Tell HN: Firefox is being slowly deprecated by the industry
I found 2 instances within the last 2 days. Are there other companies doing this? Apple Business says: There’s an error; You’re either on an unsupported browser or viewing this site on a mobile device. Switch to a supported browser. https://business.apple.com https://business.apple.com/abm_unsupported_browser?reason=Browser%20Type https://support.apple.com/guide/apple-business-manager/program-requirements-axm6d9dc7acf/web/ An Immigration Attorneys' company says: Unsupported Browser; Our platform is designed to work exclusively with Google Chrome and does not support other browsers at this time. Please set up /log into your Alma account through Chrome. https://app.tryalma.com/sign_up
Discussion Highlights (16 comments)
RJ000
Who benefits from terminating service like this?
Bender
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.
p_ing
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.
ggm
What happens if you configure your browser string to lie about your software origins and compatibility?
cozzyd
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?
UltraSane
Firefox + uBlock Origin is the only way the modern web is still usable.
8cvor6j844qw_d6
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.
Animats
The immigration attorney company works from Firefox at https://www.tryalma.com/ or https://www.tryalma.ai but not from https://app.tryalma.com Nothing reachable from https://www.apple.com/ seems to fail on Firefox.
paxys
Spoof the user agent. I'd bet the vast majority of "only works on XYZ browser" websites will still work.
karlshea
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?
_HMCB_
I get the unsupported warning even on iOS Safari.
MattGaiser
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.
bawolff
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.
amatecha
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...
andrewstuart
Use it or lose it folks.
marc_abonce
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.