Comment by maest
There are definitely website that do not support Firefox, especially in the US.
Whole portions of the Verizon website, for example. Or the website of a well known kindergarden I was researching recently.
There are definitely website that do not support Firefox, especially in the US.
Whole portions of the Verizon website, for example. Or the website of a well known kindergarden I was researching recently.
> And, if I had to wager, you could bypass a lot of this "doesn't work on Firefox" by just changing your user agent.
Indeed, even in the codebase at $JOB that I'm responsible for, we have had some instances where we randomly check if people are in Chrome before blocking a browser API that has existed for 2 decades and been baseline widely available. These days 99% of features that users actually care about are pretty widely supported cross-browser, and other than developer laziness there's literally no reason why something like a banking app shouldn't work in any of the big 3.
I guarantee you that if you set your `userAgent` to a Chrome one (or even better yet, a completely generic one that covers all browsers simultaneously, cause most of the time the implementation of these `isChrome` flags is just a dead simple regex that looks for the string `chrome` anywhere in the userAgent), all problems you might've experienced before would vanish, except for perhaps on Google's own websites (though I've never really had issues here other than missing things like those image blur filters in Google Meet, which always felt like a completely artificial, anti-competitive limitation)
Some developers are lazy. Some probably don't know that that is the right way to do it. There is a lot of legacy code from when checking user agents was more acceptable. It is much more difficult for server code to know the capabilities of the client (although in practice this isn't usually much of an issue).
Also, sometimes the feature exists so the feature check is positive, but there is a bug in one browser that breaks your functionality, so you put in a user agent check. Then the bug gets fixed, but the user agent check isn't removed for years. I've seen that happen many times.
What part of the Verizon website doesn’t work on Firefox? I am curious if it’s actually the browser or its the aggressive privacy options.
> a well known kindergarden
I am baffled by the choice to include this laughably obscure example alongside a major telecom. Surely there are better options less likely to be the fault of a random lazy web developer.
Youtube, for example seems deliberately hampered on non-chrome browsers.
For Verizon, it's one of their log in forms that doesn't work on Firefox, even with ublock disabled. Works just fine with Chrome. I was able to reproduce the behaviour on both my and my wife's laptop. (I haven't tried disabling the FF privacy features)
> I am baffled by the choice...
Rereading what I wrote, I see the unintended humour in my association.
That being said:
1. These are both websites where I don't have much of a choice whether I use them or not
2. I actually expected Verizon to have a terrible website based on the sum of my interactions with them (both online and over the phone) and how uncompetitive the market is. But I was surprised the kindergarden had a needlessly restrictive website because I thought they'd care more about their online presence. And, to be clear, the kindergarden's website is fancy and expensively designed, so their lack of Firefox support can't easily explained by laziness.
I'm sure they exist, I've just never seen them. I use banking and websites like Netflix, too. And, if I had to wager, you could bypass a lot of this "doesn't work on Firefox" by just changing your user agent.
I think it's a case of yes, it does work, but web developers don't think so, so they implement checks just for kicks.