Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

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Well, Firefox users may never make up quite as much marketshare as it used to, but it does have one advantage: we're a lot louder and more annoying than Chrome users when stuff is broken. It's a feature! (Okay, I try not to be annoying. But I'm pretty sure absolutely nobody is thrilled when I report bugs about Librewolf not working. Shoutouts to SoundCloud for eventually fixing one of said issues.)

I doubt Safari will actually die on iOS. The truth is, Safari on iOS is kinda good. That said, honestly this whole line of thinking has gotten pretty tiring. I'm not really sure that an Apple/Google duopoly on browsers is really that much better than the seemingly inevitable Google monopoly. It's not like either of them are particularly good citizens, but Apple's relatively small influence has been very negative in a lot of ways. I'm not even a huge fan of using regulations to solve every problem, but even I must admit that EU regulations have done far more to start to reel in Google than Apple ever could, anyways. As for poor WebM support and pushing wgsl into the WebGPU spec, good riddance.

It's really sad that Google can't be trusted more. There's a lot of people there who are doing good work on Chromium and other web-related projects, and it's besmirched by greedy decisions at worst and optically blind decisions at best. When I was at Google, I did spend a bit of my time trying to make some intranet stuff work better in Firefox... It's probably a token gesture at best, but oh well.

You know we're at a weird point when the underdog competition in browsers is Apple, one of the richest and most resourceful companies of all time.

> Well, Firefox users may never make up quite as much marketshare as it used to, but it does have one advantage: we're a lot louder and more annoying than Chrome users when stuff is broken.

Slack refuses to work properly on Firefox. I don't think they care that we are being loud about it.

> Slack refuses to work properly on Firefox. I don't think they care that we are being loud about it.

Microsoft Teams doesn't make calls on Firefox, and their poor excuse of a desktop client for Linux forces me to use the web app on Chromium on my work computer.

Big shout out to Webex Teams, who's web app works flawlessly on both Chromium and Firefox but actually provides a better experience on Firefox because it's easier to make video calls Fullscreen

It's funny because I find if I get my sites working properly in Firefox, they work everywhere.

Yep. This is why I request (though I don’t enforce) my front end team to use Firefox at least part of the time when developing; if it works there, it works basically everywhere else without any hassle.

Microsoft teams barely even work standalone. It frustrates me whenever all the buttons stop working when I need to unmute myself during an online meeting. I then have to use my phone and hope it won't happen there too.

</rant>

To be fair, I'm not even sure if Slack cares about web users at all. It just doesn't work that well, at least for me. (Though I obviously haven't tried it in a bit, so maybe it's good in Chrome now.)

I think the desktop slack app is built on electron so is built to render properly in chrome.

It's true, but the Electron app always seemed more full featured, and at least for me, I had lots of issues with bugginess and slowness in the web browser, even in Chrome. I'm not sure why it would be slower in Chrome than Electron. Neither are particularly lightweight. Maybe it's my fault somehow.

With Electron you can depend directly on native libraries for handling audio and whatnot, but I don't think that explains the whole picture.

One datapoint: I use Slack exclusively in the browser (both Firefox and Brave), and it works well. As far as I remember on Firefox there was some limitation on video calls but that was arbitrary (user-agent check or something like that).

Yes, it is just video calls.

I hadn't tried the user agent trick, I was just frustrated enough at being on my personal laptop and having to join a call then finding Slack was being terrible.

And for no apparent good reason other than bad quality software.

I only brought it up because it is high profile web application that has an arbitrary Firefox limitation, and as a Firefox user I will name and shame bad applications.

Slack doesn't work properly full stop. It's a bloated unstable mess on every platform. Discord puts it to shame.

What doesn't work properly and are there issues for this where I can add my support?

I'm using slack on Firefox daily. Prefer it over loading that slow and resource hungry desktop app, if only for speed alone. But haven't encountered stuff that works on the desktop app, but not in the browser.

It refuses calls as "not supported in this browser".

Are you user-agent spoofing?

I'm also using Slack on Firefox and I'm not doing any user agent spoofing.

Calls?

That's what I had issues with, and what has been confirmed by multiple other people in this thread unless you spoof your user agent.

I've never used calls. Never even considered using it. So could be that feature isn't working.

For the rest, slack works well enough on FF. Often faster than the desktop app because the latter is so resource hungry, it becomes slow.

> You know we're at a weird point when the underdog competition in browsers is Apple, one of the richest and most resourceful companies of all time.

It's not so weird considering the following:

1. Safari only works on Apple operating systems

2. Safari development has been seriously underfunded by Apple, since Apple wants to keep people in their walled garden app store, and web apps, by their very nature, can't be controlled by them.

I've noticed Facebook (.com, the new one built on React), works horribly in Firefox.

I constantly report bugs and issues (with video and descriptive written copy) but some have persisted for months.

There's one where the CSS breaks if you open a lightbox modal and you can no longer click any buttons. Only way to fix it is to refresh the page.

They really don't seem to care at all.

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