Is it worth supporting Firefox? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#31

Post by slezyr » Mon, May 07, 2018, 1:29 PM UTC

johnchristopher wrote: post #14

> I work for a major publisher. Ad-blockers are starting to hurt our revenue big time. No. What's hurting your edit:employer's revenue is years of blinking GIFs, auto-play videos and misleading links thrown between paragraphs. That's the first reason why I started using ad-blockers 15 years ago. The privacy issue is a recent thing. > We're doing a redesign now. Manager says that we should just discourage the users of…

> But that'd just bring chrome users who use ad-block.

There is no ad-block on _mobile_ chrome. Maybe they talk about mobile clients here?

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#32

Post by rsoto » Mon, May 07, 2018, 1:29 PM UTC

> Extension cannot mimic everything. There are far too many features. NaCl, other css values. Also we use obfuscated js to resist reverse engineering. There are like 100 features, and more in future that'll be chrome specific. Average time to reverse engineer a 10mb obfuscated js file is like a 1 month. We're safe for 10 years. I'm against this shit tho.

Not to be dismissive, but this sounds like he's trolling. One thing is not actively supporting one browser because «it's at the bottom of the list» and another thing is actively trying to detect it.

Also I don't think he understands what obfuscated JS means, and is he seriously talking about having a 10MB JS file? Just for a major publisher? For comparison: NYT's home page is 1.6MB, the whole document. The thing that totally gives it's trolling away is the 10 years «safe thing».

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#33

Post by _jal » Mon, May 07, 2018, 1:31 PM UTC

johnchristopher wrote: post #14

> I work for a major publisher. Ad-blockers are starting to hurt our revenue big time. No. What's hurting your edit:employer's revenue is years of blinking GIFs, auto-play videos and misleading links thrown between paragraphs. That's the first reason why I started using ad-blockers 15 years ago. The privacy issue is a recent thing. > We're doing a redesign now. Manager says that we should just discourage the users of…

Just a datapoint: if you "discourage" my browser, I go away and don't come back. Same with EME - I will not need your efforts in my life.

I've yet to find a site so great that I'll disable security or switch browsers to use them. (Work is an exception; somehow there's always some crappy site with needy requirements. But that's my employer's browser/computer, and the sites aren't major publishers.)

So I hope your manager did their cost-benefit well. I don't know too many publishers in a position to be selective about their readers. But I suspect I know who you're talking about, and won't personally won't miss any of their properties.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#34

Post by mathieubordere » Mon, May 07, 2018, 1:31 PM UTC

So, why would your manager want to optimize for the browser with the highest average revenue per user?

e.g. a browser with 1 user that generates $100 vs a browser with 1K users that generate $1 on average. Your manager would optimize for the former?

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#35

Post by Matt3o12_ » Mon, May 07, 2018, 1:31 PM UTC

3131s wrote: post #23

seanalltogether wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit broke for me on Firefox whenever they moved to ssl permanently, hitting the back button always reloads the page rather then going back to the cached state it was in so comments show uncollapsed. HN doesn't seem to have this problem.

I've noticed that too, is it only a Firefox thing? It's very annoying.

I think it is a reddit thing. I’m pretty sure I observed the same behavior when I used chrome (thought this was almost a year ago) and this still happens on my iPad using safari.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#36

Post by taneq » Mon, May 07, 2018, 1:33 PM UTC

DanWaterworth wrote: post #26

sevensor wrote: post #16

Firefox is a standards-conforming web browser. If some nincompoop puts a web page out there and my browser can't render it, I'm not going back. I make an exception for restaurant websites, because I want to see the menu and they all seem to have been defrauded by the same bad designer.

The rule of thumb for restaurants is the poorer the website, the better the food. Restaurants with Flash-only pages that haven't been updated for 15 years are the best. Also, the cleaner the bathrooms, the cleaner the kitchen.

That's why I only go to restaurants whose website is a menu dropped in my letter box every couple of months.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#37

Post by drb91 » Mon, May 07, 2018, 1:34 PM UTC

sevensor wrote: post #16

Firefox is a standards-conforming web browser. If some nincompoop puts a web page out there and my browser can't render it, I'm not going back. I make an exception for restaurant websites, because I want to see the menu and they all seem to have been defrauded by the same bad designer.

Hell, in the short term, this could improve the internet for Firefox users.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#38

Post by taneq » Mon, May 07, 2018, 1:35 PM UTC

Qwertie wrote: post #25

sevensor wrote: post #16

Firefox is a standards-conforming web browser. If some nincompoop puts a web page out there and my browser can't render it, I'm not going back. I make an exception for restaurant websites, because I want to see the menu and they all seem to have been defrauded by the same bad designer.

The comments said that the reason the page doesn't work on firefox is they detect the user agent for firefox and don't load the css if its found.

Could this finally be the end of every user-agent string starting with Mozilla/?

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#39

Post by xori » Mon, May 07, 2018, 1:37 PM UTC

DanWaterworth wrote: post #26

sevensor wrote: post #16

Firefox is a standards-conforming web browser. If some nincompoop puts a web page out there and my browser can't render it, I'm not going back. I make an exception for restaurant websites, because I want to see the menu and they all seem to have been defrauded by the same bad designer.

The rule of thumb for restaurants is the poorer the website, the better the food. Restaurants with Flash-only pages that haven't been updated for 15 years are the best. Also, the cleaner the bathrooms, the cleaner the kitchen.

> The rule of thumb for restaurants is the poorer the website, the better the food.

While I think this is a stupid rule, I can't deny that for my top 10 restaurants it's true.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#40

Post by bansheehash » Mon, May 07, 2018, 1:37 PM UTC

slezyr wrote: post #31

johnchristopher wrote: post #14

> I work for a major publisher. Ad-blockers are starting to hurt our revenue big time. No. What's hurting your edit:employer's revenue is years of blinking GIFs, auto-play videos and misleading links thrown between paragraphs. That's the first reason why I started using ad-blockers 15 years ago. The privacy issue is a recent thing. > We're doing a redesign now. Manager says that we should just discourage the users of…

> But that'd just bring chrome users who use ad-block. There is no ad-block on _mobile_ chrome. Maybe they talk about mobile clients here?

If you're on Android, try a firewall-based system-wide adblocker like Blokada (https://blokada.org/index.html). It's very effective at blocking ads, including on mobile Chrome, and it's grandma-friendly (doesn't need root, nothing to maintain)