I’m warning Google that Google Chrome may soon be disabled on my devices.
Discord, slack, bitwarden, steam, Microsoft teams, visual studio code, balena etcher . Anyone else know of any electron apps or heavily modified version of chrome?😄
Teams has switched to Microsoft’s own edition of the same concept, “Edge WebView2”. Now that Edge is just being Chrome wearing a rubber Scooby Doo mask, I don’t expect the differences are vast.
Another fun iteration is Plex’s desktop client, which uses QtWebEngine… however surprise! still the Chromium engine underneath.
Signal’s desktop app is plain old Electron though.
Of the ones on your list, worth noting that Discord and Slack work fine with FirefoxPWA.
https://github.com/gamingdoom/datcord
Works like a charm.
What pisses me off is how many websites don’t work right with Firefox now. There’s been several times where I’ve had issues with a site functioning on Firefox and had to switch to a chromium browser.
I see this FUD all the time but nobody ever gives examples. Can you point to some specific sites that don’t work with Firefox?
It’s not FUD but there’s usually more to it than just “Firefox”. Usually has something to do with security plugins. There are sites that do not work properly with Ublock or Noscript installed, even when you turn them off for the site. I’ve experienced it many, many times. It happens to me most often ordering food, because a lot of local restaurants sites are janky as fuck, but I’ve also had issues with more well known sites. Southwest airlines has been problematic for a couple years now. My credit union also had issues with parts of their online banking app, but that thankfully got fixed after a year or two.
TL;DR - it’s a real thing.
Walmart.com didn’t work for me on FF for about a week, and it did work on edge and chrome (still broken on FF when I disabled all my add ons). However, they fixed it and it works now. I think it was just a problem with the build of the website, and wasn’t intentional because it definitely works now.
I think that’s what’s more likely - temp problems that could affect any browser until their web dev fixes it. Not anything malicious like intentionally blocking a browser.
And then, it’s just Walmart. It’s nothing that really mattered.
I was worried about this when I originally switched from Chrome to Firefox earlier this year but I can honestly say I haven’t found a single site that I personally use that I had to go back to Chrome for. Any issues I had with any site were related to ad blocking using uBlock or DNS based blocking I also do.
The payment provider my local council uses doesn’t work on Firefox, or Safari. I have to use shitty chrome on my phone. I refuse to install it on my computer.
I have issues with twitch. Given I only watch every 3 months for the POE announcement live stream, I just open brave for that one site. I have not tried to figure out if it’s my setup or not
dialog boxes will just fuck off. I’ve never gotten webRTC to work properly, though that might be configuration skill issues, and or webRTC implementation skill issues, since it seems to only work on browser, not across two different ones.
I’ve seen sites just load asinine layouts, borked kerning, completely fucked text handling. Just goofy shit.
In some cases i’ve seen sites have no download buttons on firefox. I don’t know why, it’s confused me a few times though.
The local Uber eats clone here has the submit order button off screen. Reuters on Android sometimes has the top bar of the webpage shift down over the content. A video conferencing site used by my medical provider won’t connect the video. The 3rd party comment section on our local news site sometimes lays out the controls off screen. The Lemmy PWA on Android used to crash on startup (recently fixed yay!!)
FF is my daily driver and 99% of things work fine, but I’ve definitely found a few sites where they clearly didn’t test it. I still have Chrome installed for those rare occasions I need it.
And I don’t even necessarily blame Firefox for this. I used to do web dev back in the day and I remember making my shit work across multiple browsers. Maybe Firefox is doing it right and Chrome is doing it wrong, but everybody targeted Chrome because it has a zillion percent of the market.
I use firefox and keep Chrome on my PC for this reason. Off the top of my head:
I can’t use Siyuan correctly, my main editor, in Firefox. It only registers the initial backspace key press.
I do telehealth, and the voice/video will not work in firefox no matter what I try.
Live-reloading for Ruby on Rails projects doesn’t seem to work on firefox.
Firefox has been, and still is, my primary browser since before Chrome even existed so, definitely not FUD. Also, it’s generally not Firefox’s fault either, but instead the developers of websites that don’t work in Firefox are usually doing something that isn’t standards compliant.
First to come to mind is that I can’t log into the account management part of the pet boarding company I use when in Firefox. Another scenario is that a lot of movie streaming sites won’t give Firefox video higher than 720p so in that case, Edge is often the only browser that can receive 1080p video. From my understanding the movie studios are the ones to blame for this.
I read that most sites work just fine if you spoof your user agent to windows and standard chrome
This happens very rarely, but it does happen from time to time. When a website starts acting weird out of nowhere I keep a copy of Chrome installed just for that use and then promptly return to Firefox.
My insurance site (MyCigna) started working a couple months ago, but for years it failed to log in. It’s those types of contracted apps that seem to fail the most for me, like apps you’d see on a company intranet.
I have a friend who sends me tiktoks that refuse to load with firefox on my phone. I consider it a blessing
Libredirect extension will redirect to public proxitok instances so you could watch them without going to tiktoks site directly
The only problem I run into is sites that use Bluetooth or USB APIs to talk to a local device. Both Firefox and Safari don’t implement them due to security concerns.
I just read about this extension today. Seems interesting. The description says It’s supposedly doing more than just switching the UA.
I was recently trying to add tickets from ticketbastard to Google wallet to be able to use them offline. I have chrome disabled on my phone. Surprise surprise it doesn’t work with any other browser except chrome. The ticketbastard app just throws an error and nothing happens. Took me a lot of searching to realize it was because chrome was disabled.
Does this happen in you work environment or on your private managed system? I raise this question because I started to realize that governing firefox apparently is a hard task. Never did I experience a faulty site on my private desktop devices but on my work stations. Im currently running firefox 115.13.0esr.
Unfortunately for work I may have no choice:-(. Several of our daily work products I’ve tried on Firefox without success. Those also don’t have ads.
I wish there were better alternatives. I may try out LibreWolf but I could not imagine it somehow being easier, though with enough effort put in the end result may be all that matters. Until the first update (possibly forced on the server end even if I don’t on mine) that breaks everything and I cannot do my work for the day, in which case I will absolutely go crawling back to Chrome, bc they have us by the short hairs there.:-(
My company just plain old won’t install Firefox without a good reason.
I’m stuck using chrome or edge. Once the ad block stops working on chrome, I move over.
I really hate the corporate IT.
I was at a job that was slowly transitioning from a medium sized company to a larger one, initially we were allowed just install and use whatever on our machines, but gradually IT started implementing policies where if we wanted to add something it had to go through a request system and usually it would be denied.
As a software developer this was just infuriating, it would hold up work, force us to use shitty software (like Chrome and Edge) and there would often be fuck ups where installing a new version of software would require removal of the old one and installation of a new one - which would trigger the approval process again.
Like - I get it - some people can’t be trusted, but we were some of the key devs for the companies product, we know what we’re doing.
I was rather happy to leave that part of the company behind when I left.
My company just plain old won’t install Firefox without a good reason.
If you have other potential employers in mind, the IT environment at your current employer and other potential employers is maybe one factor to keep in mind in making decisions as to where to work.
There are some IT policies that are no-gos for me at potential employers. I ask during the interview process.
I went through the same thing with MSIE. Corporate mandates and stuff. Businesses are sometimes wrong.
Firefox my beloved.
Saying this about any corporation’s product is guaranteed not to age well.
Chromium (Google Chrome’s base) is also open source.
And yet, we’re still at a corporation’s mercy as to whether everything Chromium-based gets ruined by Google’s fuck-what-the-users-want policies. Like with Manifest V3. And JXL support. And extensions on mobile.
So is Android. So is Chromium. So is React, and Flutter. So is Java.
Open source doesn’t mean FOSS.
I’m grateful for FF, but they also annoy me at times. Just little stuff probably not worth bitching about in detail. But also a peek at the potential for problems that you’re talking about.
So of course I’ll bitch about it.
I call it the “stop whatever you think you’d rather do right now and pay attention to our product” type shit.
Imagine you have a combination wrench and whenever you take it out of the toolbox it starts yammering at you about how great of a wrench it is and all if its shiny features. Fucking ridiculous, right?
So why do we tolerate software that does that?
Way too much software does this pushy shit. Just stay outta my face and do your actual job, software.
Because people have the attention span of a goldfish and if you aren’t reminding them every 5 seconds of the features they have available they’ll forget they do in fact use them and then complain to support because they can’t spend 5 seconds on the help page.
I say this, not in defense of mozilla, but in frustration at having to deal daily with these kinds of issues. You can put giant screen-size arrows on where to go / what single “do the thing” button to press and people will still forget 5 seconds later.
Firefox is a foundation, not a corporation. And I’m already using Fennec instead of the official release.
No. Firefox is a product. Mozilla is a corporation AND a foundation.
Yeah, it’s strange just how readily the blinders go up wherever Mozilla is concerned. They’re a corp, just like any other; if they had the money and leverage, they’d be just as aggressive as Google. Have people already forgotten that time they laid off 200+ employees and then gave all the execs bonuses?
E: Apparently y’all have forgotten. In 2021, Mozilla laid off a few hundred employees. CEO’s salary doubled that year. Fuck Mozilla, they’re no more your friends than Google or Microsoft; they’re the same evil, just smaller-scaled evil, is all.
But they haven’t threatened to undercut ad blocking yet, so as a comparison they are better.
You forgot to also mention that they are a cult where you get attacked if you say anything negative about Mozilla.
This is the first I’ve heard of LibreWolf. Is it compatible with Windows 7? And also, why is it good?
You’re overreacting. Firefox knows their users. I am a huge “stan” for Firefox, but I will delete it like a time traveller if they make it impossible to ignore ads. I will salt the earth and poop on Firefox’s grave and actively avoid it everywhere… However. If I’m wrong, there will be a Next Thing…
If you use a DNS solutions you can block all the telemetry shit. Frankly FF has been phoning home in a lot of undesirable ways for many years even before this, like most browsers.
Firefox is no longer an adversary to Google for the browser market, if it ever was. FF has become a vassal of Google that with its tyranny is dictating the course of the internet, such as WEI that as far as I know it was abandoned at least for now.
At least link the full article and not just the headline… smh. Here is also the follow-up article with comments from Firefox’s CTO. https://www.heise.de/en/news/Firefox-defends-itself-Everything-done-right-just-poorly-communicated-9802546.html
Anyone else been having issues of not being able to load YouTube videos past the first few seconds on Firefox using ublock? I couldn’t find any recent information online. I don’t know if this is part of the war on ad blockers, or unrelated.
meanwhile firefox lists it as recommended and also lets you use it on firefox mobile.
Almost as if a browser company that’s not also an advertising company has no reason to fight ad blockers.
I’ve got some bad news for you. Mozilla bought an ad company.
i mean they bought a privacy preserving ad company to offer an alternative for companies to google, which is what they should be doing.
because like it or not people depend on ads for their sites.
You can always fork firefox. People used to use website not requiring javascript at all and it worked well. Some people still use even w3m f.e. when graphics card driver goes bad after update and they need to watch some docs on the internet. Most current browser have most features you would ever need
Google needs to be broken up by government.
It saddens me to agree with this. Who knew Google would become as oppressive as fucking MICROSOFT?
I hear the term ‘broken up’ a lot in media and discourse, but it’s never explained. In your eyes, what actually happens when a government ‘breaks up’ a corporation? I mean, what are the steps, objectives, and outcomes?
Not being adversarial, I’m just curious.
It really wouldn’t change anything in the long run. Any company that creates a browser is gonna need some form of income and people aren’t willing to pay for a browser. What would be their incentive to continue to work on the browser when they aren’t being paid?
Adblockers are the largest consumer boycott in history.
Google isn’t just disabling an extension, they’re attacking a boycott comprised of 200,000,000+ people, all around the globe, standing up to forced manipulation of our beliefs and habits by profit-hungry corporations.
