In Firefox, about:config > general.useragent.override > new string, click +, paste in the value from the website above, click the checkmark.
This will work most of the time on the sites that hired lazy, incompetent web developers to design their pages -- washingtonpost.com, lowes.com, and the worst offender of all, homedepot.com.
This is nothing new for any browser, unless you believe in the mid-late 2000s Chrome was being "slowly deprecated by the industry" for sites that refused to work with Chrome.
These are just lazy developers, or developers who don't want to bother testing against FF. It happens. Move on. This is not some industry trend.
app.tryalma.com doesn't work on safari either.. says its chrome only.
So the story isn't really about firefox.. it's about Chrome's marketshare being high enough that some companies are happy to ignore every other browser.
People are using Firefox intentionally, vs. using IE because it was preinstalled. Firefox is a maintained browser. IE was hard to support, and Firefox is not. There are a lot of differences.
I'm with you, but I do think the situation can be characterized differently in a couple important ways:
1. IE was the default browser for many users (i.e. anybody using Windows who didn't know better).
2. IE had a lot of bugs and and was often non-compliant with standards.
Those two things combined meant that supporting IE required additional work, and if you didn't put in that work you were going to get users from IE anyway they'd just get frustrated and confused when things broke. So "detect IE and tell them use something else" was at least a reasonable fixed-cost approach to not having users get totally stuck. (And IE went down to 2-3% at least in part because devs revolted against IE earlier and started serving those "don't use IE" messages when its usage was still higher.)
Neither factor is really true of FF. It's not the default for any major platform, its user-base at this point is largely power users who won't be easily confused, and outside of some non-standard APIs most sites don't need and some fairly edge-casey stuff, most sites that work on Chrome will work fine on FF as well without alteration. If anything, IME Safari is more likely to need special attention than FF (but of course Safari has much higher market share so it merits that effort).
So I totally get not wanting to spend QA budget on FF, and I could understand showing a small banner suggesting you use a different browser, but erroring/completely blocking usage of the site does feel excessive to me, and even a bit mean-spirited since it takes extra effort to detect FF to show the message and prevent using the site! I don't think these sites are going out of their way to block usage of other low-usage browsers (some of which can alter behavior that could break some sites even if they are Chromium-based).
You left out the important and main reason, support for ie wasn't dropped - support for IE6 was dropped. At a point in time when it was already long since deprecated by it's maintainer, Microsoft
Those old IE versions were products of a time when Microsoft was intentionally just making shit up, baking it into their browsers, and releasing stuff like Frontpage to produce garbage, browser-favoring markup. That among various other (often illegal) behaviors designed to destroy competition and capture the web for one company.
When everyone finally had the chance to axe IE support, it made all the sense in the world to do that. But that's not the situation with browsers like Firefox.
As for Apple? Any of their web properties that exist for reasons other than selling hardware are just embarrassingly bad. Have been for years... and their problems have nothing to do with Firefox.
Oh well. I just don't use sites that don't load on Firefox. I'm already pretty used to missing out on a lot of websites because I just close websites that show a pop-over modal ad or video ad or anything particularly intrusive like that...
There's some irony in Chrome's user agent referencing Mozilla and Gecko for historical compatibility reasons: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/146.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
When companies or government offices tell me to use another browser I tell them I can not, dont have administrative access and make them input all the data for me.
One thing we can do to slightly mitigate this as devs is to use Firefox ourselves while working on our job's front-end. Even if the company doesn't prioritize Firefox, we can make sure it works in the browser while doing our normal job.
This is what I've been "accidentally" doing throughout my career, not even thinking about helping Firefox support but just because I actually prefer to use Firefox myself.
And it's not even extra work because nowadays the feature support in Firefox and Chrome is nearly identical and all the mainstream front-end libraries already support both browsers. In fact, I only remember 2 times in the last 5 years when I found bugs caused by inconsistent browser behaviours and both were quick and easy to amend in the same PR; no ticket nor discussions on prioritization were even needed.
This isn't unusual for Apple, who appear to be aspiring to Microsoft business practices from a few decades ago. If they cannot be bothered to support you, you can return in kind by not supporting them and their practices either.
I don't agree with this post being flagged, but HN seems to suppress anything that's remotely critical of apple, don't be surprised if this is removed.
That's a great suggestion! I used the 'User-Agent Switcher' add-on [1] and that seems to have done the trick for both the websites I reported above. (edit: I chose the option 'Windows / Chrome 146' in the add-on's UI).
As someone else said here, we should probably chalk it up to laziness on developers' part; maybe there's more to it, but I'll take that explanation and move on :-)
> we should probably chalk it up to laziness on developers' part
Also, developers at many companies don't own their time. They're given a certain amount per feature that they didn't estimate themselves, and the company doesn't give them time to fix Firefox specific bugs because it would cost them more than the user's monetary value is worth compared to other features or bugs.
In one of these cases Apple, who has a competing browser that they make tens of billions of dollars with by selling the traffic to Google. It's the top of the surveillance capitalism funnel.
I think the poster is referencing that uBlock Origin does not work with browsers other than Firefox. And that while some sites work poorly (deliberately deprecating Firefox), other sites work very poorly (without uBlock Origin). Presumably spoofing user agents works for now but has its limits.
You would think AlmaLinux would be a supported distribution (and that obviously defaults to Firefox).
I only use Chrome for Microsoft Teams there NASA insists on using (Teams doesn't seem to detect my camera in Firefox... And the teams for Linux app was total trash when I tried it, maybe it's better now if it still exists.). Is there a way to stop it's obnoxious trying to be the default browser every time?
Not surprised. A QA team I worked with only tested against Chrome-based browsers and Safari. If users hit issues on Firefox or anything else, support was just told to have them switch browsers.
This is what happens when your usage share is basically a rounding error.
I love firefox, i've been using it since version 1.0 to today.
However mozilla really has been directionless, its no surprise that nobody cares when the browser has basically devolved into copying everything that chrome does, but a year later and not as good.
Firefox is still ahead of Chrome in several areas.
- multi account containers
- ublock origin (and extensions in general)
- extensions on Android
Firefox has also recently improved tabs with a number of features. I haven't used Chrome in a long time, so I don't know if these exist there.
Firefox just works, and blocks ads, and doesn't randomly decide I'm not allowed to do things it doesn't' approve of anymore (like block ads with ublock origin).
What features does Chrome provide in the last year (that presumably would not yet be copied by Firefox)?
Every company I have worked for has passed on fixing things that just impact Firefox.
In my first job back in 2019, a support ticket came back about a dropdown bug in Firefox. It didn’t even make it to engineering before they told them to switch to Chrome.
Browse to https://www.whatismybrowser.com/guides/the-latest-user-agent... and copy the latest UserAgent string for Google Chrome.
In Firefox, about:config > general.useragent.override > new string, click +, paste in the value from the website above, click the checkmark.
This will work most of the time on the sites that hired lazy, incompetent web developers to design their pages -- washingtonpost.com, lowes.com, and the worst offender of all, homedepot.com.
This is nothing new for any browser, unless you believe in the mid-late 2000s Chrome was being "slowly deprecated by the industry" for sites that refused to work with Chrome.
These are just lazy developers, or developers who don't want to bother testing against FF. It happens. Move on. This is not some industry trend.
> “These are just lazy developers…”
It appears the system is working as intended.
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Oh, but AI has made the cost of development so low! It doesn't cost much to do cross-browser tests anymore. /s :-)
Well, it never cost much. For the most part you just need to install it into your test framework.
The problem is that the value of doing it is essentially none.
This isn’t true. Firefox users get really salty about this. They really will drop your product.
Absolutely. I will refuse to do business with anyone who is hostile to the open web.
The immigration attorney company works from Firefox at
or https://www.tryalma.aibut not from https://app.tryalma.com
Nothing reachable from https://www.apple.com/ seems to fail on Firefox.
app.tryalma.com doesn't work on safari either.. says its chrome only.
So the story isn't really about firefox.. it's about Chrome's marketshare being high enough that some companies are happy to ignore every other browser.
Chrome is the new IE!
Not saying I like the situation, but Firefox usage is about ~2-3%.
That's about where IE 6 and then IE 11 were when everyone was excited they could finally drop them. Why should anyone treat Firefox differently?
People are using Firefox intentionally, vs. using IE because it was preinstalled. Firefox is a maintained browser. IE was hard to support, and Firefox is not. There are a lot of differences.
I'm with you, but I do think the situation can be characterized differently in a couple important ways:
1. IE was the default browser for many users (i.e. anybody using Windows who didn't know better).
2. IE had a lot of bugs and and was often non-compliant with standards.
Those two things combined meant that supporting IE required additional work, and if you didn't put in that work you were going to get users from IE anyway they'd just get frustrated and confused when things broke. So "detect IE and tell them use something else" was at least a reasonable fixed-cost approach to not having users get totally stuck. (And IE went down to 2-3% at least in part because devs revolted against IE earlier and started serving those "don't use IE" messages when its usage was still higher.)
Neither factor is really true of FF. It's not the default for any major platform, its user-base at this point is largely power users who won't be easily confused, and outside of some non-standard APIs most sites don't need and some fairly edge-casey stuff, most sites that work on Chrome will work fine on FF as well without alteration. If anything, IME Safari is more likely to need special attention than FF (but of course Safari has much higher market share so it merits that effort).
So I totally get not wanting to spend QA budget on FF, and I could understand showing a small banner suggesting you use a different browser, but erroring/completely blocking usage of the site does feel excessive to me, and even a bit mean-spirited since it takes extra effort to detect FF to show the message and prevent using the site! I don't think these sites are going out of their way to block usage of other low-usage browsers (some of which can alter behavior that could break some sites even if they are Chromium-based).
You left out the important and main reason, support for ie wasn't dropped - support for IE6 was dropped. At a point in time when it was already long since deprecated by it's maintainer, Microsoft
Those old IE versions were products of a time when Microsoft was intentionally just making shit up, baking it into their browsers, and releasing stuff like Frontpage to produce garbage, browser-favoring markup. That among various other (often illegal) behaviors designed to destroy competition and capture the web for one company.
When everyone finally had the chance to axe IE support, it made all the sense in the world to do that. But that's not the situation with browsers like Firefox.
As for Apple? Any of their web properties that exist for reasons other than selling hardware are just embarrassingly bad. Have been for years... and their problems have nothing to do with Firefox.
I didn't realize Firefox's market share had gotten so low. Now I'm sad.
Oh well. I just don't use sites that don't load on Firefox. I'm already pretty used to missing out on a lot of websites because I just close websites that show a pop-over modal ad or video ad or anything particularly intrusive like that...
Spoof the user agent. I'd bet the vast majority of "only works on XYZ browser" websites will still work.
There's some irony in Chrome's user agent referencing Mozilla and Gecko for historical compatibility reasons: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/146.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
I do agree, but at scale it shrink the percieved usage of Firefox (and derivatves) even more
When companies or government offices tell me to use another browser I tell them I can not, dont have administrative access and make them input all the data for me.
what should cost you about 15s of your time ends up costing you 1+ hour of your time.
Put your money where your mouth is
Be the change you want to see
Vote with your wallet
These are all sayings emphasizing going out of your way for a social good. This is just more of the same.
I'm retired. For me it is a small sacrifice that may or may not help others as I am known to bring internal and external escalation to the party.
It's the principle of the thing.
It's a gift to a bureaucrat
Yes, and?
One thing we can do to slightly mitigate this as devs is to use Firefox ourselves while working on our job's front-end. Even if the company doesn't prioritize Firefox, we can make sure it works in the browser while doing our normal job.
This is what I've been "accidentally" doing throughout my career, not even thinking about helping Firefox support but just because I actually prefer to use Firefox myself.
And it's not even extra work because nowadays the feature support in Firefox and Chrome is nearly identical and all the mainstream front-end libraries already support both browsers. In fact, I only remember 2 times in the last 5 years when I found bugs caused by inconsistent browser behaviours and both were quick and easy to amend in the same PR; no ticket nor discussions on prioritization were even needed.
This isn't unusual for Apple, who appear to be aspiring to Microsoft business practices from a few decades ago. If they cannot be bothered to support you, you can return in kind by not supporting them and their practices either.
I don't agree with this post being flagged, but HN seems to suppress anything that's remotely critical of apple, don't be surprised if this is removed.
Shopify online store editor also doesn't work in Firefox. It's a shame that Firefox is getting sidelined.
What happens if you configure your browser string to lie about your software origins and compatibility?
That's a great suggestion! I used the 'User-Agent Switcher' add-on [1] and that seems to have done the trick for both the websites I reported above. (edit: I chose the option 'Windows / Chrome 146' in the add-on's UI).
As someone else said here, we should probably chalk it up to laziness on developers' part; maybe there's more to it, but I'll take that explanation and move on :-)
[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/uaswitcher/
> we should probably chalk it up to laziness on developers' part
Also, developers at many companies don't own their time. They're given a certain amount per feature that they didn't estimate themselves, and the company doesn't give them time to fix Firefox specific bugs because it would cost them more than the user's monetary value is worth compared to other features or bugs.
Please use it only for lazy dev website, as it hides the global usage of Firefox
The websites magically start working and I run into zero issues.
The developers are lying and trying to force people to switch browsers.
I get the unsupported warning even on iOS Safari.
Who benefits from terminating service like this?
The company that would have to hire devs to make sure it worked correctly on firefox.
The business case for things like this is pretty obvious when firefox usage is so low.
A page that works on Chrome will also work on Firefox unless you go out of your way to avoid web standards.
In one of these cases Apple, who has a competing browser that they make tens of billions of dollars with by selling the traffic to Google. It's the top of the surveillance capitalism funnel.
Surely they are not benefiting if people don't use their website because their browser is not supported
They're forcing the use of their browser.
Firefox + uBlock Origin is the only way the modern web is still usable.
I run into this problem when using Firefox + uBlock Origin. The solution is spoofing the user agent in this case.
I think the poster is referencing that uBlock Origin does not work with browsers other than Firefox. And that while some sites work poorly (deliberately deprecating Firefox), other sites work very poorly (without uBlock Origin). Presumably spoofing user agents works for now but has its limits.
What!? This thread is about "unsupported browser(s)", not anything that uBlock Origin fixes.
For what it's worth. I agree with OP which is why Firefox with uBlock Origin is my primary browser.
You would think AlmaLinux would be a supported distribution (and that obviously defaults to Firefox).
I only use Chrome for Microsoft Teams there NASA insists on using (Teams doesn't seem to detect my camera in Firefox... And the teams for Linux app was total trash when I tried it, maybe it's better now if it still exists.). Is there a way to stop it's obnoxious trying to be the default browser every time?
I use the app on Gnome and it works fine, at least for the replacement of Skype (non pro)
Not surprised. A QA team I worked with only tested against Chrome-based browsers and Safari. If users hit issues on Firefox or anything else, support was just told to have them switch browsers.
I think this is a pact between advertising companies.
Use it or lose it folks.
This is what happens when your usage share is basically a rounding error.
I love firefox, i've been using it since version 1.0 to today.
However mozilla really has been directionless, its no surprise that nobody cares when the browser has basically devolved into copying everything that chrome does, but a year later and not as good.
Firefox is still ahead of Chrome in several areas.
Firefox has also recently improved tabs with a number of features. I haven't used Chrome in a long time, so I don't know if these exist there.Firefox just works, and blocks ads, and doesn't randomly decide I'm not allowed to do things it doesn't' approve of anymore (like block ads with ublock origin).
What features does Chrome provide in the last year (that presumably would not yet be copied by Firefox)?
Every company I have worked for has passed on fixing things that just impact Firefox.
In my first job back in 2019, a support ticket came back about a dropdown bug in Firefox. It didn’t even make it to engineering before they told them to switch to Chrome.
[dead]