You must log in or register to comment.
As if they needed to check for ““compatibility”” at all - just let the users try their makeshift coded-in-a-weekend browsers, or their 2008 version of IE.
The better question is why some websites even bother checking for the browser when the vast majority of people uses mainstream options that follow web standards and self-update.
Checking the browser version kind of made sense 15 years ago when updating the browser depended on the user’s awareness and willingness of doing so, and the lack of standards across browsers was blatant. Nowadays that’s pretty much useless. The maximum these sites should be doing is displaying a banner letting the user know their browser might be incompatible (because it’s likely not in a way that prevents usage), then fuck off.
I had a client once who used to be obsessed with this. By his logic, if a potential customer visited the website and had a bad experience because the site didn’t work properly in their browser, they’d think the company was unprofessional and wouldn’t come into the store and we’d lose them as a customer forever. Analytics showed that 99+% of people would visit in one of the big three, and he wouldn’t pay for someone to test the site on the less popular browsers, instead he insisted on fingerprinting logic that broke all the time and probably caused more bounces than any possible rendering quirks from niche mobile browsers would have caused
It’s ridiculous some people even consider blocking a browser completely and having a near 100% chance of turning away the customer that uses it instead of just letting the user browse and have a significant chance of nothing bad happening.
People are not going to change browsers to visit this website unless they absolutely have to - in which case they’ll hate this company for it.
Oh my god, you get it. Thank you for your continued existence. Keep going!
Checking the browser almost never makes sense these days.
Sites should be using feature detection instead. Rather than checking the browser version, instead check if the browser supports the features they require.
It’s more practical though, from a more general UX perspective where the U is often a non technical person. If you throw a “ur browser doesn’t support webserial(or whatever)” message up on the screen, you’re just gonna confuse tons of users who won’t even know what the hell you’re talking about. Easier (for everyone) to tell them to just use what you know works.
The message doesn’t have to be technical and can still mention browsers - just say “your browser isn’t compatible with this site. Try updating it or switch to Chrome or Edge”. The idea is just that if someone with a non-Chrome and non-Edge browser tries to load the page and it supports the feature, they won’t see the message.
Time for OP to install a User Agent Switcher plugin
🍻here’s to all the developers out there who makes sure there site works great not only with Firefox, but also with ublock origin and piholes!
It is always shocking to me how many sites or apps completely fail to load if you dare block google analytics!
I don’t know, works on my browser.
-Devs, probably.
If it’s a website which only works with a specific browser, it’s a shitsite.
At that point it’s not even a website. It’s just content for the app. Calling it a website is like calling my Minecraft base a website.
“We’re a very inaccessible and hostile webpage. Turn back now.”
Abandon all hope ye who enter here
Limited time to build something so you have to pick based on a couple factors, often largest % of users.
Well good thing my employer runs a script every 15 min to set the default browser to Edge.
They probably get better metrics off of you running corporate logins and edge. Edge is equivalent to Chrome It supports all the same plugins.
It’s probably just secops picking the low hanging fruit dissuade you subverting network security.
Edge is built upon chromium
When I say that Edge is equivalent to Chrome, I don’t mean that Edge is exactly Chrome It’s not what I said and it’s not what I meant. I mean that for all intents and purposes you can use edge for anything you want to use Chrome for. Major differentiation is that you’re giving all of your data to Microsoft in lieu of Google. And you could look at all the other chromium base browsers and say yeah you could do the same thing with those but in this case we have a business user. There’s businesses are probably already running Microsoft networks. They might very well already have Microsoft SSO. Edge is going to have all kinds of great tie-ins to active directory policy. So secops/it is going to try to force you to use Edge, instead of say Firefox with a barely have any control over or maybe brave where you’re going to try TOR or IPFS and just basically be a stain on their HIDS board.
Edge is equivalent to Chrome It supports all the same plugins.
What’s this then?
Jesus man I just explained it to you. Welcome to my block list
Ah I see Mr I’m never wrong
run a script to set the default browser back to chrome just after it changes, using some timer estimation magic also… try taskkill
Jeez, imagine.
cheap. easy to admin.
Because Firefox has better XSS detection than Chrome and will block adware sites from injecting tracking that Chrome completely allows.
is this true?
In my experience of using the traffic inspection tool fiddler: for https sites you have to have it add its own self signed cert to be able to see traffic.
Firefox, out of the box, detects it immediately and warns you of a security issue, not letting you do anything.
Chrome, and chromium based browsers,
don’t even notice it and happily let you do what needs to be done.I’ve had the experience of a few sites not working recently in Firefox, one of them explicitly stated an ad server was blocked because of xss settings and refused to load. Chrome didn’t care.
Because they’re paid to.
Standardization is nice for people who make sites and people who use them.
Which is why we have HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript, supported by all major browsers.
Unless you’re doing something outrageously non-standard, there is no reason to block specific browsers.
Except for politics.
These terms are absolutely meaningless. Browsers like all Chromium forks and Firefox add new CSS, HTML and JS features on a almost monthly basis. Safari then usually is takes a year more to implement them. And for the past few years Chrome has usually been adding new stuff the fastest, then Firefox a bit later and then Apple adds them after a year, but only if they don’t threaten the native Apps on iOS because of AppStore money.
Web standards keep evolving, this is normal. Otherwise you would be still running Adobe Flash.
Why you are getting downvotes? Actually Mozilla standardizes things on web
Ads and tracking ? Browser with the largest market share ? Well, we are back to IE6 monopoly. :(
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
On the other hand, if it works in Firefox, it’s likely to work everywhere else.
I use Firefox for development and then, barring some weird chrome bug, things just work everywhere.
deleted by creator
If it truly is only an hour of someone’s time, then I’d much rather they made that insignificant amount less profit, but did the work to make our experience better.
deleted by creator
I found a bug once in our content that only affected Firefox. Old versions of articulate whouldnt start properly. Not somthing I could fix on my own as i meeded anyoher department. I brought it to the attention of the managers. They didn’t want to fox it as apprently Google analytics showed only .4% of our user base was using Firefox. I manged to convince them its part of our user commitment to ensure that we work consistently across all browsers, but it was a pain.
Google analytics showed only .4% of our user base was using Firefox.
Maybe it was that low because the site didn’t work properly on Firefox…
Exactly. When the planes come back from battle, you put armor on all the places where the bullet holes aren’t, because that’s where the planes that didn’t make it back were shot.
That’s the main issue of using analytics and telemetry on something that’s used by power users: most of them disable/block them, so the real reported usage is much lower
I believe that this is illegal.
There’s no law saying you need to support multiple platforms. There are some windows apps that don’t exist on macos for example. It just sucks.
Nope. Afaik, there is still no legal precedent set that you must make your publicly available website usable on more than one browser suite. Which is ludicrous, because Google has quietly been trying to make Chrome the only option.
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/mobile/worldwide
According to this:
On the desktop, Firefox has about 6% marketshare, and Edge, the Windows default, about 11%.
On mobile, however, Firefox is at 0.5%, and Edge at 0.3%.
A lot of people only browse the Web on a mobile platform. And the ones using those tend to use the default browser bundled with their phone; if what they have out-of-box works, they’re not going to install anything else. Apple bundles Safari, and Google bundles Chrome, so that’s what gets used.
Chromebooks are frequently used in US schools, this has to screw the statistics.
That’s why I started setting Firefox as the default browser on my family’s phones. They were too annoyed by ads and almost got scammed once. With Firefox and uBlock Origin it’s like magic for them. Plus they don’t visit any non-mainstream websites so they’ll never encounter such a screen.
A small step to a better web-browsing experience for all of us.
Important to note as well that both Edge and Opera along with Chrome (and many other niche browsers) are based on Chromium, giving them an even bigger spread of users that are using the same browser from a compatability standpoint.
The point of a commercial website is that it is accessible from everywhere at every time.
It does not make sense to exclude an entire customer base just because you don’t want to support multiple platforms.
If businesses were smart, yes. But they are, first and foremost, greedy.
It still doesn’t explain all the extra work of detecting and intentionally blocking firefox…
Something didn’t work on Firefox and the dev didn’t get permission to work out how to fix it as it was uneconomical compared with just disabling firefox
I expect that they had something break on it and decided that it wasn’t worth the time spent fixing it, so they just blocked it so more users didn’t run into it. A simple message may be annoying to them, but at least they have a straightforward workaround then.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I use Firefox on both mobile and desktop, but it’s not too hard to see why they’d do a cost/benefit analysis like that. No one company is in the business of trying to do antitrust work, to avoid a browser monopoly, and that’d be the reason why it’d be important to have competing browsers.
