Hacker News Reader

Comment by preinheimer | Hacker News Reader

Specific problems I've had as a firefox user:

- I can't pay municipal license fees (Site says "Use Chrome")

- I can't use the Vendor management portal for $largePopularTechCompany type company for my small business ("We support Chrome")

- Xero my small business accounting software just doesn't work properly ("Use Chrome")

View on HN

Some Xero products don’t work properly no matter what your browser is.

For me, Mozilla has bugs or weaknesses in Linux. YouTube chews my cpu (hardware acceleration is broken, at least for me). Tabs ‘freeze’ due to a bug in an X11 lib. Pop up bubbles (do you want to enable gps to this site type bubbles) if visible before switching workspaces appear on all workspaces but cannot be actioned and appear on top.

Mozilla as a company appears to be attempting poor monetisation models like attempting to build social networks etc. I would consider paying them a yearly fee if I thought they’d use money wisely, but at the moment executive appear more interested in vanity projects.

Maybe somebody should fork Firefox and start over with new stewardship.

I've used Xero for years with Firefox without issues.

Maybe you can share your configuration? I wonder if you are lucky or they are unlucky.

I run Firefox with uBlock Origin enabled and set the Firefox enhanced privacy settings to the strictest settings. I haven't done anything special to get Xero working - never had any issues.

Are you using Firefox ESR? It usually has worse support then the regular releases.

Nope - the regular version.

Same here, though I only use a small subset of Xero features.

i assume this is just a user-agent check though i don't expect regular users to know how to switch.

This is also a double edge sword in that if it's just a user-agent check the site tends to lack a well coded fallback for any functionality that is actually not supported and the page can silently break during usage. Not necessarily a problem for those that already know how to switch, but even just installing an extension for other people doesn't mean the sites are suddenly actually compatible. Sometimes even big sites like Microsoft Teams have this kind of problem for years at a time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com