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Firefox on the brink?

brycewray.com

671–680 of 840 posts

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#671
post #668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. There are a plethora of browsers out there, and no one can be expected to test against all of them. As long as we go for a "government conforming to industry" mentality, then the cutoff has to be somewhere, and if Firefox doesn't make that cutoff, then that's all there is to it. No browser deserves special treatment here. And this is as true for Firefox as it is for Lynx.

Well, that’s what you get when you’re a Public Service. There’s an idiot living on the top of a mountain that needs some basic infrastructure? You got to get your truck out and build that supply line. You won’t do it? Then the government that granted you that Public Service status has renounced sovereignty on that part of the country

Exactly, what a weird train of thought from government workers. Seems like the mission has been lost

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have had several sites refuse to work properly (American Airlines maybe? It was some airline) with every single add-in disabled and with every security feature I could find disabled. I am with you that it's super rare, I have only had to open chrome due to it being that bad a few times, usually I just need to disable javascript blocking or enable more cookies. But there are legitimately sites that are just so badly…

I just bought tickets on AA a few months ago with Firefox and didn't have any issues

Echoing this. Just bought AA tickets through the airline’s website yesterday using FF and it worked.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#673

> I surely hope I’m wrong about this, but I fear I’m not. I suspect that the remaining Firefox users are likely to be quite "sticky". If there are websites that don't work in Firefox (but work in Chrome and Safari), I haven't yet blundered into one. My guess is that those would be mainly corporate intranet sites/apps, which I don't have to deal with. No platform deploys Firefox by default; you have to deliberately ch…

Slight nitpick but you can get edge on both Mac and Linux. They package both a deb and an rpm here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/business/download?form=... and it is also available on Mac. The main reason for using this is to run edge on windows subsystem for Linux on windows and wonder if anyone would have predicted that in the year 2000. (I actually have edge installed on some Linux machines as well, but it…

Hah! I am now better-informed. Thanks.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#674
post #117

I switched over after the Manifest v3 debacle, and after a couple of months, I wonder if the implications of using a browser with a lower market share are overblown. I haven't encountered any site that misbehaves, and the only missing feature so far is within the Google Drive web app because it uses a Chrome-only extension [1]. Maybe the ongoing standardization of the web shows its effects here, and using a standard-…

[deleted]

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#675

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reason people test with different browsers is not that they want to use non-standard features, it's that even standard features often do not work in certain browsers. This is exactly why sites should be tested for their conformance with the standard rather than with specific browsers. Testing against specific browsers just encourages browser-makers to continue to avoid fixing their shit.

If you want to make money or reach constituents, this isn't actually a viable option for anyone. When people complain that they can't submit their DMV forms (or whatever) and you say, "well we followed all the standards, go find another browser" and they say "which one" and you say "I don't know, we didn't test with any browsers, we just test against the standard" who do you think they'll blame?

Given the history of standardisation for promoting interoperability includes numerous success stories and a pattern of resistance fading over time I don't see why we should expect web standards to be any different. The level of functionality needed by a typical government site has worked close to 100% correctly in literally every major browser for literally decades.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. There are a plethora of browsers out there, and no one can be expected to test against all of them. As long as we go for a "government conforming to industry" mentality, then the cutoff has to be somewhere, and if Firefox doesn't make that cutoff, then that's all there is to it. No browser deserves special treatment here. And this is as true for Firefox as it is for Lynx.

A long time ago we had something called "standards" that were intended to solve this problem. The idea was that developers of different browsers would get together in a neutral forum and agree common ground that everyone would support. That way developers could reliably build upon that common ground and expect their products to operate correctly in any browser. It was an excellent idea that heralded the success of th…

Nonsense. Only completely trivial standards work without testing actually implementations against each other.

How do you think WiFi devices work together? Is it because WiFi is a standard? Not really - it's because WiFi vendors all test their chips against other WiFi chips on the market.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#677

Firefox was already statistically irrelevant 5 years ago. On our dashboard, a global e-commerce site with billions of views per year, it's not even in the top 10. Even regional browsers sometimes surpass it. Firefox is also no longer a developer-default browser. This too has been true for years now. There's very little Mozilla can do about it. Chrome and Safari are big because they're shipped as a default to platform…

Sorry, nothing personal. But as a 100% Firefox user I would very likely avoid to visit any global ecommerce site. It's the same world I want to avoid by not using Google products.

I know I am a small minority, but you don't even see that minority.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#678
post #117

I switched over after the Manifest v3 debacle, and after a couple of months, I wonder if the implications of using a browser with a lower market share are overblown. I haven't encountered any site that misbehaves, and the only missing feature so far is within the Google Drive web app because it uses a Chrome-only extension [1]. Maybe the ongoing standardization of the web shows its effects here, and using a standard-…

Not sure how so many in the thread are using FF problem-free? In the past few years I've encountered more and more sites that don't work properly with FF. Most of the issues are around modals that won't dismiss or even display at all. Other issues I can't identify, but the site becomes unresponsive or some content won't load. I think the Ticketmaster ticket selection page was the last one I couldn't use at all with F…

Another FF user here. Very, very few issues.

I had a problem with a shopping web-site the other day. I disabled uBlock origin, and then all extensions, but it still refused to work. I thought I'd finally found one of these mythical "Chrome-only" sites, but no - exactly the same broken site in Chrome, so the site was just totally broken. Nothing to do with FF.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#679
post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's absurd. Firefox has been at parity with Chrome for a long time, both are extremely mature technologies. Sometimes one is ahead of the other in one way or the other, but they are largely identical. The exception is when Google or Microsoft "accidentally" break their websites on Firefox. It's pure fantasy to insist that the market share of Firefox is primarily driven by technical merit. Otherwise, you couldn't e…

Multiple profiles from chrome is such an important feature for me, I don't know people cope without it.

Firefox has separate profiles and multiple containers per profile.
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