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Comment by fimdomeio | Hacker News Reader

One thing mentioned on the responses that might be really concerning is the fact that this will mean that for a lot of analytics it will look like firefox usage is close to zero.

No usage data, devs caring less about firefox, users having more problems when using firefox, less users using firefox, less users having 3rd party trackers blocked, chrome monopoly growing.

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Alternatively, it work to FF's benefit that no one can know what the real percentage of users are.

There might be some positive press around "the numbers in Analytics do not reflect users on FF"

Nah. People making decisions don't care. Firefox usage will be reported as super low, and it won't be tested.

And users who report having issues with Firefox will be told to use Chrome (that is what's already happening)

And we will shout back : )

I'm already on it as might be seen here.

Feel free to complain loud and clear if it doesn't work in FF. Make it clear that FF support isn't optional.

Also on my to do list: complain even more, including to relevant authorities about Googles abuse of market position to push their browser. Feel free to join me here as well.

(And to be sure: feel free to complain when supposedly mainstream sites doesn't work in any major browser - safari, edge, FF and even Chrome : )

We make noise, we will shout back, but even if the noise we're making eventually resolves to something positive, let's not kid ourselves, it will take _time_.

In the meantime, FF support (while, for now, relatively inexpensive/free if you just use web standards) will just continue being optional considering Chromium's quasi-monopoly.

This is why I use FF for development(and all other browsing). I get firefox support by default on all my work.

Same here : )

Only once have I experienced that something I'd actually write for production only worked in FF and not across all modern browsers.

Protip for anyone who reads this and thinks "but my employer doesn't care about Firefox':

I typically used FF also while testing other peoples work and if it didn't work in Firefox then 9 out of 10 times it didn't work in any other browser than Chrome (had some devs on my team who really didn't seem to care about cross browser compability but it would work in most browsers before it was approved :-))

Not at all unlike back in the IE6 days. Back when the response from geekdom was a loud and resounding, "fuck that!"

Suckiness of the browser situation aside, I fear I'll soon be coming to miss those days.

Since when we decided it is OK to install global tracking for everybody, whether they want it or not? The User-Agent is still visible to the website I'm visiting.

It's enough that a few large websites provide stats summary for their users. It is not necessary that Google, FB and co. track the entire Internet.

I run into a similar issue at work. I deploy ad-blockers on all student and staff machines. This makes our users invisible in Google Analytics. Supposedly our top browser is Mobile Safari.

Wouldn't it be easier to use something like PiHole to block requests to ad and analytics servers at the network level?

My web filter blocks ads, but ublock is better. It blocks off-campus and handles first-party ads. It also hides ad content frames better than dns-level blocking does. It's also easy for users to turn off when some site doesn't agree with it. My network level ad filtering has to be simple to avoid breakage since it's harder to work around.

But you're saying here that metrics might not faithfully keep track with reality; presumably an industry that cares will simply improve their metrics until they don't care.

In an ideal world yes, but what actually tends to happen is that the company starts to work towards improving their metric numbers at the cost of actually doing good business. I've seen this happen over and over again.

The web server's access logs will probably be a good place to look in the future then.

Websites can look at their own usage stats. As with some other aspects of this, people will have to actually do some work in-house.

No, they won't have to; they can simply ignore FF. I fully support this change, but to think FF matters enough to force anyone to do anything seems unfortunately a thing of the past.

Well, then Firefox will need to emulate Chrome, except that it still protects users.

In my experience as a long-term Firefox user, developers already don't care about Firefox. It's amazing how many websites I visit that break or look awful until I switch to Chromium.

Interesting, I've been using Firefox for years and can't remember the last time I've experienced a site that didn't perform as expected.

Which sites? I've been using FF as my browser for years. The only sites I've had issues with are owned by Google.

> this will mean ... No usage data

This presupposes that the current tracking (spyware) data is a reasonably accurate representation of reality. This assumption could be tested by comparing the "analytics" data to the server logs. but who wants to use accurate first-party data when delusions about "analytics" can tell you what you want to hear.

Don't forget all the Firefox forks that have to falsely identify as Firefox in order to get websites to not simply kick them off. Firefox usage is already significantly lower than Firefox usage is shown in terms of useragent statistics. A lot of that is because Firefox has chromed itself if not in source code then in spirit.

They should have user-agent info on a per-request basis. That's not the same as tracked browser-to-customer association but will at least help.

Who cares? Devs should be building to the spec, not vagaries of some privileged implementations.

And it's nobody's business what I do with the bits after it comes down the pipe anyways.

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