Live data from Hacker News

Is it worth supporting Firefox?

reddit.com

51–60 of 224 posts

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#51
This isn't 2002. If you're writing a standards-compliant web page, you're already supporting Firefox (and all other browsers). Why go out of your way, investing the extra effort needed into not supporting a browser?

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#52
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)

Is it really true that they are not allowed on play store because it interferes with googles business model ?

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#53
post #38
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/?

No, because the parent comment here is incorrect. They stated that they are using feature detection, and specifically mention user-agent as something they don't use.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#54
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)

There is a "Brave" browser which is chrome with ad-blocker. But I prefer firefox on all mine devices because of syncing passwords, history and ability to send tabs from desktop to mobile devices.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#56
post #47
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mana…

Atlassian products such as Confluence and Jira are some of those tools where I need to disable uMatrix completely to not get a crazy redirect loop when I try to login. Luckily we're leaving Atlassian quite soon, their sites have been such a pain to use for many reasons.

What are the bug reports on uMatrix for this?

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#57

Yes, it's worth "supporting" Firefox. Just like it's worth it to "support" a standards compatible web browser. I swear we're going backwards in time to IE6 days when everyone built for just one browser and forgot that others existed. Do you really want Google to dictate how the web works? I don't. When Microsoft did this we lost _years_ of meaningful improvements and just recently got the ability to vertically center…

As long as Google keeps pushing forward new useful features with Chrome, people won't care. Even more so if those new features get standardized within a few years. MS dropped the ball by resting on their laurels with IE6+ActiveX (plus the antitrust stuff scared them quite a bit) while the rest of the browser ecosystem innovated and standardized. If MS had instead kept leading the way, things could have played out differently. Instead I feel like we've gone back to IE6 days where there's one browser holding everyone else back, in this case mobile safari (and sometimes desktop safari) causes the most problems in things I work on. IE11 is more tolerable to support for me.

I still fight the good fight every now and again on respecting standards, though I get sad when it seems even the standards compliant browsers implement 99.99% of various standards but then each differ on the leftover .01%, leading to shims or workarounds for everyone. It's definitely better than it once was though -- http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/ is one of my favorite sites.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#59
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what if this publisher never did that? Ad blockers are taking off because of Internet-wide abuses (malware, privacy, gross obnoxiousness). It's a tragedy of the commons. Publishers never got together to regulate themselves so users are now doing it for them.

Why can't we have content based ads that are non-intrusive like television and old print media? Yeah they still interject in the middle of content, but not with the same level of deceit as what some ads and sponsored links do on web media. I would disable my adblocker for sites that have ad campaigns not based on "gross obnoxiousness", privacy intrusions, and disregard for if an advertising party is serving up malwar…

From my POV, it's a race to the bottom. One publisher offered video ads so other publishers felt pushed to do the same.

There was a medium post here a few days ago about the eponymous extension "Adblock". Adblock offered advertisers a paid program ("Acceptable Ads") where their ads would be vetted and whitelisted. The blog post focused on the ethical and legal quandry of double dipping income (users and advertisers) but what you're talking about isn't unheard of.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16997272

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#60
How hard is it to sell a fixed tag or any block of text within an article? Sell it as "this content will stay there for as long as the page is published". The problem is that every major publisher has bought into centralized ad brokers.

Google and Facebooks of the world sell the idea that they can personalize ads better than content producers and so everyone relies on their trackers and javascripts to build content business online. Publishers should know their audience better than ad servers.

This is what is killing the business: content creators stopped caring about their audience.

Post reply on HN