5 ms·

Tell HN: Firefox is being slowly deprecated by the industry

70 points by gurjeet 7mo ago

I found 2 instances within the last 2 days. Are there other companies doing this? Apple Business says: There’s an error; You’re either on an unsupported browser or viewing this site on a mobile device. Switch to a supported browser. https://business.apple.com https://business.apple.com/abm_unsupported_browser?reason=Browser%20Type https://support.apple.com/guide/apple-business-manager/program-requirements-axm6d9dc7acf/web/ An Immigration Attorneys' company says: Unsupported Browser; Our platform is designed to work exclusively with Google Chrome and does not support other browsers at this time. Please set up /log into your Alma account through Chrome. https://app.tryalma.com/sign_up

RJ000 7mo ago
Who benefits from terminating service like this?
- add-sub-mul-div 7mo ago
  In one of these cases Apple, who has a competing browser that they make tens of billions of dollars with by selling the traffic to Google. It's the top of the surveillance capitalism funnel.
  - gonzalohm 7mo ago
    Surely they are not benefiting if people don't use their website because their browser is not supported
    - politelemon 7mo ago
      They're forcing the use of their browser.
- bawolff 7mo ago
  The company that would have to hire devs to make sure it worked correctly on firefox. The business case for things like this is pretty obvious when firefox usage is so low.
  - xigoi 7mo ago
    A page that works on Chrome will also work on Firefox unless you go out of your way to avoid web standards.
  - ivanjermakov 7mo ago
    Making a website not work in some browsers is additional, not subtractive work.
    - bawolff 7mo ago
      Yes, but it also means that if someone complains you can more easily tell them to shove it. The net can still be less. I don't like it, but i understand why it happens.
Bender 7mo ago
When companies or government offices tell me to use another browser I tell them I can not, dont have administrative access and make them input all the data for me.
- itake 7mo ago
  what should cost you about 15s of your time ends up costing you 1+ hour of your time.
  - stavros 7mo ago
    It's the principle of the thing.
  - dugite-code 7mo ago
    Put your money where your mouth is Be the change you want to see Vote with your wallet These are all sayings emphasizing going out of your way for a social good. This is just more of the same.
  - seba_dos1 7mo ago
    Yes, and?
  - readthenotes1 7mo ago
    It's a gift to a bureaucrat
  - Bender 7mo ago
    I'm retired. For me it is a small sacrifice that may or may not help others as I am known to bring internal and external escalation to the party.
p_ing 7mo ago
This is nothing new for any browser, unless you believe in the mid-late 2000s Chrome was being "slowly deprecated by the industry" for sites that refused to work with Chrome. These are just lazy developers, or developers who don't want to bother testing against FF. It happens. Move on. This is not some industry trend.
- gurjeet 7mo ago
  Oh, but AI has made the cost of development so low! It doesn't cost much to do cross-browser tests anymore. /s :-)
  - MattGaiser 7mo ago
    Well, it never cost much. For the most part you just need to install it into your test framework. The problem is that the value of doing it is essentially none.
    - coffeefirst 7mo ago
      This isn’t true. Firefox users get really salty about this. They really will drop your product.
      - Gud 7mo ago
        Absolutely. I will refuse to do business with anyone who is hostile to the open web.
- cestivan 7mo ago
  [dead]
- xtiansimon 7mo ago
  > “These are just lazy developers…” It appears the system is working as intended.
ggm 7mo ago
What happens if you configure your browser string to lie about your software origins and compatibility?
- gurjeet 7mo ago
  That's a great suggestion! I used the 'User-Agent Switcher' add-on [1] and that seems to have done the trick for both the websites I reported above. (edit: I chose the option 'Windows / Chrome 146' in the add-on's UI). As someone else said here, we should probably chalk it up to laziness on developers' part; maybe there's more to it, but I'll take that explanation and move on :-) [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/uaswitcher/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/uaswitcher/
  - zdragnar 7mo ago
    > we should probably chalk it up to laziness on developers' part Also, developers at many companies don't own their time. They're given a certain amount per feature that they didn't estimate themselves, and the company doesn't give them time to fix Firefox specific bugs because it would cost them more than the user's monetary value is worth compared to other features or bugs.
  - batisteo 7mo ago
    Please use it only for lazy dev website, as it hides the global usage of Firefox
- rationalist 7mo ago
  The websites magically start working and I run into zero issues. The developers are lying and trying to force people to switch browsers.
cozzyd 7mo ago
You would think AlmaLinux would be a supported distribution (and that obviously defaults to Firefox). I only use Chrome for Microsoft Teams there NASA insists on using (Teams doesn't seem to detect my camera in Firefox... And the teams for Linux app was total trash when I tried it, maybe it's better now if it still exists.). Is there a way to stop it's obnoxious trying to be the default browser every time?
- batisteo 7mo ago
  I use the app on Gnome and it works fine, at least for the replacement of Skype (non pro)
UltraSane 7mo ago
Firefox + uBlock Origin is the only way the modern web is still usable.
- rationalist 7mo ago
  I run into this problem when using Firefox + uBlock Origin. The solution is spoofing the user agent in this case.
  - big_toast 7mo ago
    I think the poster is referencing that uBlock Origin does not work with browsers other than Firefox. And that while some sites work poorly (deliberately deprecating Firefox), other sites work very poorly (without uBlock Origin). Presumably spoofing user agents works for now but has its limits.
    - rationalist 7mo ago
      What!? This thread is about "unsupported browser(s)", not anything that uBlock Origin fixes. For what it's worth. I agree with OP which is why Firefox with uBlock Origin is my primary browser.
8cvor6j844qw_d6 7mo ago
Not surprised. A QA team I worked with only tested against Chrome-based browsers and Safari. If users hit issues on Firefox or anything else, support was just told to have them switch browsers.
Animats 7mo ago
The immigration attorney company works from Firefox at https://www.tryalma.com/ or https://www.tryalma.ai https://www.tryalma.ai but not from https://app.tryalma.com https://app.tryalma.com Nothing reachable from https://www.apple.com/ https://www.apple.com/ seems to fail on Firefox.
- rgbrenner 7mo ago
  app.tryalma.com doesn't work on safari either.. says its chrome only. So the story isn't really about firefox.. it's about Chrome's marketshare being high enough that some companies are happy to ignore every other browser.
  - herpdyderp 7mo ago
    Chrome is the new IE!
paxys 7mo ago
Spoof the user agent. I'd bet the vast majority of "only works on XYZ browser" websites will still work.
- batisteo 7mo ago
  I do agree, but at scale it shrink the percieved usage of Firefox (and derivatves) even more
- duckmysick 7mo ago
  There's some irony in Chrome's user agent referencing Mozilla and Gecko for historical compatibility reasons: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/146.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
karlshea 7mo ago
Not saying I like the situation, but Firefox usage is about ~2-3%. That's about where IE 6 and then IE 11 were when everyone was excited they could finally drop them. Why should anyone treat Firefox differently?
- minitech 7mo ago
  People are using Firefox intentionally, vs. using IE because it was preinstalled. Firefox is a maintained browser. IE was hard to support, and Firefox is not. There are a lot of differences.
- wfleming 7mo ago
  I'm with you, but I do think the situation can be characterized differently in a couple important ways: 1. IE was the default browser for many users (i.e. anybody using Windows who didn't know better). 2. IE had a lot of bugs and and was often non-compliant with standards. Those two things combined meant that supporting IE required additional work, and if you didn't put in that work you were going to get users from IE anyway they'd just get frustrated and confused when things broke. So "detect IE and tell them use something else" was at least a reasonable fixed-cost approach to not having users get totally stuck. (And IE went down to 2-3% at least in part because devs revolted against IE earlier and started serving those "don't use IE" messages when its usage was still higher.) Neither factor is really true of FF. It's not the default for any major platform, its user-base at this point is largely power users who won't be easily confused, and outside of some non-standard APIs most sites don't need and some fairly edge-casey stuff, most sites that work on Chrome will work fine on FF as well without alteration. If anything, IME Safari is more likely to need special attention than FF (but of course Safari has much higher market share so it merits that effort). So I totally get not wanting to spend QA budget on FF, and I could understand showing a small banner suggesting you use a different browser, but erroring/completely blocking usage of the site does feel excessive to me, and even a bit mean-spirited since it takes extra effort to detect FF to show the message and prevent using the site! I don't think these sites are going out of their way to block usage of other low-usage browsers (some of which can alter behavior that could break some sites even if they are Chromium-based).
_HMCB_ 7mo ago
I get the unsupported warning even on iOS Safari.
- gurjeet 7mo ago
  That's most likely because they don't support mobile/small-form-factor altogether.
MattGaiser 7mo ago
Every company I have worked for has passed on fixing things that just impact Firefox. In my first job back in 2019, a support ticket came back about a dropdown bug in Firefox. It didn’t even make it to engineering before they told them to switch to Chrome.
bawolff 7mo ago
This is what happens when your usage share is basically a rounding error. I love firefox, i've been using it since version 1.0 to today. However mozilla really has been directionless, its no surprise that nobody cares when the browser has basically devolved into copying everything that chrome does, but a year later and not as good.
- beart 7mo ago
  Firefox is still ahead of Chrome in several areas. - multi account containers - ublock origin (and extensions in general) - extensions on Android Firefox has also recently improved tabs with a number of features. I haven't used Chrome in a long time, so I don't know if these exist there. Firefox just works, and blocks ads, and doesn't randomly decide I'm not allowed to do things it doesn't' approve of anymore (like block ads with ublock origin). What features does Chrome provide in the last year (that presumably would not yet be copied by Firefox)?
  - bawolff 7mo ago
    I think multi container accounts are too niche to move the needle, but mobile extension and better ad block are fair points. > What features does Chrome provide in the last year (that presumably would not yet be copied by Firefox)? That's the thing though, when you are ahead you can coast on being the same. When you are behind you don't have that luxury. You have to be better in some way and not just mildly (i.e. you need some killer app). If marginally better was enough we would all be using plan9. Maybe the ad blocking story can become that for firefox, but i think chrome would have to get a lot more heavy handed before that can really become a marketing win for firefox.
amatecha 7mo ago
Oh well. I just don't use sites that don't load on Firefox. I'm already pretty used to missing out on a lot of websites because I just close websites that show a pop-over modal ad or video ad or anything particularly intrusive like that...
andrewstuart 7mo ago
Use it or lose it folks.
theturtle 7mo ago
[dead]
marc_abonce 7mo ago
One thing we can do to slightly mitigate this as devs is to use Firefox ourselves while working on our job's front-end. Even if the company doesn't prioritize Firefox, we can make sure it works in the browser while doing our normal job. This is what I've been "accidentally" doing throughout my career, not even thinking about helping Firefox support but just because I actually prefer to use Firefox myself. And it's not even extra work because nowadays the feature support in Firefox and Chrome is nearly identical and all the mainstream front-end libraries already support both browsers. In fact, I only remember 2 times in the last 5 years when I found bugs caused by inconsistent browser behaviours and both were quick and easy to amend in the same PR; no ticket nor discussions on prioritization were even needed.
- gurjeet 7mo ago
  Firefox is my default, no matter where I go. I use Firefox even on my family members' laptops, even though the Chrome is pretty much always open on their machines. Time and time again I've shown that Firefox is a better choice compared to Chrome when it comes to flexibility and privacy.
snihalani 7mo ago
I think this is a pact between advertising companies.
politelemon 7mo ago
This isn't unusual for Apple, who appear to be aspiring to Microsoft business practices from a few decades ago. If they cannot be bothered to support you, you can return in kind by not supporting them and their practices either. I don't agree with this post being flagged, but HN seems to suppress anything that's remotely critical of apple, don't be surprised if this is removed.
jerhewet 7mo ago
Browse to https://www.whatismybrowser.com/guides/the-latest-user-agent/chrome https://www.whatismybrowser.com/guides/the-latest-user-agent... and copy the latest UserAgent string for Google Chrome. In Firefox, about:config > general.useragent.override > new string, click +, paste in the value from the website above, click the checkmark. This will work most of the time on the sites that hired lazy, incompetent web developers to design their pages -- washingtonpost.com, lowes.com, and the worst offender of all, homedepot.com.
wooque 7mo ago
Shopify online store editor also doesn't work in Firefox. It's a shame that Firefox is getting sidelined.
EricRiese 7mo ago
I tried to order a tablet from OnePlus. It's impossible to create an account on oneplus.com with Firefox.
lousken 7mo ago
Instead of shoving AI, firefox should focus more on enterprise needs - it lacks in many ways and if sysadmins can't install it, then people won't even know about it.

70 points by gurjeet 7mo ago

RJ000 7mo ago

Who benefits from terminating service like this?

add-sub-mul-div 7mo ago
In one of these cases Apple, who has a competing browser that they make tens of billions of dollars with by selling the traffic to Google. It's the top of the surveillance capitalism funnel.
- gonzalohm 7mo ago
  Surely they are not benefiting if people don't use their website because their browser is not supported
  - politelemon 7mo ago
    They're forcing the use of their browser.
bawolff 7mo ago
The company that would have to hire devs to make sure it worked correctly on firefox. The business case for things like this is pretty obvious when firefox usage is so low.
- xigoi 7mo ago
  A page that works on Chrome will also work on Firefox unless you go out of your way to avoid web standards.
- ivanjermakov 7mo ago
  Making a website not work in some browsers is additional, not subtractive work.
  - bawolff 7mo ago
    Yes, but it also means that if someone complains you can more easily tell them to shove it. The net can still be less. I don't like it, but i understand why it happens.

Bender 7mo ago

When companies or government offices tell me to use another browser I tell them I can not, dont have administrative access and make them input all the data for me.

itake 7mo ago
what should cost you about 15s of your time ends up costing you 1+ hour of your time.
- stavros 7mo ago
  It's the principle of the thing.
- dugite-code 7mo ago
  Put your money where your mouth is Be the change you want to see Vote with your wallet These are all sayings emphasizing going out of your way for a social good. This is just more of the same.
- seba_dos1 7mo ago
  Yes, and?
- readthenotes1 7mo ago
  It's a gift to a bureaucrat
- Bender 7mo ago
  I'm retired. For me it is a small sacrifice that may or may not help others as I am known to bring internal and external escalation to the party.

p_ing 7mo ago

This is nothing new for any browser, unless you believe in the mid-late 2000s Chrome was being "slowly deprecated by the industry" for sites that refused to work with Chrome. These are just lazy developers, or developers who don't want to bother testing against FF. It happens. Move on. This is not some industry trend.

gurjeet 7mo ago
Oh, but AI has made the cost of development so low! It doesn't cost much to do cross-browser tests anymore. /s :-)
- MattGaiser 7mo ago
  Well, it never cost much. For the most part you just need to install it into your test framework. The problem is that the value of doing it is essentially none.
  - coffeefirst 7mo ago
    This isn’t true. Firefox users get really salty about this. They really will drop your product.
    - Gud 7mo ago
      Absolutely. I will refuse to do business with anyone who is hostile to the open web.
cestivan 7mo ago
[dead]
xtiansimon 7mo ago
> “These are just lazy developers…” It appears the system is working as intended.

ggm 7mo ago

What happens if you configure your browser string to lie about your software origins and compatibility?

gurjeet 7mo ago
That's a great suggestion! I used the 'User-Agent Switcher' add-on [1] and that seems to have done the trick for both the websites I reported above. (edit: I chose the option 'Windows / Chrome 146' in the add-on's UI). As someone else said here, we should probably chalk it up to laziness on developers' part; maybe there's more to it, but I'll take that explanation and move on :-) [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/uaswitcher/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/uaswitcher/
- zdragnar 7mo ago
  > we should probably chalk it up to laziness on developers' part Also, developers at many companies don't own their time. They're given a certain amount per feature that they didn't estimate themselves, and the company doesn't give them time to fix Firefox specific bugs because it would cost them more than the user's monetary value is worth compared to other features or bugs.
- batisteo 7mo ago
  Please use it only for lazy dev website, as it hides the global usage of Firefox
rationalist 7mo ago
The websites magically start working and I run into zero issues. The developers are lying and trying to force people to switch browsers.

cozzyd 7mo ago

You would think AlmaLinux would be a supported distribution (and that obviously defaults to Firefox). I only use Chrome for Microsoft Teams there NASA insists on using (Teams doesn't seem to detect my camera in Firefox... And the teams for Linux app was total trash when I tried it, maybe it's better now if it still exists.). Is there a way to stop it's obnoxious trying to be the default browser every time?

batisteo 7mo ago
I use the app on Gnome and it works fine, at least for the replacement of Skype (non pro)

UltraSane 7mo ago

Firefox + uBlock Origin is the only way the modern web is still usable.

rationalist 7mo ago
I run into this problem when using Firefox + uBlock Origin. The solution is spoofing the user agent in this case.
- big_toast 7mo ago
  I think the poster is referencing that uBlock Origin does not work with browsers other than Firefox. And that while some sites work poorly (deliberately deprecating Firefox), other sites work very poorly (without uBlock Origin). Presumably spoofing user agents works for now but has its limits.
  - rationalist 7mo ago
    What!? This thread is about "unsupported browser(s)", not anything that uBlock Origin fixes. For what it's worth. I agree with OP which is why Firefox with uBlock Origin is my primary browser.

8cvor6j844qw_d6 7mo ago

Not surprised. A QA team I worked with only tested against Chrome-based browsers and Safari. If users hit issues on Firefox or anything else, support was just told to have them switch browsers.

Animats 7mo ago

The immigration attorney company works from Firefox at https://www.tryalma.com/ or https://www.tryalma.ai https://www.tryalma.ai but not from https://app.tryalma.com https://app.tryalma.com Nothing reachable from https://www.apple.com/ https://www.apple.com/ seems to fail on Firefox.

rgbrenner 7mo ago
app.tryalma.com doesn't work on safari either.. says its chrome only. So the story isn't really about firefox.. it's about Chrome's marketshare being high enough that some companies are happy to ignore every other browser.
- herpdyderp 7mo ago
  Chrome is the new IE!

paxys 7mo ago

Spoof the user agent. I'd bet the vast majority of "only works on XYZ browser" websites will still work.

batisteo 7mo ago
I do agree, but at scale it shrink the percieved usage of Firefox (and derivatves) even more
duckmysick 7mo ago
There's some irony in Chrome's user agent referencing Mozilla and Gecko for historical compatibility reasons: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/146.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

karlshea 7mo ago

Not saying I like the situation, but Firefox usage is about ~2-3%. That's about where IE 6 and then IE 11 were when everyone was excited they could finally drop them. Why should anyone treat Firefox differently?

minitech 7mo ago
People are using Firefox intentionally, vs. using IE because it was preinstalled. Firefox is a maintained browser. IE was hard to support, and Firefox is not. There are a lot of differences.
wfleming 7mo ago
I'm with you, but I do think the situation can be characterized differently in a couple important ways: 1. IE was the default browser for many users (i.e. anybody using Windows who didn't know better). 2. IE had a lot of bugs and and was often non-compliant with standards. Those two things combined meant that supporting IE required additional work, and if you didn't put in that work you were going to get users from IE anyway they'd just get frustrated and confused when things broke. So "detect IE and tell them use something else" was at least a reasonable fixed-cost approach to not having users get totally stuck. (And IE went down to 2-3% at least in part because devs revolted against IE earlier and started serving those "don't use IE" messages when its usage was still higher.) Neither factor is really true of FF. It's not the default for any major platform, its user-base at this point is largely power users who won't be easily confused, and outside of some non-standard APIs most sites don't need and some fairly edge-casey stuff, most sites that work on Chrome will work fine on FF as well without alteration. If anything, IME Safari is more likely to need special attention than FF (but of course Safari has much higher market share so it merits that effort). So I totally get not wanting to spend QA budget on FF, and I could understand showing a small banner suggesting you use a different browser, but erroring/completely blocking usage of the site does feel excessive to me, and even a bit mean-spirited since it takes extra effort to detect FF to show the message and prevent using the site! I don't think these sites are going out of their way to block usage of other low-usage browsers (some of which can alter behavior that could break some sites even if they are Chromium-based).

_HMCB_ 7mo ago

I get the unsupported warning even on iOS Safari.

gurjeet 7mo ago
That's most likely because they don't support mobile/small-form-factor altogether.

MattGaiser 7mo ago

Every company I have worked for has passed on fixing things that just impact Firefox. In my first job back in 2019, a support ticket came back about a dropdown bug in Firefox. It didn’t even make it to engineering before they told them to switch to Chrome.

bawolff 7mo ago

This is what happens when your usage share is basically a rounding error. I love firefox, i've been using it since version 1.0 to today. However mozilla really has been directionless, its no surprise that nobody cares when the browser has basically devolved into copying everything that chrome does, but a year later and not as good.

beart 7mo ago
Firefox is still ahead of Chrome in several areas. - multi account containers - ublock origin (and extensions in general) - extensions on Android Firefox has also recently improved tabs with a number of features. I haven't used Chrome in a long time, so I don't know if these exist there. Firefox just works, and blocks ads, and doesn't randomly decide I'm not allowed to do things it doesn't' approve of anymore (like block ads with ublock origin). What features does Chrome provide in the last year (that presumably would not yet be copied by Firefox)?
- bawolff 7mo ago
  I think multi container accounts are too niche to move the needle, but mobile extension and better ad block are fair points. > What features does Chrome provide in the last year (that presumably would not yet be copied by Firefox)? That's the thing though, when you are ahead you can coast on being the same. When you are behind you don't have that luxury. You have to be better in some way and not just mildly (i.e. you need some killer app). If marginally better was enough we would all be using plan9. Maybe the ad blocking story can become that for firefox, but i think chrome would have to get a lot more heavy handed before that can really become a marketing win for firefox.

amatecha 7mo ago

Oh well. I just don't use sites that don't load on Firefox. I'm already pretty used to missing out on a lot of websites because I just close websites that show a pop-over modal ad or video ad or anything particularly intrusive like that...

andrewstuart 7mo ago

Use it or lose it folks.

theturtle 7mo ago

[dead]

marc_abonce 7mo ago

One thing we can do to slightly mitigate this as devs is to use Firefox ourselves while working on our job's front-end. Even if the company doesn't prioritize Firefox, we can make sure it works in the browser while doing our normal job. This is what I've been "accidentally" doing throughout my career, not even thinking about helping Firefox support but just because I actually prefer to use Firefox myself. And it's not even extra work because nowadays the feature support in Firefox and Chrome is nearly identical and all the mainstream front-end libraries already support both browsers. In fact, I only remember 2 times in the last 5 years when I found bugs caused by inconsistent browser behaviours and both were quick and easy to amend in the same PR; no ticket nor discussions on prioritization were even needed.

gurjeet 7mo ago
Firefox is my default, no matter where I go. I use Firefox even on my family members' laptops, even though the Chrome is pretty much always open on their machines. Time and time again I've shown that Firefox is a better choice compared to Chrome when it comes to flexibility and privacy.

snihalani 7mo ago

I think this is a pact between advertising companies.

politelemon 7mo ago

This isn't unusual for Apple, who appear to be aspiring to Microsoft business practices from a few decades ago. If they cannot be bothered to support you, you can return in kind by not supporting them and their practices either. I don't agree with this post being flagged, but HN seems to suppress anything that's remotely critical of apple, don't be surprised if this is removed.

jerhewet 7mo ago

Browse to https://www.whatismybrowser.com/guides/the-latest-user-agent/chrome https://www.whatismybrowser.com/guides/the-latest-user-agent... and copy the latest UserAgent string for Google Chrome. In Firefox, about:config > general.useragent.override > new string, click +, paste in the value from the website above, click the checkmark. This will work most of the time on the sites that hired lazy, incompetent web developers to design their pages -- washingtonpost.com, lowes.com, and the worst offender of all, homedepot.com.

wooque 7mo ago

Shopify online store editor also doesn't work in Firefox. It's a shame that Firefox is getting sidelined.

EricRiese 7mo ago

I tried to order a tablet from OnePlus. It's impossible to create an account on oneplus.com with Firefox.

lousken 7mo ago

Instead of shoving AI, firefox should focus more on enterprise needs - it lacks in many ways and if sysadmins can't install it, then people won't even know about it.