The worst is that just changing the user agent makes everything work.
Sites shouldn't support browsers, but standards. By all means check if a browser supports a certain standard, and provide an error message for browsers that are too far behind, but don't ban them simply for having the wrong user agent.
It ends up being a feature requested by customer support teams that you prevent the app from working on unsupported browsers because users don’t read banners or pop ups and it generates pointless tickets. If you make your users change their UA there’s an awareness that things might break.
'supported browsers' are browsers that you lose customers if you don't support. You don't lose customers by telling them to switch to Chrome. Firefox's market share is small and the number of people who exclusively use Firefox and refuse to switch is vanishingly small.
That's a great attitude towards your users. No, you, the vendor, adapt to what your users bring.
That is the standard that the web was built around. Lazy developers that only wish to cater to the one browser that they have on their desk and that refuse to recognize that the world is a bit larger than their minimal view (including screenreaders and other accessibility device) should get another job. And if the company they work at is run competently they will (Microsoft apparently is not one of those, but that's not really news either).
- 8.3% is almost much larger than the metric you actually care about -- the percentage of users that will not use Chrome (or your desired set of supported browsers).
The desired set of supported browsers will always come down to metrics.
Essentially, both companies have done anti-privacy and untrustworthy actions, and choosing the lesser evil is hardly ideal.
The 8,3% (or 9,52%, or whatever) of Firefox users is way, way beyond total Skype users. Firefox has about ~170M users, Skype 4,5M.
If a browser is standards compliant it should be supported. Note that standards are there for a reason, they create a level playing field. So all you really need to do is to ensure that your implementation is conform the standard, you then still have to test to ensure that your assumptions hold in light of practical applications of that standard on the rendering side. But there really is absolutely no excuse why barring non-standard extensions your website would not work with all browsers with more than 1% market share.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
Would be a good place to start for your compatibility testing.
Yes, you do. It might be a very, very small number, so small that you decide not to care about it, but you definitely lose people.
The tricky part is that most companies have no idea how many people they lose and why. It's just marketeers guessing and anecdotal evidence. The number is probably bigger than they think, because generally speaking, marketeers are not the type of persons that about browsers.
Correction: known bad apps (where changing it just works but they've decided not to let you use it).
I consider it very shameful behavior, sabotaging the internet.
But you are right.
This is especially insidious since so many companies are already locked into the MS ecosystem, users have no choice but to use edge or chrome and IT departments will start wondering why they would bother allowing the use of Firefox at all.
Unfortunately, I've tried browsing with no UA header, and a surprisingly large number of sites --- even ones without any sort of "app functionality" --- will return strange errors.
UPDATE: the idea below of Safari not updating it's UA seems to be a good way to move this forward.
Tracking. Safari actually stopped updating its user agent for this reason.
While chat will probably work, as it doesn't have anything browser-specific, I am not sure video/audio calls will be reliable. Even if they work now, that flow is no longer tested or fixed if it breaks on Firefox. The downloadable video/audio plugin on Windows and Mac, supporting Firefox is the expensive part that the team likely stopped supporting.
Because what we are seeing certainly seems malicious - the idea that it can work by changing the user header looked, at least to me, as a swipe to Firefox, but instead, you're explaining that you simply couldn't guarantee support.
Now, it would be cool if you could simply just state that on the page, instead of simply saying it won't work - but I do understand the desire to not present something with potential issues to the general public.
Thanks for taking the time, here.
Having worked at Microsoft though, if your team cannot guarantee that a feature works on a browser that uses some non-standard things, is a decision that product will make on how to proceed. Display a warning or just don't support? Perhaps there might be security issues in the future the company wants to avoid this way, knowing they could not patch it? And so on.
Beyond speculation, I don't have much more to offer.
The best part is that the default Waterfox user-agent begins with an unmodified copy of the Firefox one (which is allowed), with " Waterfox/X.Y." appended to it.
(j/k - I do remember the years where it was actually alright, before it became the plague on the dev community it evolved into)
(And yeah, compared with Netscape 4, IE6 was great!)
https://www.facebook.com/i.valentin.maxim/videos/10219098431...
There is an extension, that will change the UA only for Skype: https://addons.mozilla.org/pl/firefox/addon/firefox-web-skyp...
user_pref("general.useragent.override.web.skype.com", "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.77 Safari/537.36");