Hacker News Reader

Comment by chironjit | Hacker News Reader

Hey, just wanted to say great work. I'm excited for innovation of a non-chrome engine and am gonna give it a try.

My 2 biggest beef with Firefox is website compatibility and dead tabs.

For item 1, certain sites don't work with Firefox when they do with Chrome. This can happen even in sites of industries that claim to want privacy / decentralisation / anti-monopoly. Some of these are government websites.

Sometimes, websites explicitly block non Chrome browsers too.

So if I had to request a feature, this would be it.

For the second item, I haven't been really able to pin it down. But I've seen this on both Android and Linux version. A tab sometimes goes dead, that it it doesn't refresh or basically doesn't respond when typing a new address. The solution has been to just close the tab and start a new one.

Will give it a try and provide more feedback

View on HN

Don't ask a browser vendor to fix websites in 2022. We know that it's rarely a problem with the browser, and mostly devs that decided (or been told) to do a chrome only website.

We did it once with IE, don't fall in that trap again.

Haha, I don't necessarily disagree with you on this..

My only view on this is it would be nice to have a general chrome compatibility switch. I've not accounted for the feasibility of this from a technical or commercial perspective, so I can't advocate for it beyond a nice to have feature.

There used to be “Open this page in IE” browser extensions. It shouldn’t be too difficult to have a similar “Open this page in Chrome/Edge”.

It's even worse than that. You could build a site "just for chrome", only test on Chrome and still it should just work with Firefox. The sites blocking Firefox are doing so explicitly, because the site would work otherwise.

> certain sites don't work with Firefox when they do with Chrome

Despite most web devs only really supporting and testing in Chrome, aside from Google sites which deliberately sabotage FF compatibility, I find the opposite to be true more frequently. I can't count the number of times a site had not been working for my wife in Chrome and I tell her "try it in FF", and it works. I'm a full time FF user at home and have basically zero compatibility issues. I only use Chrome at work because of a few poorly implemented mandatory tools that exclude FF.

>For item 1, certain sites don't work with Firefox when they do with Chrome. This can happen even in sites of industries that claim to want privacy / decentralisation / anti-monopoly. Some of these are government websites.

People often say this but rarely give examples, do you have some? Explicitly listing the sites would be much better feedback that might actually lead the problems being solved.

Just go to about:compat in Firefox and you can see them. Most of them are simple UA locks but some require more advanced logic.

Interesting, will have a look at this

I've learnt to sorta live it and workaround it but one egregious example was a passport renewal site for a (non US) country whose image uploading function failed silently on image upload.

Repeated the process multiple times for an hour until it occurred to me to just try a chrome-based browser. Worked fine after that.

I've run into quite a few crypto-related sites that break in weird ways when interacting with wallets / etc. The relative frequency of these issues on crypto sites are really the most disappointing - so much for decentralisation, anti-monopoly, etc, etc

Not keen to name and shame in this thread but my primary worry is that it will drive away more people from Firefox.

> I've run into quite a few crypto-related sites that break in weird ways when interacting with wallets / etc. The relative frequency of these issues on crypto sites are really the most disappointing - so much for decentralisation, anti-monopoly, etc, etc

Likely they’re all using the same open source module that’s has some chrome dependancy deep in its bowels.

There is a "Report site issue..." entry in Firefox's hamburger menu, under "Help", which leads to <https://webcompat.com/issues/new>. This is really the best way to help Firefox with compatibility issues, i.e. providing specific information which can be acted upon.

#2 sounds like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1772975 , maybe comment about your experience

Reply on news.ycombinator.com