Tell HN: Firefox is being slowly deprecated by the industry

70 points by gurjeet ↗ HN
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

29 comments

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Who benefits from terminating service like this?
In one of these cases Apple, who has a competing browser that they make tens of billions of dollars with by selling the traffic to Google. It's the top of the surveillance capitalism funnel.
The company that would have to hire devs to make sure it worked correctly on firefox.

The business case for things like this is pretty obvious when firefox usage is so low.

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.
what should cost you about 15s of your time ends up costing you 1+ hour of your time.
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.

Oh, but AI has made the cost of development so low! It doesn't cost much to do cross-browser tests anymore. /s :-)
> “These are just lazy developers…”

It appears the system is working as intended.

What happens if you configure your browser string to lie about your software origins and compatibility?
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?

Firefox + uBlock Origin is the only way the modern web is still usable.
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.
Spoof the user agent. I'd bet the vast majority of "only works on XYZ browser" websites will still work.
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?

I get the unsupported warning even on iOS Safari.
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.

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.

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...
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.

I think this is a pact between advertising companies.
This isn't unusual for Apple, who appear to be aspiring to Microsoft business practices from a few decades ago. If they cannot be bothered to support you, you can return in kind by not supporting them and their practices either.

I don't agree with this post being flagged, but HN seems to suppress anything that's remotely critical of apple, don't be surprised if this is removed.

Browse to https://www.whatismybrowser.com/guides/the-latest-user-agent... and copy the latest UserAgent string for Google Chrome.

In Firefox, about:config > general.useragent.override > new string, click +, paste in the value from the website above, click the checkmark.

This will work most of the time on the sites that hired lazy, incompetent web developers to design their pages -- washingtonpost.com, lowes.com, and the worst offender of all, homedepot.com.

Shopify online store editor also doesn't work in Firefox. It's a shame that Firefox is getting sidelined.
I tried to order a tablet from OnePlus. It's impossible to create an account on oneplus.com with Firefox.
Instead of shoving AI, firefox should focus more on enterprise needs - it lacks in many ways and if sysadmins can't install it, then people won't even know about it.