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Comment by Maultasche | Hacker News Reader

I remember that in the very early days of Firefox, some websites would refuse to serve pages to anything that wasn't Internet Explorer. I did not see the point to that and I was not amused.

Firefox didn't have a problem displaying those pages, so I had to install a plugin so that Firefox could pretend to be Internet Explorer so that I could just see the web page.

I'm glad those days are over.

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> I'm glad those days are over.

Those days aren't over yet.

Google Earth says "Google Chrome is required to run the new Google Earth" or "Oh no! Google Earth isn't supported by your browser yet" if you try to use another browser:

https://www.google.com/earth/

Or trying to access the web-based version of Remote Desktop in something else than Google Chrome https://remotedesktop.google.com/access

But switching the user-agent isn't enough in other browsers, Google must be using some fuckery in the background.

Or using the web version of Slack to make a call or screenshare.

Switching the user agent isn't enough because it's not blindly relying on the user agent. It's actually doing feature detection so if your browser doesn't support whatever features used for remote desktop it'll give you an error message without relying on whitelisting a particular browser. This is exactly how web applications that need to use non-universal features should work, sure, look at the user agent for blacklisted browsers but use feature detection for what you can so that a new web browser that supports it will work without needing to modify the whitelisted user agents.

At least that's not just because of a user agent string.

Firefox doesn't support Native Client, and Google hasn't finished rewriting Earth in WASM yet: https://medium.com/google-earth/earth-on-web-the-road-to-cro...

At the time, asm.js was the standard for high-performance web applications, and Google decided to go with a format only they used, with no backwards compatibility to any other browser, ignoring the back then WIP WebAssembly.

And despite using a simple compiler backend to compile their native code to NaCl that also allows support for asm.js and WASM in a matter of a few days (entire game engines have been ported that way), Google has been going for months and still kept it Chrome-only.

Did you read the article I linked? It explains why they went with NaCL over ASM, and why, despite them having a WASM prototype for months now, it's not ready for production yet.

Basically: native threading. NaCL supports it, ASM and WASM don't (yet).

Then don’t release it.

This isn’t the first time Google has released a product exclusively for Chrome, trying to pull more users to their own platform. Even if this is not directly intended, the result is a massive anticompetitive effect.

Google does not just do this for Maps. Observe how different a Google Search results page looks on Chrome vs Firefox on Android: https://imgur.com/a/A8TYQ

I'm sure some will say they're more happy with the simpler interface, but the fact still remains that they're serving a lower quality version of the site (with no access to things like Search Tools to filter by date, for example) to non-Chrome users.

Google has been doing that for a long time. For example, many years ago it showed a warning about an unsupported browser if you tried to visit Google Docs using Opera. Now it is using user-agent to choose Youtube UI version (if you are unlucky to use a modern browser, you will get that bright whitened UI with huge margins).

Also, web version of Skype isn't working in Android browser.

Not quite over.

These days I can't view my facebook messages on Firefox for Android without hacking my user agent to pretend to be Android 4.

I'm happy that it's just a few irresponsible sites though. It used to be half the web.

Sadly I do something similar for Amazon Music. I don't have the bundled flash player in Chrome enabled and it won't use web based drm on Linux browsers, so I use a user agent extension that tells their site I'm on Windows and it works fine.

That's an entirely different issue I think? Do you have a different experience with Chrome?

Even at mbasic.facebook.com? This is how I do all my messaging these days.

I hate Facebook so much for this. Their apps are beyond bloated and track far more than I'm interested in sharing. It used to be no issue at all to send messages.

But suddenly it's not possible to send a message without going to a clunky version of Facebook.

My objections are not with Facebook really. I'm willing to make the tradeoffs that are required to participate in Facebook. I wish it were better, but Facebook is responding to incentives and is rewarded for its actions, so it's hard for me to hate them, or expect moral virtuousness.

Facebook is just doing what capitalism tells it is ok. Hate for Facebook is wasted energy. We have to stop rewarding the behaviors that we don't wish to see repeated.

Wait, that works? I'd just given up on fb on my phone.

If you don't mind... what exactly do you need to do?

phony add on

Or just use Messenger Lite https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.facebook.m...

One of the issues was that companies that targeted IE often developed their sites using vbscript rather than jscript, therefore they would not be compatible without a re-write.

Now days there's plenty of Chrome only web apps.

Netflix used to refuse to run in Firefox I had to install Chrome on my laptop just to visit one site - incredibly frustrating.

That was back in the days when Mozilla has a backbone and was standing up for users even though users were bitching

Then they caved and now we have DRM in the standard.. sad days

> even though users were bitching

> Then they caved

Some people call that "responding to user feedback". It sucks that you don't agree with their decision, but trying to paint Mozilla in a bad light for listening to their users' demands is preposterous.

I am painting Mozilla in a bad light for Betraying the The Mozilla Manifesto .. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/details/

Yes. And I am saying that it's preposterous because they did what any organization (and I mean any, this applies to companies, nonprofits, governments, etc) should be doing -- listening to their users.

Their beliefs are great and all, but at the end of the day they are providing a product for the end user, so if their users are "bitching" that they want Netflix and other EME services available on Firefox, then the right choice is to make the user happy if possible.

What about former users... because that who the most vocal people where, Chrome Traitors that do not value freedom, privacy or security.

Their actual users were demanding they not do it, they not Embrace Web Extensions, they not Force install Adware on every system, they Not make Privacy Invading features opt-out instead of Opt-In. They not Embrace the destruction of the Open Web....

We, the actual Firefox user base, were given a big middle finger by Mozilla and instead they went on a sorry excuse for a begging marketing ploy to beg user to return to their new Chrome Clone

Any organization cares about their userbase as a whole. There's no distinctions. No "former users", "traitors", or "actual Firefox user base". Just "users". Because once you get past a certain number of users, you need to start looking at decisions statistically.

If 70% of users want Netflix, and the other 30% want privacy, then Mozilla is going to look at the 70%. Because that's what makes sense from any sort of organizational planning. You're not going to try to appease a tiny minority (and yes, privacy-conscious individuals are very much in the minority in the world. We may be in a bubble here on HN, but the common person is not going to give two shits about the privacy concerns we may have) when you can appease far more users by doing the opposite.

You've made it clear you are biased in this argument. Maybe try taking a step back and looking at the issue more objectively, or from the other perspective.

I am being very objective, The Mozilla Foundation is a Non profit tax free organization that gets that tax free status because they are suppose to be following their stated goal of the organization not to be popular

Mozilla Foundation has a Tax Free Status in order to promote the Open Web

They are no longer honoring that goal, as such they should lose their Tax Free status, the should stop calling themselves a Foundation, they should stop fraudulently holding themselves out as being For Privacy and the Open web

if they want to make a Insecure, Privacy Invading Browser, that is perfectly fine. Google and MS already do that

They need to be honest about it and not hold themselves out to be something they are not

They do not fight for the open web, they do not fight for user privacy, they do not support the goals stated in the the Mozilla Manifesto. Thus it should be removed and Mozilla Foundation should be dissolved into the Mozilla Corporation a for profit software vendor making a Commercial Web Browser

You taking the stance that Mozilla is no different than Google, MS or other Commercial Software Vendors. That they are a software company looking to make the best software for their customers..

Mozilla does not have customers, Mozilla is not and should not be a commercial entity, Mozilla is a Charitable Foundation with a set of goals they are violating

That was a DRM thing. Eventually Firefox added support for EME: https://www.pcworld.com/article/3183742/data-center-cloud/ne...

But a downside is that Netflix still limits Firefox to 720p video, even if you're paying for 1080p:

https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742

You can see what resolution you're getting with the Ctrl+Alt+Shift+D shortcut to bring up Netflix's debugging information (and press again to dismiss it). You can also verify your resolution with the Test Patterns video.

The sad thing is 1080p video works just fine in Firefox. There's a Firefox add-on available which enables the 1080p stream:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/force-1080p-n...

But that's also the restriction for Chrome. Only edge, IE and Safari get 1080p support for browsers. Which proves to me that I don't need 1080p really since I hadn't noticed.

How far do you sit from your screen, how big is it?

> One of the issues was that companies that targeted IE often developed their sites using vbscript rather than jscript, therefore they would not be compatible without a re-write.

Based on:

>> Firefox didn't have a problem displaying those pages

It probably wasn't due to vbscript

In those days each browser had their own quirky idea of how to render a website (even Firefox). None of which was really "right" but how IE did it was the de facto standard because IE had 90+% marketshare. If you had a site that could potentially be "broken" if the layout didn't render correctly the the easiest thing to do was to test that it worked how you wanted it to in IE and then add a note telling people it might be broken in other browsers (or not serve to them).

It wasn't until after people really started focusing on standards compliance and cross-browser compatible frameworks that things got better. The "acid tests" for html/css/js standards compliance helped establish how far along the various browsers were at the time. Most browsers were absolutely terrible in that era, it wasn't until Chrome hit the scene and webkit started taking off that standards compliance started to become a big deal. Eventually most major browsers had decent or good standards compliance in their rendering and things like jQuery helped smooth over the rough spots of differences in browser behavior.

Today, Google Search itself uses that.

Try using Google.com from Firefox Mobile and from Chrome Mobile, and you'll see a major difference.

To get 95% of the functionality working, you need to fake a Chrome UA. In 2018.

Just tried this with latest versions of Chrome and FF on Android. The Firefox one loads what looks like the desktop site from 2013 but with bigger font; the chrome one loads a regular modern UI.

Faking the user agent header (yay, FF on Android supports all the desktop extensions) makes everything normal on Firefox.

Sometimes, in my up-to-date Firefox on Linux, I come across a web site saying I need the newest version of Firefox / Chrome / IE...

Those days are nowhere close to over. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15636674 for a short list of examples that Mozilla's web compat team has hit just in the recent past.

From memory that plugin was "IETab" and actually rendered the page using IE somehow within a Firefox tab.

The plugin page is still there though obviously obsolete by now.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ie-tab/

I remember there being some activeX plugin/module/whatchamacallit that'd run your website in a google chrome frame inside IE. Awful hack but it did work great.

Chrome Frame. It was shipped by Google itself.

I ran into a site last year that refused to work if the browser reported the OS to be Linux. Worked fine with it spoofed.

In the days of Netscape, pages would tell IE users to "get a real browser"

Aren't we still saying this?

IE 7 Tax

https://www.kogan.com/au/blog/new-internet-explorer-7-tax/

I doubt that ever paid for itself in development cost vs "tax" collected.

(yes i know it's probably a joke)

They aren't over. Google use some weird WebRTC in Hangouts that doesn't work in Firefox and so on.

And in the newest installment, https://github.com/google/closure-library/issues/883 is UA-sniffing that is now preventing Firefox from aligning with all other browsers on whether arrow keys fire keypress events, which causes _other_ Google things, which assume they don't, to break.

Also Closure assumes that only things with "WebKit" in their UA might be running on a mobile device and that all browsers fall into the WebKit/IE/Edge/Gecko buckets (and will fail badly if a browser does not).

And this is just one library.

User agent sniffing is still around.

If you're uding something different from the approved four, Edge/Safari/FF/Chrome, lots of sites will nag you.

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