We’ve been anticipating it for years, and it’s finally happening. Google is finally killing uBlock Origin – with a note on their web store stating that the extension will soon no longer be available because it “doesn’t follow the best practices for Chrome extensions”.
Now that it is finally happening, many seem to be oddly resigned to the idea that Google is taking away the best and most powerful ad content blocker available on any web browser today, with one article recommending people set up a DNS based content blocker on their network 😒 – instead of more obvious solutions.
I may not have blogged about this but I recently read an article from 1999 about why Gopher lost out to the Web, where Christopher Lee discusses the importance of the then-novel term “mind share” and how it played an important part in dictating why the web won out. In my last post, I touched on the importance of good information to democracies – the same applies to markets (including the browser market) – and it seems to me that we aren’t getting good information about this topic.
This post is me trying to give you that information, to help increase the mind share of an actual alternative. Enjoy!
Firefox needs to work on ensuring seamless compatibility with more websites, web apps and so on, because I’m personally very bored with my kids’ schools and related services sending out emails and forms with links that simply won’t open in FF but are clearly expecting Chrome or Edge where they work fine. Yes, this is on the lazy developers, but if FF want wider scale take-up outside of geeky niche groups then this is the stuff they must fix.
It’s pretty trivial to just use an alternate browser for the garbage sites that don’t support FF.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. If your site doesn’t work on Firefox your site doesn’t work. As web developers your job is to develop applications for the web not for one specific browser. This goes double for essential services.
“ugh just use a normal browser”
My job requires login to most internal websites via Microsoft Azure AD SSO using Kerberos authentication using passwordless, smart card auth.
This switch happened this week. Up until yesterday I was 100% Firefox until this.
Firefox for MacOS is not able to do this. I spent an hour or so looking for solutions. Chrome on MacOS also doesn’t. Safari does and now I have to fucking use Safari FFS.
Could be worse. You could have to use Chrome.
Or use Edge
Why do you hate me
Just tryna save you from the failed abortion that is Safari
That’s some BS. You and i both know that Chromium has the largest share in the browser business, so it makes sense from a development perspective to develop websites that will reach the most people. It’s on Firefox to optimise their browser so that it can run these sites as well.
On the same line of thought, we should remove sidewalks and bike lanes because cars use the road more
A single company shouldn’t be able to dictate how the web works.
Well too bad, because that’s how things are
Nope
Wrong again, sparky.
firefox uses the standard, chrome are adding some non-standard crap to be anti-competitive. same shit microsoft did with internet explorer and caused it to eventually be replaced by chrome waybackwhen once law finally told them to back off.
it’s not up to firefox, it’s up to the law to step in and prevent google from doing anti-competitive non-standard shit.
Slack calls disabled for firefox users, but if you change the user agent to chrome it works…
Almost like it does work on Firefox but for some reason they don’t want you using it. Honestly it’s so damn weird, why do that? Is there some incentive for them?
I can’t think of a single example where a web page doesn’t work on FF.
Lol. I remember when FF was the most popular browser.
I just need a „install as app“ Feature in Firefox, that is not as pain as the webapp Manager app we currently have
On mobile it’s the three dots then the install button that has an image of a cellphone?
I guess, I only know the way on iPhone using “add to homescreen”
What do you mean “install as app”?
Install PWA so that you can start those as normal native apps without it looking like a website in a browser (remove unnecessary window decorations) and cache js for ever, so that the PWA can be used offline, if features are not dependant on API calls
I encounter this very infrequently. I think I only have 1-2 examples at work. It’s not a huge deal for me to spin up a chrome for those one or two occasions.
I recall I didn’t get some sites working on Chrome either, when Firefox fails me 😅
This is also true. The majority of the time when something doesn’t work on Firefox and I try to go to Chrome, it doesn’t work there too 😂
Care to share some examples Firefox has trouble with? The only issues I have with websites is due to my aggressive use of Noscript.
There’s some streaming video sites that deliberately block Firefox. It used to be that Firefox didn’t support the necessary web standards, but now it does. The site put up blocks telling you to use Chrome, and never got around to taking them down.