Hacker News Reader

Comment by aetherspawn | Hacker News Reader

Every day I hit sites that literally only work in Chrome.. it’s time to fight back :)

I exclusively use firefox, have a pretty normal browsing pattern, and that almost never happens to me! Much less that once a month, maybe once every 3 months

Same

For whatever reason car manufacturers are the worst at it. Microsoft is also pretty bad (worse than Google).

Finding one once every few months sound about right but usually the bugs impacting Firefox users are major PITA. Some I’ve had over the past few years:

* myADP had some kind of bug preventing firefox authentication that lasted months.

* Elan financial redid their credit card site for fidelity visa and had a CSS bug that hid the card total balance. This lasted for about a month.

* bitbucket (work required) had this bug that prevented pages rendering in firefox. It was some kind of JS client side bug and it impacted a bunch of people in my company. After months of support request they gave us some console commands that opted into an experimental feature which resolved the issue. This one was especially frustrating as they kept telling us to just clear our cookies and delete our profiles.

* Some random IRS system I had to use for either requesting a tax transcript or validating my identity just didn’t work.

It’s actually been so frustrating my coworkers joke anytime there is a bug I’m experiencing that it must be another Firefox only bug.

Opening fastmail in Firefox crashes the whole browser. I don't know why. I stopped my subscription due to that.

I have used fastmail in Firefox daily for years, never had an issue.

Well maybe it only happens for me. Not only the page becomes non responsive the whole browser becomes non responsive.

Yeah, something is going on with GP's browser. I have Fastmail open in Firefox right now, I've never had an issue with it.

I'm not saying that to dismiss the problem, I believe GP that it's crashing; more bringing it up to say "there is something going wrong here that's not at the browser/site level that could potentially be fixable for you on your local device if you want to use Fastmail in Firefox."

vanguard's website can't edit holdings with firefox. I reported it years ago and literally nothing's been done.

I've never had a problem on their UK site [1]. It might be a different code base.

1. https://www.vanguardinvestor.co.uk/

> myADP

For years they had a terrible implementation that only worked in _old_ versions of IE. They had no incentive to change because they were the main players in that space. I loathed them because their tagline was "Anytime, anywhere" which was clearly missing an asterisk.

Normally it's something else, like a plugin. To be honest I don't notice much, frequently I assume it's some tracking that's blocked which courses the site to not function and just move on.

Between blocking tracking, with DuckDuckGos privacy plugin, and using Firefox I'd say that blocking tracking breaks WAAAAY more sites.

I recently installed adguard on my home server, and it did indeed break a few sites.

Agreed. I regularly have to do a little "disable for site" dance with uBO and Privacy Badger to even get certain websites to load. It's kind of convenient in that it gives me an inflection point where I can choose not to use that website or service at all.

The times it does happen I've found more often than not switching the user agent fixes it...

I simply refuse to use websites if they require Chrome. I find some other way to do whatever it is I'm trying.

Logging into PSN was (is?) broken for a very, very long time. It was for at least 1.5 year, but I switched after that so I couldn’t tell beyond that.

Similar for me, I’d say it’s actually more like once or twice a year. More if you count sites that are specifically about Chrome experiments, which sometimes get linked from HN.

One factor I've found is the intersection of Enhanced Tracking Protection and Multi-Account Container in Firefox. I'm seeing daily "Please stop using an ad blocker, Firefox is an ad blocker, please use Chrome, this site works best in Chrome" banners and ad walls and paywalls and other similar cranky anti-patterns.

It fascinates me how many people I know have uBlock (Origin) installed in Chrome and see nowhere near as many whiny banners and "stop running an ad blocker" nonsense as I see running Firefox without an ad blocker just ETP and MAC. The people complaining "Firefox is an ad blocker" are making it clear that they don't actually care that you are blocking ads or not, they care that you are blocking trackers and hate you for trying to maintain a semblance of privacy. Keeps saying the quiet parts out loud.

Most of the sites that do that are a "close tab and ignore" thing, some are a sequester to their own account container and feed them garbage (create a dumb account for them, turn off ETP just for them just in that container). It is still only a once-a-month case where such a site I need to get something done on is entirely broken in Firefox and I need to open it in something Chromium based, but that's still too often and getting worse.

But that "Firefox is an ad blocker, please use a less private browser" is a daily annoyance for me for sure.

It's usually super critical things that don't work, for example:

I couldn't apply to become a registered engineer in my state using Firefox because the form was in an iframe, and for some reason the iframe didn't render on FF.

The credit portal for Shell Fuels only works in Chrome and doesn't display at all in FF due to a console error. (Enough of the page renders to make you think that the page is complete but i.e. the buttons to apply or make a payment don't render).

The field for setting the date of a consultation (work) in our accounting package doesn't work in FF, and no matter how many times I write to their support team they just write back with "Firefox is not supported, please download Chrome". There was a similar attitude at a software company I worked prior, but I managed to wear them down and get Edge (modern), Firefox and Safari on the QA supported browser list with the reasoning that they are the default browsers for Windows, Linux and macOS respectively.

But come on, browser standardization is so good these days I honestly don't understand how people are making pages that only work in Chrome?

Is this a geographically local thing? This happens very rarely to me, although I there are some (Google) sites I use regularly that do work worse on Firefox than Chrome.

Speaking of that, I've had issues with Firefox (both on Mac and Linux) where some checkboxes just don't appear. I was checking in for an international flight last month on American, and could not manage to get through the checkin process until I discovered there was a checkbox I needed to tick that didn't even appear on Firefox (but which did on Chrome)..

Yeah it's upsetting the sites that I run into this on, especially since there's no excuse in 2023. On more obscure pages on Vanguard's website I've run into some broken stuff that results in console errors I don't remember, but switching to Chrome made it work :/

yeah the edit holdings page is broken in FF

Yes. It reminds me of when there were rumours/(facts?) about open source sabotaging of FF. I see a lot of instances where pages worked fine on FF but now they don't, and sometimes I have to fire up another browser. I really hope that's not the case.

I use FF by default.

Spoofing your user agent to a chrome one will make most of these sites work. They're just not interested in allowing you privacy.

I don't think I've come across that yet with Firefox.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com