Hacker News Reader

Comment by creshal | Hacker News Reader

> When the specs are constantly churning in order to keep one gigantic company's browser an effective monopoly, maybe it isn't really that important to follow them so closely...

The notion breaks as soon as your users want to use youtube or gmail, which for some mysterious reason keep insisting on using all these useless "standards" even though they have no benefit to the user.

View on HN

Youtube and gmail will mysteriously break for people on Firefox too, so it's not that much worse.

/sarcasm (sort of...)

Pretty sure those sites break in Edge and Brave as well...

They break them on purpose so people will switch to Chrome. And the worst part is, there's no evidence (yet?) that there's malice behind it. Maybe we'll get a whistleblower at some point, but that'll only happen when their income no longer covers buying off their conscience.

Do they only break for users in the United States? I've been using Firefox exclusively since about 2.0, and I've never had any of the Google projects break for me. Not once. Yet this seems to be a pretty common problem around here.

I'm from Europe and on one occasion Youtube was broken on Firefox but not on Chrome. It was fixed in the day or two.

In my experience, YouTube in-video links (those that e.g. show thumbnails of videos and are pointed at by vloggers with their fingers) have been broken in Firefox for years. Not that I complain, I've always been annoyed by those. I think it took me 2 years to realize that after seeing vloggers point at invisible things. I had to double-check in Chrome. (I just assumed that they forgot to add the links when editing.)

Those links don't appear on my Android-based Youtube clients that come with my cable box and Sony TV. The vlogger's hand points to nothing. It's amazing how second-class Youtube on Android TV is, maybe someone at Google hates testing it. I still manage to use it for about 75% of my Youtube usage. My wife and I are definitely going through a Youtube phase, which will probably end when the ads reach a tipping point.

What exactly is broken in Firefox on YouTube or Gmail? I'm not a heavy Firefox user, but when I try it every once in a while, I've never noticed anything broken on any of the Google's sites, even Maps and Docs worked just fine - but then, maybe I wasn't trying out some advanced features.

My wife and I have had a fanless PC hooked up to our TV since 2011.

Firefox is the only browser we use and we watch Youtube every day. If it broke, I'd know about it or hear about it.

It never breaks.

> What exactly is broken in Firefox on YouTube or Gmail?

Performance. That makes the sabotage so insidious!

https://tech.co/news/google-slowed-youtube-firefox-edge-2019...

https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/disable-polymer-youtube

Incompetent vs malice...

If they are close to the edge cases of the spec, just not testing on Firefox will break it. By negligence, rather than malice.

Regular Firefox user here with a YouTube Premium account. I use it all the time and have never had any issues.

Just a couple weeks ago, you couldn't use the spacebar in YouTube search in Firefox only.

For YouTube, use youtube-dl or VLC (it's capable of playing YouTube videos directly).

For gmail, use an IMAP+SMTP client of your liking, of which there's no shortage.

Or there's https://invidio.us/ !

This notion also breaks when user wants to use govt and financial (bank, etc) web-sites.

Depends on the gov, in Europe they tend to follow usability guidelines

True, a browser is now necessary in these cases. However, my government and banks have strong incentives to make their services accessible and not break usability.

> as your users want to use youtube or gmail

Yes, as long as a requirement is something those corps control, they'll essentially control you.

The answer is to ignore support for gmail and youtube and hope their reputation catches up to them - specifically youtube alienating creators and becoming yet another corporate on-demand television-clone.

mail.google.com and YouTube.com are just frontends.

There are alternative and better ways to access gmail and YouTube.

I just found this one for youtube and twitter for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/privacytoolsIO/comments/jlkqxa/any_...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com