AND the ability to install any extension [1][2] [0] Kiwi browser also has text-reflow. But the implementation is terrible. Yandex's works really well. [1]Kiwi Browser also offers full extension support [2] Yandex makes you jump through hoops to install some extensions by refusing to install them as 'incompatible'. However by enabling Developer Mode and using 'Load Unpacked' you can usually get around this. I run Yandex browser on Android with uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, ViolentMonkey, Windscribe VPN and I Don't Care ABout Cookies. BTW --to pre-empt the tediously predictable: * I use <Russian product> * Ha! All your data belong to Vladimir Putin! or * I use <Chinese product> * Ha! All your data belong to CCP! responses If I didn't use Yandex browser on Android, Kiwi browser would be my second choice. On paper, it offers the same must-have features as Yandex; text-reflow and full extension support. But, in practice, I find it pretty clunky and glitchy. And, the reason I brought up the subject of Firefox mobile, in the discussion of Firefox's demise is that: 1. For quite a while now, more people have been browsing the web on mobile than on desktop. So having a decent mobile version of your browser is paramount 2: Many people [myself included] enjoy the convenience of being able to 'pick up where we left off' when switching between using browsers on our laptops / desktops /mobile devices. So finding one browser that we can use [and sync] across all devices is preferred. I still have Firefox on my laptops & desktops. But, these days, I rarely ever fire it up, as I know anything I do on there will be lost to me when I switch to one of my mobile devices.
yashg 4y ago
With a heavy heart, I recently switched from FF to Chrome. My primary credit card payments were not going through in FF. It wasn't redirecting back to merchant site from payment processors website after entering card details. It is still my primary browser on phone but I am not sure how long it will last.
- spidersouris 4y ago
  Did you try using safe mode? I've had a similar problem and I figured out it was caused by an addon.
  - yashg 4y ago
    I'll try that. If an addon is causing that I may switch back.
    - yashg 4y ago
      I tried and it worked. Then I disabled extensions one by one and found the culprit. Firefox is back as my default browser. Feels like I am back home. :D
- Markoff 4y ago
  But why? There are other better options than Chrome, I use for instance Vivaldi on desktop and Kiwi on Android since it supports extensions, Edge is also decent on desktop and mobile (but no extensions there).
  - yashg 4y ago
    Why didn't I think of Edge? Kind of forgot that there is another browser on Windows. Let me try that as well.
    - Markoff 4y ago
      I'd recommend Vivaldi on desktop, much more user friendly than Edge, I guess their mobile offering won't be much worse as well, though never tried, since I'm happy with Kiwi browsers with extensions.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mrjin 4y ago
Hmmm, wondering how essential mbna is in Canada? If I have to choose one between a bank and Firefox, then FireFox it's.
- jamincan 4y ago
  It's a credit card issuer owned by one of the major Canadian banks (TD). In other words, not essential at all.
alphaomegacode 4y ago
I understand if Firefox has some issues for this bank but this is a public-facing site of a multi-BILLION dollar bank. TD Bank owns MBNA and their unwillingness to test and support Firefox seems to echo the comments in here that it's just laziness. It isn't like users are trying to run some cutting edge game experience.
albertopv 4y ago
Unwelcomed, but expected. Firefox market share is shrinking every day.
tpoacher 4y ago
Steps to resolve issue: 1. Create a firefox addon called "workaround for MBNA" 2. The addon simply opens an email with the subject "Dear MBNA I will be closing my account because you don't support firefox". Plus twitter, etc.
nunez 4y ago
My guess is that they have few users using Firefox plus either (a) some Firefox-specific vuln was blown way out of proportion, enough to get Legal to block this browser, or (b) their front-end devs haven't discovered Playwright yet and don't know how to run e2es against it, which MBNA considers a non-starter Either way, horrible decision on their part, especially now that firefox usage might be ramping up due to Manifest v3 concerns
ciwchris 4y ago
I found the same thing when I went to renew my US passport on state.gov > The following desktop browsers are supported on this site: Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Safari (macOS only).

108 points by ckcheng 4y ago

Description: "image alt text Firefox user alert—After August 1, you must use Chrome, Edge or Safari to access MBNA online banking. Sorry!"

MattGaiser 4y ago

In most of my jobs, as soon as Firefox presented any kind of issue or inconsistency, support for it was dropped. In my first job, we had an inconsistency in how Firefox handled datalist vs how Chrome did. Firefox support officially ended at standup the next day. That being said, I do have a (largely dormant) MBNA account if anyone has specific checks they want to do.

torstenvl 4y ago
> That being said, I do have a (largely dormant) MBNA account if anyone has specific checks they want to do. You mean... if anyone has specific checks they want to have you do? Not my practice area, but letting someone circumvent anti-terrorism banking laws seems like something you'd definitely want to seek legal advice about before acting.
postalrat 4y ago
Dropping support the day after you find an issue just means it wasn't supported. Pretty bad signal for anyone depending on your support.
- MattGaiser 4y ago
  In that case we only had major municipal users and I only remember one being impacted, so it was easy enough to tell them to ditch Firefox for Chrome.
  - postalrat 4y ago
    Maybe stop telling them you support chrome and instead tell them chrome works with your site.
vlod 4y ago
I web develop first using Firefox and I can't ever remember a time that it failed to run on chrome. Not sure if you remember the "good old days" when people coded only for IE (because what's the point... the rest be damned). We had EXACTLY this same attitude. MSFT then let IE6 stagnate. Most likely we won't have the same fallout with chrome (as there are quite a few derivatives), but do we really want to just have one code base? (chromium). Having competition is good. We should do whatever we can to stop Firefox dying, IMHO.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

pkilgore 4y ago

More details[1] [1] https://www.quippd.com/writing/2022/07/19/MBNA-stops-supporting-firefox-in-august-best-alternatives-to-their-credit-cards.html https://www.quippd.com/writing/2022/07/19/MBNA-stops-support...

joeframbach 4y ago
There aren't really any details there either. Still no idea why the bank claims Firefox can't be supported.
- MiguelX413 4y ago
  I see many details like screenshots in the link.
  - somebehemoth 4y ago
    Please point those details out. I see a single screenshot that does not show anything failing to work in FF.

ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago

MattGaiser 4y ago
I agree with you (as a Canadian) that excellence isn’t really part of our culture. However, this has long had American precedents. Both Airbnb and Groupon built for Chrome as of 2017. https://thenextweb.com/news/please-build-websites-web-not-just-google-chrome https://thenextweb.com/news/please-build-websites-web-not-ju...
- DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
  > I agree with you (as a Canadian) that excellence isn’t really part of our culture. Canada excels in diplomacy and things-like-that though.
  - ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
- ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
  Yes it is shameful but it's not a public utility like a bank doing it.
  - MattGaiser 4y ago
    MBNA is hard to call a public utility. They are a niche credit card provider for all sorts of smaller rewards programs in Canada. And you won’t find governments doing much better on this front. I get your point, but if big tech isn't willing/able to handle multiple browsers, MBNA is not going to be able to do it.

kgbcia 4y ago

it's a shame , competition is important.

solardev 4y ago
Webkit/Safari is the closest thing to competition that Chrome has. Firefox is so rarely used it that it doesn't really factor into any decision making anymore. If Safari (especially iPhone) doesn't support something, that's a big deal. If Firefox doesn't support something, people shrug and move on.
- prophesi 4y ago
  Even so, letting the "competition" just be 75% Chrome and 25% Safari still isn't a good thing.
  - betwixthewires 4y ago
    "Competition" requires competitors to actually compete. Firefox is clearly not interested. If you want me to use a competitor, build one that doesn't fuck me over. Begging me to use something because "the other guy is too big!" is just not going to fly when I have to actually use it for practical purposes.
    - SECProto 4y ago
      > "Competition" requires competitors to actually compete. Firefox is clearly not interested. I exclusively use Firefox because of ublock on mobile. Other browsers cant compete. I have no issues using FF, and major annoyances when I use chrome on someone else's computer (wrong shortcut to open a new private tab, can't press backspace to navigate back 1 page in history, etc)
      - solardev 4y ago
        You can use what you want, but that doesn't really make Firefox relevant... I think a lot of Firefox users also tend to be power users who have unusual settings and blockers, like you. To companies who own websites, that's even less incentive to support them.

solardev 4y ago

At work, we just deprecated Firefox last week too, after encountering some HTML Canvas performance bugs that have been around for years. Firefox was less than 3% of our user base, even less than Edge, and we just didn't have the resources to keep debugging for one browser. Everything else is Blink and Webkit. RIP...

TranquilMarmot 4y ago
Same here. We just kept running into bugs with Firefox, especially with a lot of "newer" technologies like WebRTC. It hurt to deprecate because I used to be such a Firefox fanboy. The last few years there's been a compounding effect of Chromium/Blink adding features that aren't supported elsewhere and Firefox just having a slew of very outdated bugs that haven't been fixed for years that have made it difficult to use. The percentage of our users who use Firefox has also steadily declined... most likely because we have to throw up "Unsupported browser, things may not work" warnings all over the place because the number of random bugs users keep running into.
- BeefWellington 4y ago
  I'm curious as to what these specific issues you guys are mentioning are. I browse the web largely with a Chrome UA string on Firefox and I don't think I've ever seen an actual problem. If I don't use a Chrome user agent though, I get a lot of "This site will only work in Chrome/Edge" or "This site doesn't work in Firefox" popup nonsense, which is especially funny when the sites function otherwise completely fine.
  - solardev 4y ago
    The same Canvas code runs fine on Webkit and Blink, but really really slow on certain Firefox builds (dependent on OS and CPU architecture). I'm not at work and don't have the bookmarks handy, but you can search their issue tracker and see dozens of open issues along those lines, stretching back more than 5 years and still unresolved. I'm sure Firefox works fine for most sites, but if you're one of those that it has an issue with, well... just like IE, below a certain % of usage share, we just have to make the decision to not support it. Actually, this was a learning experience that caused one of our devs to switch from Firefox to Chrome too. We didn't realize how far behind Firefox had gotten until we had to debug the issue and read through their tracker. Mozilla just ignored the threads after a while and they kept building and building. We haven't put up a warning banner yet but probably should. It's like IE all over again lol.

twirlock 4y ago

e3bc54b2 4y ago

I have another similar story. Firefox didn't behave nicely and after multiple days of investigation (I am not well versed in front end, neither are most people in my org) we decided to just let it be broken and advises customers to use Chrome. I still personally use Firefox, at home and at work and will continue to do so. But the writing is appearing on the wall and it doesn't look pretty.

xyzsparetimexyz 4y ago
What site?

josephcsible 4y ago

It's one thing to not officially support a browser. It's another to say "we're going to try to figure out if you're using this browser, and if so, intentionally lock you out".

richbell 4y ago
Generally speaking it's due to not wanting to test multiple browsers (laziness). However, at $BIG_CORP, we had a massive internal website that did exactly this. Naturally, people bypassed this by changing their user-agent. When the product owner realized this, he flew into a rage on Slack and threatened that people bypassing the block could be help criminally responsible for damaging infrastructure. I never figured out what his reasoning was.
- hestefisk 4y ago
  Could be the site was configured to use IE6 NTLM authentication, which other browsers don’t support. Could be to maintain an audit trail of who accessed what, eg for SOX compliance reasons. It was / is not uncommon for big corporations with an SOE / golden image with Windows vXX and IE vXX to do this. Not saying this to defend his / her dickhead behaviour, though. It’s very different (and extremely lazy) for a public web site.
  - olyjohn 4y ago
    Chrome and Firefox have both supported NTLM for years.
- Ygg2 4y ago
  Yeah, and by pushing out features, Google is building a moat. You must be this rich to enter, otherwise you will get left in the dirt. Mozilla isn't fully blameless but Web is turning into OS 2.0
- justinclift 4y ago
  > I never figured out what his reasoning was. Probably being a control freak, then making shit up to try and force ppl to follow his dictates.

Markoff 4y ago

Why support niche browser nobody use? This is on Mozilla management spending money on everything but browser and their devs introducing nonsense features nobody asked for instead basic ones, heck their Android version still didn't have pull down to refresh and pretty much no extension support.

mmastrac 4y ago

Hmm. I have an MBNA MasterCard. I'll see if I can apply my miniscule leverage.

Mumps 4y ago
I'm closing mine over this. Like any customer movement, enough disgruntled people just need to actually follow through.

KingOfCoders 4y ago

cpurdy 4y ago
Weird. This is not at all my experience. I haven't been using Firefox for 30 years, since it hasn't existed that long, but I've been using it since it was first working.
- KingOfCoders 4y ago
  Weird. I was using Mosaic on DECs at the beginning of the 90s (when WWW came to university around 1993), then Netscape (commercial "fork" of Mosaic) on SGIs (at my first startup) and then Firefox on Linux. [Edit] I still remember Coherence also [1], yes I'm that old ;-) [1] "Cameron made a joke every 30 secs - noone laughed in the audience though I found them all funny." https://svese.dev/i-want-to-meet-cameron-purdy/ https://svese.dev/i-want-to-meet-cameron-purdy/
  - wharfjumper 4y ago
    Ironically an "online casino" has hacked the CTO coaches website.
    - KingOfCoders 4y ago
      Thanks, oh yes the irony, can you email me?
dragonwriter 4y ago
> Mozilla was hijacked by political activists who wanted to change the internet and spend hundreds of millions of dollars on non-browser things. Mozilla, like most nonprofits, has always been run by activists who wanted to change the space the org was focussed on, and it started out spending lots of resources on non-browser things, too.
- 4y ago

cpurdy 4y ago

Firefox has consistently been the only browser protecting people from the Facebooks and Googles of the world. There are a few sites that don't work in it, but it tends to hew closer to the standards than the proprietary lock-in browsers.

solardev 4y ago
I don't think people really value online privacy all that much. They choose to use Facebook and Google despite everything. And there's always Chromium spinoffs like Brave and Edge with much better compatibility and similar protections. Firefox offers nothing special anymore. And while Google isn't exactly benevolent, Chrome doesn't spam you with ads the way Firefox constantly does with its suggestions and whatever the hell Pocket is.
- orev 4y ago
  Those people probably don’t fully understand how pervasive the tracking is. If they did, they would care. When Apple launched the tracking prompt in iOS, Facebook took out ads warning people how bad it was going to be for them, and the results proved their fears right. When asked, almost everyone chooses “no”, and I suspect many of the “yes”es are misclicks.
  - solardev 4y ago
    My takeaway from that is that people will choose privacy if it doesn't cost them anything and is easy. But if it inconveniences them, whether it's having to click through five menus to disallow cookies or having to use Firefox, most just won't bother. People always say they care if you ask them, but if you look at their behaviors, almost nobody actually does. It's just a nice to have, not a necessity.
    - oarsinsync 4y ago
      > My takeaway from that is that people will choose privacy if it doesn't cost them anything and is easy. Agreeing with the above, an alternative take on the rest is that people will not choose privacy if it is expensive and difficult. This doesn’t mean that it’s not a necessity, just that they can’t afford it and/or can’t work out how to get it. The organisations involved in invading end user privacy employ large numbers of psychologists to deliberately design things that make being privacy-conscious difficult (mentally taxing / expensive / path of most resistance). When the population at large is (unknowingly) fighting against an highly armed adversary, it feels uncharitable to claim that they don’t care. We’re losing a war the vast majority don’t even realise is happening.

picsao 4y ago

Normille 4y ago

Firefox shot themselves in the foot by having such a painfully slow mobile version. For years, almost every review on Google Play complained about its sluggishness. Yet Mozilla seemed content to keep describing it as "fast" as if that alone fixed the problem. They also, for some unaccountable reason --and, again, in the face of countless complaints dating back years--- removed the 'text reflow' function, which basically made half the web unreadable on mobile [for me, anyway]. And, as mentioned above, their stupid 'curated extensions' policy was the icing on the cake. Firefox come across like Apple these days "We know what you want, better than you do"

TheCapeGreek 4y ago
Haven't followed the mobile browser scene so correct me if things have changed, but the main draw for FF on mobile (at least on Android) has been: - Autoplay in the background without YouTube Premium - Extensions - specifically uBlock Origin, making it an option (the only?) for ad blocking on mobile. - Sync your FF data between desktops and mobile - great if I need to access something on the go without a password manager. I hate its sluggishness as well but the pros are pretty hefty IMO. For those using F-Droid, there's also Bromite, an ungoogled Chromium with ad blocking built in. Haven't used it too much.
alserio 4y ago
At least you can install ublock origin on Firefox mobile. You cannot do that in chrome and safari
- Normille 4y ago
  Yes, you can. I use Yandex browser [Chromium-based] on Android. Like all mobile browsers, it's a piece of crap. But it's the least piece of crap one I've found so far. The only mobile browser that offers text-reflow[0] AND the ability to install any extension [1][2] [0] Kiwi browser also has text-reflow. But the implementation is terrible. Yandex's works really well. [1]Kiwi Browser also offers full extension support [2] Yandex makes you jump through hoops to install some extensions by refusing to install them as 'incompatible'. However by enabling Developer Mode and using 'Load Unpacked' you can usually get around this. I run Yandex browser on Android with uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, ViolentMonkey, Windscribe VPN and I Don't Care ABout Cookies. BTW --to pre-empt the tediously predictable: * I use <Russian product> * Ha! All your data belong to Vladimir Putin! or * I use <Chinese product> * Ha! All your data belong to CCP! responses If I didn't use Yandex browser on Android, Kiwi browser would be my second choice. On paper, it offers the same must-have features as Yandex; text-reflow and full extension support. But, in practice, I find it pretty clunky and glitchy. And, the reason I brought up the subject of Firefox mobile, in the discussion of Firefox's demise is that: 1. For quite a while now, more people have been browsing the web on mobile than on desktop. So having a decent mobile version of your browser is paramount 2: Many people [myself included] enjoy the convenience of being able to 'pick up where we left off' when switching between using browsers on our laptops / desktops /mobile devices. So finding one browser that we can use [and sync] across all devices is preferred. I still have Firefox on my laptops & desktops. But, these days, I rarely ever fire it up, as I know anything I do on there will be lost to me when I switch to one of my mobile devices.

yashg 4y ago

With a heavy heart, I recently switched from FF to Chrome. My primary credit card payments were not going through in FF. It wasn't redirecting back to merchant site from payment processors website after entering card details. It is still my primary browser on phone but I am not sure how long it will last.

spidersouris 4y ago
Did you try using safe mode? I've had a similar problem and I figured out it was caused by an addon.
- yashg 4y ago
  I'll try that. If an addon is causing that I may switch back.
  - yashg 4y ago
    I tried and it worked. Then I disabled extensions one by one and found the culprit. Firefox is back as my default browser. Feels like I am back home. :D
Markoff 4y ago
But why? There are other better options than Chrome, I use for instance Vivaldi on desktop and Kiwi on Android since it supports extensions, Edge is also decent on desktop and mobile (but no extensions there).
- yashg 4y ago
  Why didn't I think of Edge? Kind of forgot that there is another browser on Windows. Let me try that as well.
  - Markoff 4y ago
    I'd recommend Vivaldi on desktop, much more user friendly than Edge, I guess their mobile offering won't be much worse as well, though never tried, since I'm happy with Kiwi browsers with extensions.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

mrjin 4y ago

Hmmm, wondering how essential mbna is in Canada? If I have to choose one between a bank and Firefox, then FireFox it's.

jamincan 4y ago
It's a credit card issuer owned by one of the major Canadian banks (TD). In other words, not essential at all.

alphaomegacode 4y ago

I understand if Firefox has some issues for this bank but this is a public-facing site of a multi-BILLION dollar bank. TD Bank owns MBNA and their unwillingness to test and support Firefox seems to echo the comments in here that it's just laziness. It isn't like users are trying to run some cutting edge game experience.

albertopv 4y ago

Unwelcomed, but expected. Firefox market share is shrinking every day.

tpoacher 4y ago

Steps to resolve issue: 1. Create a firefox addon called "workaround for MBNA" 2. The addon simply opens an email with the subject "Dear MBNA I will be closing my account because you don't support firefox". Plus twitter, etc.

nunez 4y ago

My guess is that they have few users using Firefox plus either (a) some Firefox-specific vuln was blown way out of proportion, enough to get Legal to block this browser, or (b) their front-end devs haven't discovered Playwright yet and don't know how to run e2es against it, which MBNA considers a non-starter Either way, horrible decision on their part, especially now that firefox usage might be ramping up due to Manifest v3 concerns

ciwchris 4y ago

I found the same thing when I went to renew my US passport on state.gov > The following desktop browsers are supported on this site: Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Safari (macOS only).