4 ms·

Websites already can barely be assed to care about supporting Firefox users, doing adblocking by default is a great way to get websites to start putting up bann

by dralley 2mo ago

Websites already can barely be assed to care about supporting Firefox users, doing adblocking by default is a great way to get websites to start putting up banners that say "our website does not work with your browser, please switch to Chrome" en-masse. And Mozilla did develop anti-fingerprinting tech, but they can't enable it by default because it breaks lots of websites and when a website doesn't work they're not going to appreciate Mozilla for protecting them, they're going to be pissed that it doesn't work.

swed420 2mo ago
The level of mental gymnastics in this thread denying the extent to which companies like Google (and their puppets like Mozilla) control the internet is too damn high. Fortunately if projects like Ladybird gain enough momentum, websites might be forced to cater to it. Time will tell.
- inigyou 2mo ago
  You know you can make a browser based on Firefox's core and don't need to make a new one from scratch that'll never get past Cloudflare?
  - swed420 2mo ago
    > You know you can make a browser based on Firefox's core If you want to inherit all of Firefox's flaws, I suppose. > and don't need to make a new one from scratch that'll never get past Cloudflare? Considering Cloudflare is a sponsor of Ladybird, something tells me they're going to grant an exception for it.
    - Larrikin 2mo ago
      What flaws exactly? People on here love to moan about Firefox because Mozilla did one thing at some point in the existence of the company they didn't like. But then just cede the Internet to Google and chromium clones because at some point when they were a crappy junior JS dev, Chrome had some better tooling over Firebug so they just got used to testing in one browser. Maybe they also like to remember how Firefox, a decade ago, couldn't handle 1000 tab sessions. I hope Firefox keeps up the fight but HN loves to crap all over them for not being perfect.
      - tombert 2mo ago
        Can’t speak for all users, but at least as of about six months ago, there appears to be a bug in Firefox in NixOS where the shader cache doesn’t appear to be able to write properly, and as such video acceleration doesn’t work. It became most evident when I was trying to watch 360-degree videos in Immich. Entirely possible that this is an issue specific to NixOS or my machine, but because of that issue I switched over to Brave. I would like to go back to Firefox at some point. Maybe I’ll see if I can make a patch to fix video acceleration on NixOS.
        fouc 2mo ago
        the obvious thing to do is keep using firefox as your daily driver, and load up the other browser as needed for the video etc. I'm being tongue-in-cheek here because it seems most people just give up on safari/firefox if one thing doesn't work and go to some chromium-based browser as their default driver. That's sad.
        picofarad 2mo ago
        What you say is what I do, Firefox is open all the time, I switch to brave or edge if ff won't load something. I use adnauseam as adblocker. I have never had chrome on windows 10 or 11; nor chromium. For a year chase.com wouldn't allow me to login from Firefox. Dumb.
        inigyou 2mo ago
        Did you go to your local Chase branch with Firefox on your phone and pretend you have no idea why it doesn't work?
        duskdozer 2mo ago
        I don't understand it. I do keep an ungoogled chromium install around for the few times when I suspect a site is intentionally breaking itself for firefox, and it's not a big deal to open on occasion. Otherwise, if you value customization at all, you have to use firefox.
    - chironjit 2mo ago
      Sadly Cloudflare's browser detector is the main barrier to using Servo for most websites, so they're not the angel they seem
  - bossyTeacher 2mo ago
    > You know you can make a browser based on Firefox's core and don't need to make a new one from scratch that'll never get past Cloudflare? Under some definitions, the browser IS the core. You are bound at a fundamental level to your parent if you build on someone else's foundations. Firefox is probably a great one to do it but worth knowing that someone else owns the land upon which you stand.
- Plont 2mo ago
  They literally didn't deny that. They made a separate point you appear not to have actually read. Regardless, I don't want baked-in Firefox adblocking in part because I don't trust Mozilla with that task either. They'd absolutely end up allowing their own "acceptable" telemetry and ads. Even if they didn't, it would be unlikely to ever be as effective as Ublock Origin. Much like how Chromium browsers' built-in adblocking is barely anything in comparison, even on Manifest V2. And yet, for now, Firefox and Mozilla is by far the lesser evil. I like a few of the Chromium browsers well enough, but they are ultimately at the mercy of Google. I hope Ladybird does well, too.
  - swed420 2mo ago
    Their separate point was ignored because it was an irrelevant tangent. > Regardless, I don't want baked-in Firefox adblocking in part because I don't trust Mozilla with that task either. This is in a thread about how we should be happy that FF is vetting code for us. Do we trust them or don't we? > And yet, for now, Firefox and Mozilla is by far the lesser evil. I'm instinctively tempted to agree, but the difference is so negligible at this point that the only sign I would is the fact I'm still using FF due to momentum (as well as Ladybird not being ready from prime time yet). FF/Mozilla has proven itself to be controlled opposition, so I'm not very interested in games of "lesser-of-two-evils" abuser logic that has infected politics and many other spheres in a race to the bottom.
    - aaplok 2mo ago
      > Do we trust them or don't we? GP trusts them for reviewing external extension code, and ensure that it does not contain malware, but not for not inserting exception to their own telemetry if they wrote the code themselves. Or, more likely, they feel that having two independent actors collaborating on the extension (one by writing and the other by reviewing) yields a more trustworthy outcome than either actor on their own.
      - swed420 2mo ago
        That was a rhetorical question. Mozilla have given us plenty of reasons to not trust them, which makes it hilarious that anybody would think it's noteworthy they're reviewing the code of Raymond Hill of all people.
- bossyTeacher 2mo ago
  > Fortunately if projects like Ladybird gain enough momentum, websites might be forced to cater to it. Time will tell. Ladybird has corporate sponsors too. Sponsorship is influence. Obviously, the more sponsorships you have the less influence an individual one have but it is worth knowing.
  - swed420 2mo ago
    True, but it ultimately depends on the terms of the sponsorship. One would hope that a project like Ladybird (which is motivated to compete with a product which was ruined by Google's sponsorship) would choose those terms carefully.
Grom_PE 2mo ago
Websites blocking Firefox because of ad blocking has happened before: https://web.archive.org/web/20070817224229/http://whyfirefoxisblocked.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20070817224229/http://whyfirefox...
- VCFundedGenYer 2mo ago
  Very, very easily defeated by a user agent switcher. Snapchat tries to block Firefox, but all you have to do is fuzz the agent to say you're Chrome and then you're in with no issues.
cookiengineer 2mo ago
With a normal Firefox on desktop on Linux, I get unsolvable recaptchas all the time, especially on cloudflare pages. Ironically, if I fake instead a chromium to be on Windows (UA and Sec-CH headers), I am allowed most of the time even though my TCP fingerprint must mismatch then. It's annoying to see what the normal web has become. Can't even read news anymore. Ironically, all these bot defenses make it easier for bots to scrape their website, but make it harder for actual users to use them. The only bot defense web app firewall that still works with Firefox seems to be Anubis. Pretty much all others autoflag Linux users as bot users, which feels insane if you think about less web developers must know about how botnets work.
- happymellon 2mo ago
  > With a normal Firefox on desktop on Linux, I get unsolvable recaptchas all the time, especially on cloudflare pages. I get this with Chrome on MacOS. I'm becoming more convinced that Cloudflare is the bane of the internet.
- notpushkin 2mo ago
  > I get unsolvable recaptchas all the time, especially on cloudflare pages. If you really mean reCAPTCHA (the one with a “select all squares that have X” kinda challenges), then Cloudflare hasn’t used that for quite a while now. archive.today uses a Cloudflare-looking (old style) page with a reCAPTCHA (and they do serve it quite often), but I don’t think I’ve seen other sites do that.
  - Macha 2mo ago
    No you can get literally unsolveable captchas with cloudflare. You tick the box and it just refreshes and displays the unticked box again. Or people it on gateway endpoints that just return plain text errors (Humble does this).
    - inigyou 2mo ago
      There's code that makes it do something different after 100+ failed retries but you can speed it up by editing the _cf_chl_rc_* cookie (which is just a number). I haven't yet worked out what it does differently.
somenameforme 2mo ago
Brave has native ad-block and anti finger-printing, enabled by default, and the web works excellently as in I don't know of a single site that doesn't work with it.
- moebrowne 2mo ago
  Not saying your wrong, but the number, and type, of sites you browse is going to be a very narrow slice of the sites that all Firefox users browse
- Medowar 2mo ago
  Brave is based on Chromium and inherits basically all compability, that this brings. Firefox with Gecko is a different engine entirely and that sometimes causes compatibility issues or different behaviour, that websites have to account for.
- dbspin 2mo ago
  Brave's ad block is pretty ineffectual by itself. For example it doesn't block youtube adverts. Recently switched to Firefox with Ublock origin, and loving it. So much more efficient and quick than it was back in the day when we all switched to Chrome.
  - tejohnso 2mo ago
    I never see YouTube ads since switching to Brave.
  - wyclif 2mo ago
    For example it doesn't block youtube adverts Pretty sure that's not true. I don't see any YT adverts when using Brave, and I don't have any extensions installed.
    - somenameforme 2mo ago
      It definitely blocks YouTube ads.
    - 2mo ago
tomkarho 2mo ago
> start putting up banners that say "our website does not work with your browser, please switch to Chrome" That's how IE 6 was killed.
- pjmlp 2mo ago
  It was killed by a lawsuit, mostly. Also FE devs using all new Chrome shinny APIs, and their Electron junk are also to blame, and they aren't going to throw their toys away.
  - tentacleuno 2mo ago
    If nothing else, I really do hope that the greater AI usage leads to more adoption (and hopefully interest) of native frameworks.
    - pjmlp 2mo ago
      If only, everyone brags about Claude and Fable, yet they can't do anything better than Electron and React for TUIs.
- dspillett 2mo ago
  The final death of IE6 was because corporates finally stopped using it⁰ and the reason for that had nothing to do with sites/apps refusing to work. If we'd said "we don't support IE6" they'd either say "the contract we signed years ago somehow says otherwise" or "fair enough, we'll use someone else's solution then". What killed it was IE6 not supporting TLS1.0 out of the box or TLS1.1+ at all, and that started to make them fail external audits. After years of telling them IE6 was holding us back implementing best-practise security on their instances of our apps¹ and being ignored because doing anything about it their side was too much hassle, external auditors started refusing to give them relevant certificates & such because of their systems not being up to best practise (or even good practise by that point!) and suddenly they made the effort to no longer have anyone in their orgs using IE6. -------- [0] source: I was working on software serving the banking industry (customer facing & investment sides, not trading) around that time and years either side [1] Even having annual conversations like: ! The pen test results say you should disable anything below TLS1.0 (and later 1.1), and you haven't. Please do. ? Are you sure? We'd *really* like to, as we've repeatedly mentioned, but that will block your IE6 users. ! Yes! You must follow the recommendations! ? Excellent. Done. [a short time passes] ! Your application is broken for some of our users! ? Yep. They are using IE6 without TLS enabled. ? Either you need to upgrade their configurations or tell us, in writing please, to break from best practise and reenable the older protocols. [another short time later] ! Please reenable the older protocols.
kazinator 2mo ago
> banners that say "our website does not work with your browser, please switch to Chrome" Which in practice means "switch to using a Firefox extension which fakes looking like Chrome, and just to selected shitty sites like ours".
- HappMacDonald 2mo ago
  Which in practice would only be executed by the same crowd of people who would have opted-in to the security features on the first pass.
  - OtomotO 2mo ago
    Which in turn should be built into the browser and done automatically
    - drabbiticus 2mo ago
      I don't think Firefox should automatically spoof a Chrome user agent.
      - tux3 2mo ago
        There's a long tradition of browsers doing exactly that. The Chrome user agent starts with Mozilla/5.0, ends with Safari, claims to be like Gecko, based on KHTML, and somewhere in there is the string Chrome. That was done exactly because people were trying to gate which browsers could or couldn't see their page by name, instead of by missing functionality.
      - OtomotO 2mo ago
        If a site doesn't work, I disagree. It should. The web is becoming a monopoly anyway... a contradiction to what web once meant.
  - kazinator 2mo ago
    It would be executed by anyone who experiences a problem using a site with Firefox and asks for help about it in a forum, or chat AI, or finds a YT video about it, etc. Non-technical people do follow recommendations like installing an extension to help with a problem. Especially if they see the same recommendation from multiple sources, and testimonials as to its efficacy.
PunchyHamster 2mo ago
we have clause in deal with clients about browser support (IIRC 5% or something like that). FF was just mismanaged so badly that the usage dropped so far into low single digit % it's not the question of maliciously not supporting it, it's the question of not wasting time on browser barely anyone of actual users use. So, most sites work, but are never tested on FF, because there is no point, client won't pay for it.

by dralley 2mo ago

swed420 2mo ago

The level of mental gymnastics in this thread denying the extent to which companies like Google (and their puppets like Mozilla) control the internet is too damn high. Fortunately if projects like Ladybird gain enough momentum, websites might be forced to cater to it. Time will tell.

inigyou 2mo ago
You know you can make a browser based on Firefox's core and don't need to make a new one from scratch that'll never get past Cloudflare?
- swed420 2mo ago
  > You know you can make a browser based on Firefox's core If you want to inherit all of Firefox's flaws, I suppose. > and don't need to make a new one from scratch that'll never get past Cloudflare? Considering Cloudflare is a sponsor of Ladybird, something tells me they're going to grant an exception for it.
  - Larrikin 2mo ago
    What flaws exactly? People on here love to moan about Firefox because Mozilla did one thing at some point in the existence of the company they didn't like. But then just cede the Internet to Google and chromium clones because at some point when they were a crappy junior JS dev, Chrome had some better tooling over Firebug so they just got used to testing in one browser. Maybe they also like to remember how Firefox, a decade ago, couldn't handle 1000 tab sessions. I hope Firefox keeps up the fight but HN loves to crap all over them for not being perfect.
    - tombert 2mo ago
      Can’t speak for all users, but at least as of about six months ago, there appears to be a bug in Firefox in NixOS where the shader cache doesn’t appear to be able to write properly, and as such video acceleration doesn’t work. It became most evident when I was trying to watch 360-degree videos in Immich. Entirely possible that this is an issue specific to NixOS or my machine, but because of that issue I switched over to Brave. I would like to go back to Firefox at some point. Maybe I’ll see if I can make a patch to fix video acceleration on NixOS.
      - fouc 2mo ago
        the obvious thing to do is keep using firefox as your daily driver, and load up the other browser as needed for the video etc. I'm being tongue-in-cheek here because it seems most people just give up on safari/firefox if one thing doesn't work and go to some chromium-based browser as their default driver. That's sad.
        picofarad 2mo ago
        What you say is what I do, Firefox is open all the time, I switch to brave or edge if ff won't load something. I use adnauseam as adblocker. I have never had chrome on windows 10 or 11; nor chromium. For a year chase.com wouldn't allow me to login from Firefox. Dumb.
        inigyou 2mo ago
        Did you go to your local Chase branch with Firefox on your phone and pretend you have no idea why it doesn't work?
        duskdozer 2mo ago
        I don't understand it. I do keep an ungoogled chromium install around for the few times when I suspect a site is intentionally breaking itself for firefox, and it's not a big deal to open on occasion. Otherwise, if you value customization at all, you have to use firefox.
  - chironjit 2mo ago
    Sadly Cloudflare's browser detector is the main barrier to using Servo for most websites, so they're not the angel they seem
- bossyTeacher 2mo ago
  > You know you can make a browser based on Firefox's core and don't need to make a new one from scratch that'll never get past Cloudflare? Under some definitions, the browser IS the core. You are bound at a fundamental level to your parent if you build on someone else's foundations. Firefox is probably a great one to do it but worth knowing that someone else owns the land upon which you stand.
Plont 2mo ago
They literally didn't deny that. They made a separate point you appear not to have actually read. Regardless, I don't want baked-in Firefox adblocking in part because I don't trust Mozilla with that task either. They'd absolutely end up allowing their own "acceptable" telemetry and ads. Even if they didn't, it would be unlikely to ever be as effective as Ublock Origin. Much like how Chromium browsers' built-in adblocking is barely anything in comparison, even on Manifest V2. And yet, for now, Firefox and Mozilla is by far the lesser evil. I like a few of the Chromium browsers well enough, but they are ultimately at the mercy of Google. I hope Ladybird does well, too.
- swed420 2mo ago
  Their separate point was ignored because it was an irrelevant tangent. > Regardless, I don't want baked-in Firefox adblocking in part because I don't trust Mozilla with that task either. This is in a thread about how we should be happy that FF is vetting code for us. Do we trust them or don't we? > And yet, for now, Firefox and Mozilla is by far the lesser evil. I'm instinctively tempted to agree, but the difference is so negligible at this point that the only sign I would is the fact I'm still using FF due to momentum (as well as Ladybird not being ready from prime time yet). FF/Mozilla has proven itself to be controlled opposition, so I'm not very interested in games of "lesser-of-two-evils" abuser logic that has infected politics and many other spheres in a race to the bottom.
  - aaplok 2mo ago
    > Do we trust them or don't we? GP trusts them for reviewing external extension code, and ensure that it does not contain malware, but not for not inserting exception to their own telemetry if they wrote the code themselves. Or, more likely, they feel that having two independent actors collaborating on the extension (one by writing and the other by reviewing) yields a more trustworthy outcome than either actor on their own.
    - swed420 2mo ago
      That was a rhetorical question. Mozilla have given us plenty of reasons to not trust them, which makes it hilarious that anybody would think it's noteworthy they're reviewing the code of Raymond Hill of all people.
bossyTeacher 2mo ago
> Fortunately if projects like Ladybird gain enough momentum, websites might be forced to cater to it. Time will tell. Ladybird has corporate sponsors too. Sponsorship is influence. Obviously, the more sponsorships you have the less influence an individual one have but it is worth knowing.
- swed420 2mo ago
  True, but it ultimately depends on the terms of the sponsorship. One would hope that a project like Ladybird (which is motivated to compete with a product which was ruined by Google's sponsorship) would choose those terms carefully.

Grom_PE 2mo ago

Websites blocking Firefox because of ad blocking has happened before: https://web.archive.org/web/20070817224229/http://whyfirefoxisblocked.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20070817224229/http://whyfirefox...

VCFundedGenYer 2mo ago
Very, very easily defeated by a user agent switcher. Snapchat tries to block Firefox, but all you have to do is fuzz the agent to say you're Chrome and then you're in with no issues.

cookiengineer 2mo ago

With a normal Firefox on desktop on Linux, I get unsolvable recaptchas all the time, especially on cloudflare pages. Ironically, if I fake instead a chromium to be on Windows (UA and Sec-CH headers), I am allowed most of the time even though my TCP fingerprint must mismatch then. It's annoying to see what the normal web has become. Can't even read news anymore. Ironically, all these bot defenses make it easier for bots to scrape their website, but make it harder for actual users to use them. The only bot defense web app firewall that still works with Firefox seems to be Anubis. Pretty much all others autoflag Linux users as bot users, which feels insane if you think about less web developers must know about how botnets work.

happymellon 2mo ago
> With a normal Firefox on desktop on Linux, I get unsolvable recaptchas all the time, especially on cloudflare pages. I get this with Chrome on MacOS. I'm becoming more convinced that Cloudflare is the bane of the internet.
notpushkin 2mo ago
> I get unsolvable recaptchas all the time, especially on cloudflare pages. If you really mean reCAPTCHA (the one with a “select all squares that have X” kinda challenges), then Cloudflare hasn’t used that for quite a while now. archive.today uses a Cloudflare-looking (old style) page with a reCAPTCHA (and they do serve it quite often), but I don’t think I’ve seen other sites do that.
- Macha 2mo ago
  No you can get literally unsolveable captchas with cloudflare. You tick the box and it just refreshes and displays the unticked box again. Or people it on gateway endpoints that just return plain text errors (Humble does this).
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    There's code that makes it do something different after 100+ failed retries but you can speed it up by editing the _cf_chl_rc_* cookie (which is just a number). I haven't yet worked out what it does differently.

somenameforme 2mo ago

Brave has native ad-block and anti finger-printing, enabled by default, and the web works excellently as in I don't know of a single site that doesn't work with it.

moebrowne 2mo ago
Not saying your wrong, but the number, and type, of sites you browse is going to be a very narrow slice of the sites that all Firefox users browse
Medowar 2mo ago
Brave is based on Chromium and inherits basically all compability, that this brings. Firefox with Gecko is a different engine entirely and that sometimes causes compatibility issues or different behaviour, that websites have to account for.
dbspin 2mo ago
Brave's ad block is pretty ineffectual by itself. For example it doesn't block youtube adverts. Recently switched to Firefox with Ublock origin, and loving it. So much more efficient and quick than it was back in the day when we all switched to Chrome.
- tejohnso 2mo ago
  I never see YouTube ads since switching to Brave.
- wyclif 2mo ago
  For example it doesn't block youtube adverts Pretty sure that's not true. I don't see any YT adverts when using Brave, and I don't have any extensions installed.
  - somenameforme 2mo ago
    It definitely blocks YouTube ads.
  - 2mo ago

tomkarho 2mo ago

> start putting up banners that say "our website does not work with your browser, please switch to Chrome" That's how IE 6 was killed.

pjmlp 2mo ago
It was killed by a lawsuit, mostly. Also FE devs using all new Chrome shinny APIs, and their Electron junk are also to blame, and they aren't going to throw their toys away.
- tentacleuno 2mo ago
  If nothing else, I really do hope that the greater AI usage leads to more adoption (and hopefully interest) of native frameworks.
  - pjmlp 2mo ago
    If only, everyone brags about Claude and Fable, yet they can't do anything better than Electron and React for TUIs.
dspillett 2mo ago
The final death of IE6 was because corporates finally stopped using it⁰ and the reason for that had nothing to do with sites/apps refusing to work. If we'd said "we don't support IE6" they'd either say "the contract we signed years ago somehow says otherwise" or "fair enough, we'll use someone else's solution then". What killed it was IE6 not supporting TLS1.0 out of the box or TLS1.1+ at all, and that started to make them fail external audits. After years of telling them IE6 was holding us back implementing best-practise security on their instances of our apps¹ and being ignored because doing anything about it their side was too much hassle, external auditors started refusing to give them relevant certificates & such because of their systems not being up to best practise (or even good practise by that point!) and suddenly they made the effort to no longer have anyone in their orgs using IE6. -------- [0] source: I was working on software serving the banking industry (customer facing & investment sides, not trading) around that time and years either side [1] Even having annual conversations like: ! The pen test results say you should disable anything below TLS1.0 (and later 1.1), and you haven't. Please do. ? Are you sure? We'd *really* like to, as we've repeatedly mentioned, but that will block your IE6 users. ! Yes! You must follow the recommendations! ? Excellent. Done. [a short time passes] ! Your application is broken for some of our users! ? Yep. They are using IE6 without TLS enabled. ? Either you need to upgrade their configurations or tell us, in writing please, to break from best practise and reenable the older protocols. [another short time later] ! Please reenable the older protocols.

kazinator 2mo ago

> banners that say "our website does not work with your browser, please switch to Chrome" Which in practice means "switch to using a Firefox extension which fakes looking like Chrome, and just to selected shitty sites like ours".

HappMacDonald 2mo ago
Which in practice would only be executed by the same crowd of people who would have opted-in to the security features on the first pass.
- OtomotO 2mo ago
  Which in turn should be built into the browser and done automatically
  - drabbiticus 2mo ago
    I don't think Firefox should automatically spoof a Chrome user agent.
    - tux3 2mo ago
      There's a long tradition of browsers doing exactly that. The Chrome user agent starts with Mozilla/5.0, ends with Safari, claims to be like Gecko, based on KHTML, and somewhere in there is the string Chrome. That was done exactly because people were trying to gate which browsers could or couldn't see their page by name, instead of by missing functionality.
    - OtomotO 2mo ago
      If a site doesn't work, I disagree. It should. The web is becoming a monopoly anyway... a contradiction to what web once meant.
- kazinator 2mo ago
  It would be executed by anyone who experiences a problem using a site with Firefox and asks for help about it in a forum, or chat AI, or finds a YT video about it, etc. Non-technical people do follow recommendations like installing an extension to help with a problem. Especially if they see the same recommendation from multiple sources, and testimonials as to its efficacy.

PunchyHamster 2mo ago

we have clause in deal with clients about browser support (IIRC 5% or something like that). FF was just mismanaged so badly that the usage dropped so far into low single digit % it's not the question of maliciously not supporting it, it's the question of not wasting time on browser barely anyone of actual users use. So, most sites work, but are never tested on FF, because there is no point, client won't pay for it.