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Comment by someonenice | Hacker News Reader

Already lot of sites are not tested on Firefox and many explicitly so [1]. Now the web publishers that rely on ads will have less incentive to support Firefox. They might even actively promote other browsers. Similar to how IE was discouraged by websites explicitly.

"This site works best on Chrome" is only what is needed now to reduce the Firefox userbase further.

Note - This comment was typed on firefox.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17363721

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Meanwhile, in Germany, Firefox is at a stable 25-26% (according to statcounter)

If you are offering services to us, you probably can’t afford to ignore FF. If you are a German company, that goes double.

Is that true? I'm not speaking morally here, but pragmatically: 25% of German GDP is a little under a trillion dollars, or about 1% of global GDP. I know there are plenty of problems to nitpick with this rough model, eg that developed countries are often targeted first, but even limiting to OECD countries only yields 1.5% of GDP.

Europe-wide figures would be more relevant, but it's tough for me to see any company that isn't Germany-specific (or at best, regional) caring much about a fraction of the userbase of a country whose GDP is itself a fraction of potential markets.

Now don't get me wrong, businesses that are Germany-only are still pretty massive objectively, but it doesn't seem like that would be enough to move the needle on the way the Web ecosystem develops. German (eg) bank support for FF seems like not much more than a regional technological quirk, like if you found out that Kazakhstan's banks only worked well on IE6

Given Google Chrome's opposition to adblocking, combined with a ~33% of users using an adblocker, it suggests this trend is going to make Mozilla Firefox more popular; not less. Either way, I regard it as playing hardball.

> and many explicitly so [1].

Ignoring Google's properties (because we all know by now that they don't really play fair), the only examples I see there are Bank of America and some user complaining about his D3 animation being slow.

I'd hardly call that many.

This website uses user agent detection to block Firefox https://business.apple.com/

If you are serving customers and don't want to walk away from sizable percentages of your user base, you test on Chrome, Firefox, IE, Edge (old and the chromium one), Safari, Brave, and maybe even good old Opera. And if you are any good, it would be relatively rare for you to find issues.

IE is probably the hardest of these. The reason that still has non trivial amounts of users is because so many websites can't afford to lose access to those users.

Firefox has a builtin user agent spoofer (not extension), and those helpful promotions just shut up.

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