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Comment by realusername | Hacker News Reader

They just block it by user agent, if you spoof it, everything is working well.

At this rate, how long until Firefox does a "Like Chrome" in its UA?

Mozilla is developing an add-on called Go Faster that uses WebCompat data to adjust settings in Firefox for compatibility on poorly tested sites.

https://github.com/mozilla/webcompat-addon

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Compatibility/Go_Faster_Addon/Overr...

https://webcompat.com/

Firefox already ships some UA overrides. You can see the list of active overrides (with links to bug reports explaining each) in Firefox's about:compat page.

It looks like about:compat is the desktop implementation of the Go Faster add-on.

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/07/firefox-68-bigints-contras...

Good to see this in action already.

How comes nobody has sued them over that yet?!!

It's the same as games saying: "windows only". They could argue that it's a technical requirement.

In the "Windows only" case it is kind of reasonable: supporting another platform takes work.

When they are blocking other browsers explicitly despite the fact that the other platforms work that is a whole different level.

Well browsers with a different engine do work differently. By the way, I do disagree with this strategy. Just saying it is not necessarily something illegal.

Problem was in this case it seems the product works fine across different engines, they just decided it was ok to block a competing product to limit comsumer choices and generally make the web a worse place ;-)

Of course it doesn't have to be that black and white but they certainly makes it easy to dislike them at the moment.

In this case it's more like a game detecting that it's being run through Wine, and blocking it, even if it would have worked fine.

Which rule they violated?

I wonder if a case could be built on accessibility grounds actually...

Abuse of dominant market position in one market (search) to push into other markets (browsers).

Skype is a Microsoft product, though?

Sorry, I thought it was about hangouts or something.

Embarrassing, sorry, and thanks for pointing it out.

haha thanks. Didn't even think about this for some reason, yet it's so simple.

I there a plugin to spoof the UA for certain sites only?

Edit: it doesn't work.

I use this one: https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/uaswitcher/, you can override per website or globally.

Thanx, this one works.

Yes, I'm using this one in Firefox for Android: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/uaswitcher/

This should do the trick: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-st...

That's what I tried to use but did not work at first. It works if you use block list mode and list .skype.com and .live.com.

Heh. It's the same old web app from the works-in-firefox days.

There is also an add-on just for Skype: https://addons.mozilla.org/en/firefox/addon/firefox-web-skyp...

I use it, instead of different methods, because it's just a few clicks away and for me it's one of the top results for "firefox skype".

THANKS!

this just worked. Onto Firefox!

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