Snapchat. Now on the Web | Hacker News Reader

Snapchat. Now on the Web

web.snapchat.com

24 pointsnateb202221 comments

How is it possible that in 2023 they can't support Firefox and Safari?

Update: It works totally fine on Firefox if you use an extension to lie about your user agent. What a joke.

Firefox and Safari would probably work for the majority of features but Chrome probably exposes some browser APIs that the rest don't that might make a couple things not work.

For people who know enough to spoof a Chrome user agent, they know enough not to mind if some things break but regular consumers wouldn't know about browser compatibility topics and would blame any irregularities not on their browser but on Snapchat, which is why they choose to display this error rather than let people through.

Yea that's fair, and I totally understand when sites limit to newer (last 2-3 years) versions of browsers or limit to Chrome, Safari, and Firefox.

But to cap it at just Chrome like its 2012 when browser compatibility has come such a long way is likely unnecessary and frankly lazy on their part. I can't think of an API that they definitely would need to use that isn't in Firefox.

Exactly. There's no excuse, a "unicorn" company with millions of users such as Snapchat can surely do better.

It’s always fun being on MDN and seeing some feature supported for years except a big red “No” under Safari. Had two of those today.

Yea, but are any of those missing features required to run Snapchat?

Everyone will have a different answer.

This is the torture of writing applications for other people. There’s userCount + 1 opinions on things.

I often have to make notes to remind myself how half the CS team wants it like X but the other half wants Y and to stop oscillating the feature. Sometimes you can’t make everyone happy with a clever solution. Sometimes you get to make everyone equally unhappy.

It’s the debate as old as time: should the website load as best as it can, or should it work perfectly or not at all?

Funny enough, the amount of bots in my inbox went up by like 500% as soon as this launched. Weird how that works.

Also, now it’s easier to take screenshots.

Why was this a good idea? Who asked for this?

I noticed this as well.

Much easier to take screenshots now, without users getting notified that a screenshot took place.

sweet

"Browser not supported

Snapchat for Web only supports the latest version of Chrome and Edge on computers (not phones or tablets) at this time."

Snapchat doesn't even work on rooted phones. I'm surprised they're taking this "security risk".

crickets

You're not kidding; it was posted here 7 months ago with zero comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32143292

I guess this explains why I see snapchat.com as a referral / traffic source in my web analytics.

Thank god i was waiting for this

Doesn't work on Firefox.

it does if you use a user agent switcher to chrome

isn’t this a paid feature?

shouldn’t that be the opposite?

oh okay. now web less users then mobile

I'd just choose a world with less clip-based frenzied communication and developed some standard of digital stoicism instead of overindulgence that is snapchat and tiktok.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com