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I use Firefox as my main browser. I love Firefox and I want it to succeed. However... a person who uses Firefox as their primary browser must generally still k

I use Firefox as my main browser. I love Firefox and I want it to succeed. However... a person who uses Firefox as their primary browser must generally still keep Chrome installed. A person who uses Chrome as their primary browser has no need to keep Firefox installed. Firefox should endeavor to fix that. First, Firefox should honor age-old tradition, swallow its pride, and spoof 99% of the Chrome user agent string. That's how upstart web browsers have fought against sites breaking things for them for decades. Second, Firefox should endeavor to be as compatible as possible with Chrome with regard to the DOM and JS, being sneaky if it has to. I think O365 webmail is the first good place to start, since it's widely deployed. USG websites as well, like DFAS MyPay or Marine A-PES do not work well on it. Obviously, it's difficult for Firefox devs to test on these sites, but that's all the more reason to take bug reports seriously.

deafpolygon 3y ago
> First, Firefox should honor age-old tradition, swallow its pride, and spoof 99% of the Chrome user agent string. This leads to the larger issue of not knowing who your visitors actually are. If 75% of all Firefox installations spoof Chrome, then you won't know that they are actually FireFox users. This can drive adoption rates down as they stop caring about making things work on Firefox.
- torstenvl 3y ago
  No. Fragmentation is not a feature of the web, and delusions about developers caring about Firefox and its ~2% of web traffic are not helpful. The way to make sites work on Firefox is to convince them to stop serving broken shit to Firefox. This is the way the web has always worked.
- andrewaylett 3y ago
  It's already the case that companies using "Real User Metrics" will miss many Firefox users -- client-based monitoring is indistinguishable from client-based tracking (intent notwithstanding) with the result that if I need to disable three separate sets of protections (ETP, Privacy Badger, uBlock Origin) before my browser will report my useage of my employer's website. Not everyone using Firefox will be quite so determined as I am, I'm sure. But it's still an issue that I try to raise with people who want to use browser statistics for anything. It's also worth noting that Firefox does spoof its user-agent in some circumstances, if you visit `about:compat` then you can see a list of sites that have user agent tweaks applied to them. See also: webcompat.com
genevra 3y ago
Yeah, hard to recommend a browser that breaks on certain sites for subtle reasons to family members who aren't as tech oriented for instance.
gitaarik 3y ago
Yeah, and apparently Google deliberately makes their sites work worse in Firefox. So for Firefox to by default spoof their user agent to be Chrome for those sites would be great. I actually installed a user agent spoofer plugin for this, User-Agent Switcher.
jmm5 3y ago
MS Office webmail works well for me in Firefox under Ubuntu.
sagarpatil 3y ago
Till the time they fix it, there's this add-on which fixes the issue: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/google-search-fixer/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/google-search...
danaris 3y ago
Ultimately, Firefox can't fix that. The only ones who can are Google, who deliberately degrade the non-Chrome experience on YouTube in some cases.
- torstenvl 3y ago
  Of course Firefox can fix that, the same way web browsers have always fixed it: copying user agent strings. There's a reason Chrome claims to be "Mozilla" What exactly do you think the logic Google implements would be? Why do you think Google wants to get rid of user agent strings?

deafpolygon 3y ago

> First, Firefox should honor age-old tradition, swallow its pride, and spoof 99% of the Chrome user agent string. This leads to the larger issue of not knowing who your visitors actually are. If 75% of all Firefox installations spoof Chrome, then you won't know that they are actually FireFox users. This can drive adoption rates down as they stop caring about making things work on Firefox.

torstenvl 3y ago
No. Fragmentation is not a feature of the web, and delusions about developers caring about Firefox and its ~2% of web traffic are not helpful. The way to make sites work on Firefox is to convince them to stop serving broken shit to Firefox. This is the way the web has always worked.
andrewaylett 3y ago
It's already the case that companies using "Real User Metrics" will miss many Firefox users -- client-based monitoring is indistinguishable from client-based tracking (intent notwithstanding) with the result that if I need to disable three separate sets of protections (ETP, Privacy Badger, uBlock Origin) before my browser will report my useage of my employer's website. Not everyone using Firefox will be quite so determined as I am, I'm sure. But it's still an issue that I try to raise with people who want to use browser statistics for anything. It's also worth noting that Firefox does spoof its user-agent in some circumstances, if you visit `about:compat` then you can see a list of sites that have user agent tweaks applied to them. See also: webcompat.com

genevra 3y ago

Yeah, hard to recommend a browser that breaks on certain sites for subtle reasons to family members who aren't as tech oriented for instance.

gitaarik 3y ago

Yeah, and apparently Google deliberately makes their sites work worse in Firefox. So for Firefox to by default spoof their user agent to be Chrome for those sites would be great. I actually installed a user agent spoofer plugin for this, User-Agent Switcher.

jmm5 3y ago

MS Office webmail works well for me in Firefox under Ubuntu.

sagarpatil 3y ago

Till the time they fix it, there's this add-on which fixes the issue: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/google-search-fixer/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/google-search...

danaris 3y ago

Ultimately, Firefox can't fix that. The only ones who can are Google, who deliberately degrade the non-Chrome experience on YouTube in some cases.

torstenvl 3y ago
Of course Firefox can fix that, the same way web browsers have always fixed it: copying user agent strings. There's a reason Chrome claims to be "Mozilla" What exactly do you think the logic Google implements would be? Why do you think Google wants to get rid of user agent strings?