Hacker News Reader

Comment by Zardoz84 | Hacker News Reader

> The larger problem, though, is that it's not at all clear that Firefox will remain a viable alternative to Chrome. Its market share has been falling for years, and not everybody is pleased with the directions that the Mozilla Foundation has taken. The creators of web sites have responded by not caring about Firefox; having to retry broken web sites in Chrome is a ritual that many Firefox users have had to get used to. It's not surprising that users give up and just run Chrome from the outset.

Pardon ? I don't run on any issue that requires using Chrome instead of Firefox. At least, not usually.

Also, as web developer I always work on Firefox and then I try on Chromiun and Edge to see if I run on a Blink bug (Yeah! I hit a few working on this way) or something that it's different between Firefox and Blink engine

View on HN

I encounter it occasionally. Either broken or omitted features. Slack calls don't work in Firefox just because. Blurring out your background in Google meet isn't available on Firefox. Some utilities websites here, in Ireland, don't work in Firefox but do in Chrome.

>Slack calls don't work in Firefox just because.

Slack calls don't work in Firefox because Slack explicitly made the choice to not support Firefox and to not follow web standards in how they implemented Slack calls. Furthermore, they go a step further by detecting your browser and blocking the feature for Firefox users and telling you to switch to Chrome. [1]

This is not a failure of Firefox, it's a failure of Slack. I think the attitude in your comment is very common, and is exactly why it's so hard to build a web browser for the modern web that isn't part of the Google Chrome monoculture. Users cannot differentiate easily between problems they encounter because of their browser vs problems they encounter because of the web app, and for the user it doesn't matter because it's still a problem. Regardless of the cause, it's important that browser makers solve these issues to ensure that users can get things done on the web, but that's easier said than done.

[1]: https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/958645632620748800?lang=e...

> Furthermore, they go a step further by detecting your browser and blocking the feature for Firefox users and telling you to switch to Chrome.

Well, it is perhaps worth noting that if you fake your user agent to remove the block, calls still don't work (I've tried). I'm not opposed to blocking a feature which the developer knows is not going to work (although it would be nice if their was an override, for browser developers if no one else).

But, yes, the fact the calls don't work in the first place is BS. And it is, sadly, one of the reasons I finally gave up and switched to Chrome earlier this week. I need this stuff for work, and I just can't fight it anymore!

That's the thing, though: very few Slack users will care that it's Slack's fault that calls don't work on Firefox. They'll blame Firefox, and switch to Chrome, if that feature is important to them. (Or they'll use Slack's Electron app.)

I know its a failure of Slack, which is why I responded to the parent

Adding to the sibling comment, MEGA download of large files apparently only works if you use a Chromium-based browser since those quasi-standardised a feature that IIRC allows websites direct access to local storage.

W.T.A.F.

Define “large file”, that’s not my experience (but I’ve not used MEGA in a while, they might have broken something...)

IIRC, it was >3GB or >4GB either in a single file or as a combined download.

True for desktop Firefox. Mobile FF not so much but likely the combination of adblock and mobile FF is not ideal if you want usual commercial sites to work.

Corporate IT is a whole other story. It has been IE only but chrome somehow managed to be compatible with most of the crap they came up with to secure the intranet. Firefox could never complete there... Just too much Microsoft specific 'extras'.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com