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.
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.
Time for OP to install a User Agent Switcher plugin
Yep, that's always worth a try
The problem is that there are still features missing from certain browsers. For example, Mozilla does not like restrictive licenses, which is why many media codecs are not available in Firefox. Google does not care, pays the fees and provides the media codecs for free. As soon as we get rid of shit like h265 and switch to av1, the world will be a better (and more open) place where everyone can use any browser.
"We're a very inaccessible and hostile webpage. Turn back now."
Abandon all hope ye who enter here
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.
Companies like chrome because it’s the most used browser. So if they develop for it, and only for it without caring of compatibility on others, then it’s cheaper. And since they don’t want you to use another browser and complain that their site is broken, the just block you.
Which is kind of dumb, because if you target Firefox you are writing to a standards compliant browser that means your code should work on all other browsers. Chrome came when IE still owned the internet and their goal was to offer a faster browser that still worked, so now chrome has a bunch of hacks coded into it.
Shouldn't they just commit to follow the web standards? Most modern browsers strive to follow those standards.
Well chrome should, yes. But they don't.
Then some JavaScript framework developers think "well this non-standard feature is neat, let's use that everywhere" and then companies who use their framework (or a framwork dependent on it) can't support all browsers.It's a multilayered problem (as always) with lots of individually decisions that make sense, but don't work out in the end (as always).
I think the most annoying thing here is the decision to blanket ban other browsers. Why not just have a little drop-down bar at the top that says 'You may encounter issues, we recommend browsing this site with Google Chrome', instead of completely blocking access? The cynic in me suspects it's linked to advertising.
If one changes the user agent in Firefox so that it announces itself as Chrome, most of these sites work just fine. Adobe Express is the last example I tried.
Ads and tracking ? Browser with the largest market share ? Well, we are back to IE6 monopoly. :(
Largest marketshare to check for compatibility, while ignoring all the other browsers.
It's almost certainly market share. Easier to just slap a "use chrome" check on it than to spend any dev time supporting the others.
Weird, I see "You will need to use a different service/company"
Exactly what I saw. A giant nope.
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.
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
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.
If only being part of the .4% was like being part of "the 1%".
🍻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!
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
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.
Chromebooks are frequently used in US schools, this has to screw the statistics.
for the love of god, charge your phone
4%, absolute madman, probably only had time to make this post and can't answer comments anymore
RIP {I can't type out that username}, you shall be remembered while you charge your phone
4% is enough for like 8-10 minutes tho
Counterpoint: let the battery run out and have a nice rest!
Because they hire cheap developers who don’t know what the fuck they are doing?
Is very possible to know exactly what should be done, but not have the time available to achieve it.
This is the correct answer
I would sooner blame the management, that would even think of excluding "untested" or "unsupported" browsers, like some kind of technofacist dictator, instead of choosing a helpful "if you're having problems with our shit site, use chrome" message... or even literally doing nothing... everything is broken these days, and a half-functional site is better than an intentionally-broken one.
Well good thing my employer runs a script every 15 min to set the default browser to Edge.
run a script to set the default browser back to chrome just after it changes, using some timer estimation magic also... try taskkill
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
Jeez, imagine.
I don't know, works on my browser.
-Devs, probably.
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.
Spoofed user agent goes brrrr
To avoid testing on other platforms. Money is limited.
This could be a 'works better on chrome popup'. Instead it's a hard block
I absolutely hate this. Ordered something last night that refused to work on Firefox or Firefox based browsers. Switched to my emergency Fulguris and checkout worked like police working for a white rich man.
I'm doing a course for cyber security at my local tafe, and thier website only works on Chrome. Go. Figure.
Better than when I went to college and everything only worked in IE
This is the browser where you have to be most careful.
Don't use that website if you can
I would thank them for letting me know their site isn't worth the visit.
Time for some user agent spoofing
It used to be the same way with Internet Explorer.
What really chaps my ass is when they don't bother to tell you. It always happens when I'm filling out a form and find out that the submit button just doesn't do anything. Then I have to go back through chrome just to fill out the same form a second time.
Worst part is that I get this with the government website in the UK. For me it was a sub menu which was supposed to appear when a certain option was clicked. It wouldn't display the sub menu in Firefox. Had to redo the damn thing in Edge...
Yep and this happens more than the situation in the OP. Just... shit won't work. No reason why? Well fuck, let me try Chrome. Yep, that works.
It's just lazy devs. They program for Chrome and don't even test in anything else because that's 90% of the market. On the desktop.
This is hilariously not the case on mobile, where everything is programmed for Safari.
I just call places like that and tell the service rep the website didn't work. They do it for me on their end usually and it costs the company more money for the trouble.
The really irritating part is that tools like Playwright let you end-to-end test your product across the big three (Chromium, Firefox and Webkit). Which, most of the time, means these products that specify "Chrome only" simply aren't E2E testing with modern tools.
The only end-to-end happening in those scenarios is the end-to-end pipeline of "shit in, shit out".
Let’s be honest, probably no (automated) pipelines involved in the whole project. Bonus points for SSH’ing into the production server and manually making edits there.
because it has more market share
By a huge margin
I wonder if it would work if you spoofed your user agent.
it almost always does, lol
Find the user agent of the most recent chrome release and change your user agent in about:config
Don't change it browser-wide because stats trackers will think that Firefox's market share is going down. Use a user agent switching extension and change it only for the sites that need it.
Chrome implements features that aren't standards track into their browser, and lazy/oblivious devs use these features to build their products - only to realize wayyy too late it won't work in Safari/Firefox because it uses APIs that are chrome only
Firefox still has no month or week inputs. These things have been standardized 10 years ago and implemented in Chrome as of version 20.
Because Google Chrome setups a good framework from the moment you open it to track, collect data, basically free market your internet life. Companies like to work the less possible using the least money, if Google already gives them all that setup for a fee then it's more profitable than having to pay programmers to track you in other browsers.
So they deliberately are saying to your face: "I only let you use my stuff if you enter as naked as possible". They are not even shy about it.
Someone like this only deserves a spit in the face and a domain ban. Basically. They can fuck off.
Notes: Most of what I said is not exactly all the true. Most companies just reuse webpage code that it's only tested form chromium, so they only let you use that. Because they are lazy AF, they don't care about customers, they only care about money.
You know the answer b
The answer to most questions is money.
Ads = money
cheap. easy to admin.
It drives me bonkers.
And, unfortunately, when I mention this issue I'm am frequently assured that I am mistaken and that there can be no issue. (paraphrasing).
It's a real problem - I live Firefox (with its standards compliance) but people didn't adhere. And here we are.
Limited time to build something so you have to pick based on a couple factors, often largest % of users.
64.7% of all web traffic was from Google Chrome in 12/23. Companies like it because you can develop for one browser and support most people.
Have Chrome installed because Medcert requires it. Even if I agent switch, it still won’t function.
Atleast im not the one paying for Medcert, so w/e
Google pays them...
Said the same thing. Was downvoted for it. Lemmy is weird
Sorry to hear that. The Internet overall is a weird place. Some corners are more so than others.
Because it's secure
Because they’re paid to.
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.
You know what kind of org Google is don’t you ?
brave browser is right there. Just saying.
Firefox is less sketchy, and is one of the last browsers left that isn't based on Chromium. Just saying.
bravevivaldi!only if you have to use chromium of course!<
Would you prefer they go back to mandating that you use Internet explorer?
Progress is slow little steps forward, with a step back here and there.
Chrome was better that ie. It was also available for use on all of the big operating systems.
The fewer Internet browsers a page has to support the faster it is to build and the more people will have a uniform experience there.
I'd rather they not give a damn what browser you use as long as it complies with current web standards. That's kinda the whole point of there being open standards.
