Mozilla Firefox is below PG&E threshold for support | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla Firefox is below PG&E threshold for support

pge.com

105 pointsNeverBehave87 comments

Evidently, electric poles that don't fall over at the slightest breeze are also below PG&E's threshold for support.

Consider what support mean. It doesn't mean "works with".

Supported likely means that they test with and design for. It also means that if a customer is using that browser and there's a problem (e.g., seeing their bill online) they will fix the problem if it's just in that browser.

Firefox is 3.3% of users [1]. When it comes to testing features with (including QA validation) and working around browser specific bugs, what % of usage should drive that?

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/

Is that a tracker that works even in the presence of AdBlock et al? If not, it's going to significantly undercount Firefox.

I have a theory that Firefox gets under reported in a lot of stats because its users are more likely to use Adblockers. Statcounter for example is going to be blocked by most Adblockers; stats based on server logs will be more accurate.

It's not just client side trackers that get blocked -- any server side tracker that only counts specific resources being requested is going to be blocked by Adblockers too.

Well summarized. It's amusing to read Brave on their unsupported list, since it's just Chromium with privacy features built-in. They wouldn't be able to tell, non-invasively, since it self-reports as the most boring, common version of Chrome that it can. Actually, privacy features that break sites by default if you don't know how to adjust them. Works, guaranteed by our developers and customer support folks, should be a different bar.

So long as they don't active sniff and reject non-approved browsers.

Microsoft Edge is now using the same rendering engine as Chrome too

Microsoft Edge isn't on their list of unsupported browsers.

3% isn't that low when you consider how many people there are.

Oh, I agree, but some corporate spreadsheet jockey may not think that 3% sounds like much.

This.

I wish we didn't only measure (and pay for) five nines+ uptime, but also support. Remember how annoyingly often just 99.9% uptime means you're out of business?

This is a red herring.

If we work to usage, we allow the browser market to be swallowed by one proprietary player.

That manufacturer can then call ALL the shots.

Engineers and development have a duty to work according to open standards to prevent this from happening.

Plenty of engineers are responsible for having Chrome where it is now, and keep going at it, by shipping Chrome all over the place as Electron.

Hardly thinking about their supposed duties.

If Mozilla doesn't care about recapturing market share, why should we? Someone should just fork Gecko and make a new browser at this point.

What is it, 2008?

What kind of exotic stuff is a utility company's public website doing that makes supporting an established browser engine impossible in 2024?

It's more a case of they don't bother testing using firefox. It may incidentally work on firefox, as a side effect of being tested in browsers that people still commonly use in the 2020s.

It's more that they don't care if, say, an automated support chatbot doesn't work in Firefox. In which case they tell you to just use Chrome rather than submit a ticket telling one of their web devs to fix something.

Their website is SO SO bad. It is almost like they don't want you to easily be able to see your bill and investigate the rates. The only part of the website that is easy is making payments.

Every single ISP does this. Even both of Googles ISP brands do it. I've convinced myself it's to hide their coverage maps, forcing you to give address and get a single data point. In reality it just means I never wind up helping friends move ISPs because it feels.lile an abusive relationship no matter what move you make.

2008? More like 1998. Totally unacceptable bullshit.

"Don't worry, though... Regardless of your browser choice, we'll still hijack 'alt+back_arrow' to show you supported browsers instead of navigating to the previous page."

That'll teach me to try to eat leftover bbq with my primary hand while using the other to browse HN over lunch.

> Regardless of your browser choice, we'll still hijack 'alt+back_arrow' to show you supported browsers instead of navigating to the previous page.

Frustrating. I'm using Mac, so the corresponding shortcut for returning to the previous page is command + left arrow (back arrow), now hijacked. command + [ does the same thing and isn't hijacked yet. If you're on Windows, backspace might work in Firefox, but you'll first need to change to change a flag in about:config [1]. I'd be reluctant to give backspace that behavior, since I've accidentally lost progress on online forms by accidentally navigating to another page.

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/keyboard-shortcuts-perf...

Three of those browsers are just Chromium reskins, how are they supporting Chrome but not them?

“Support” means “actively testing and fixing bugs”

This news doesn’t mean that it just will stop working in Firefox, it’s just that they don’t test and they don’t care.

i have seen websites that actively block you from using them unless you’re on a “supported” browser. it’s kinda nuts

Example: Twitch still doesn't let me login from Firefox if I'm on Alpine Linux.

It only happens when I try from Alpine Linux, so they might be testing for some musl-specific quirk and denying access just for not being the Firefox from a different distro.

how old is your firefox? i am almost positive ive used twitch on alpine but it was a while ago

Brave is unsupported by a lot of websites, but almost always works (at least if you turn off shields).

"Unsupported" = "We don't test or develop with this browser in mind", not "This browser doesn't work." If that browser effectively mimics one that is supported, it usually works fine.

This is a customer facing message. People understand brands, they don't understand which browser uses which engine.

"Pge.com is supported on most major operating systems and browsers."

And by "most major browsers", we mean Chrome, reskinned Chrome and Safari.

Whenever I mention a website's issue to tech support, they give me the "just use Chrome" song and dance. I have to actively protest for the right to use Firefox. If your company does this you are complicit in Google's monopoly control of the web and you probably don't support Linux either.

It is already been like that for the last five years in most projects I worked on.

It wasn't part of browser matrix for acceptance delivery, we did it because we still cared, not because we had to.

I've lived all over the US. Why are utility company websites SO BAD? All of them are terrible.

The good news is that it is rare for any of us to need to visit them.

Except that when you need to visit them, you almost always REALLY need it.

Very low competition I'd guess. It's a little better with internet providers because we have a few options, at least in my area.

> I've lived all over the US. Why are utility company websites SO BAD? All of them are terrible.

Utility companies are deliberately regional monopolies, without the threat of competition there's no incentive to do better. That's presumably reflected in but not limited to the quality of their web sites.

In California, PG&E refused to hand over legally-required documents, in addition to refusing to hand over ordinary information that they were not required to hand over. Subsequently, a pipeline in San Bruno (updt) area exploded, a dozen houses burned to the ground, and several people died. They established new legal precedent by being convicted of Murder One.

investigations subsequently determined that PG&E had falsified reports, and failed to conduct testing that was required by law.

Next, the Tubbs fires. "do better" ??

> Subsequently, a pipeline in San Mateo area exploded, a dozen houses burned to the ground, and several people died.

I recall the San Bruno gas explosion[0] you're referring to. It happened at a time when I regularly drove down that leg of Skyline to access Pacifica and Ocean Beach coming from south bay via the peninsula/280.

We clearly need better solutions for how such utilities are delivered and their businesses operated. Though in the case of residential gas lines, we should probably just stop the practice, especially in seismically active regions like the bay area...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bruno_pipeline_explosion

[00] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNSjRKY7Ha8

also https://www.sanbrunokiosk.com/introduction

It doesn't reduce their income to have a bad website, and might save them a bit in dev costs (maybe not though? if not, there's an opportunity to sell them on better sites)

Because they overpay hacks to build them, and pass the cost onto consumers.

I guess Firefox just isn't hexavalent enough for PG&E.

Lots of other websites that don't have this disclaimer, but also have much worse support for Firefox (read: none, and it's likely perma-broken and wontfix)

I'm not sure why this was voted so high or would be news to anyone. It's a single website and historically this is nothing new (IE used to be the only supported browser on nearly all sites, or the reverse became true once Chrome had enough traction while IE development languished).

Firefox is not that popular of a browser. Not news at 11.

Yeah, I was wondering about this. Who the heck is PG&E and why is it newsworthy if a single company doesn't support Firefox browser fully?

> Who the heck is PG&E

For many people this is the power company. If you want electricity, you go through them. Needing to use specific browsers to get basic services is an accessibility problem.

They are an electric provider in the United States. I last dealt with them while in California.

PG&E is Pacific Gas and Electric. It provides utility services to tens of millions of people. They’re one of, if not the biggest single utility companies in the country.

It’s not like MomNPop, LLC.

They may as well be for a lot of us. I'd never heard of Kroger before a few months ago, and apparently they're one of the biggest grocery store chains. Their size doesn't mean that everyone knows about them.

The people posting and upvoting likely see it as the possible start of a trend.

... One of the largest utility companies in the US and part of the S&P500?

Why make it sound as if either of those things mean anything?

    PG&E provides natural gas and electricity to 5.2 million households in the northern two-thirds of California.

That's 2% of one country...

Even worse, this news affects 3% of that 2%.

Try looking outside your bubble every now and then!

5.2M households is roughly 15M people. 3% of that is 450k users. While not huge on the scale of the global browser install base, that is still a pretty sizeable chunk of users that this might impact.

Also, I'm not in CA and I know of PG&E - in fact many USA residents probably do because they make the national news cycle quite a bit. No need for such a patronizing comment.

PG&E is a huge utility company in northern california.

It's a electricity and gas utility that serves San Francisco and the Bay Area. Many Hacker News readers are from this area.

People love complaining about PG&E since its prices are ludicrously high (one of the highest in the nation --- about 50 cents per kWh), while the service is quite poor (they famously caused some serious wildfires and have frequent power outages during storms, although admittedly the recent couple of storms were quite strong). Now that they stopped supporting a beloved browser, there is all the more reason for the Bay Area techies to complain.

close, but think bigger

Fast facts about PG&E The company provides natural gas and electric service to approximately 16 million people throughout a 70,000-square-mile service area in northern and central California.

You're getting dogpiled on for not knowing this, but it's a reasonable question. If you're not one of the ~5% of the US population (0.2% of the global population) that lives in the part of California indicated on this map [0], the only interaction you might have had with PG&E is when they sparked a forest fire that caused smoke to cover most of the United States in 2018 [1].

[0] https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/tariffbook/ELEC_MAPS_...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Fire_%282018%29

if you want "support" the price of your bills will go up 50%. cuz just displaying HTML is too hard for some developers

self note: realize this when I login to the website to check my bill and now there is always an orange bar saying I am using unsupported browser, and a pop up every time I open the website.

The bigger problem I think is I cannot dismiss the bar. Of course I can use adblocker element match to block it but it is a hostile move imo.

Firefox has been declining in popularity for a decade and a half.

Eh it's been a decline approaching about 3% and staying around there for years now.

Moral victory.

...because who could love a technological monopoly more than a huge electrical power utility?

Everyone that ships Electron apps, and codes for "ChromeOS".

Thanks Mitchell!

♡ Chrome Team

Google becoming the main funder of Mozilla was a brilliant strategic move.

Now the Mozilla CEO knows where the money and it's salary comes from, and they know what they need to do to please the funder.

Thus the Firefox usage stats shows a perfect downtrend line, just as Google would want it to be.

No words need to be spoken, but everybody understands what the game is.

Please don’t bring it to their attention.

At $0.60/kWh, I cannot afford a new excuse to hike my electric and gas bill.

I cannot stand this company. I don’t agree with the practice where people in San Francisco have to pay for mismanagement and neglect of this for profit corporation’s infrastructure in far flung rural areas - places that I have never been before - and have no connection to. If we forced PG&E to breakup after the last bankruptcy, and San Francisco had purchased the wire infrastructure and transmission lines that give us light in the City, we would be much better off. Proceeds would be reinvested… Municipal ownership is the only proper solution. Just a thought.

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