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Comment by cebert | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft is being so aggressive it makes me never want to attempt to try Bing or Edge ever. I wonder if they’ve calculated the number of folks they’re losing forever with these tactics.

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My assumption is that they have and the number of gained users is still more than those they lose. After all, most people (normies) still believe whatever their OS tells them, and if it tells them that Edge is safer and faster, they have no reason to doubt that.

While my personal preference is Firefox, i also have work to do, and most work sites will work perfectly with WebKit, and not so great with the Mozilla engine, so at my work PC i effectively had the choice between Chrome or Edge.

I ended up going with Edge with the reasoning that both Chrome and Edge probably report a boatload of telemetry back to the mothership, as well as Windows 11, so there was no reason to share that telemetry with both Microsoft and Google if i could just share with one.

On the plus side of things, Edge to me feels better. It's actually not half bad (privacy issues aside that exists in both Chrome and Edge).

Name one site, that works "not so great" with Firefox.

Basically anything that relies on Microsoft SSO, which is pretty much everything "enterprise".

It "works", but requires far too much manual intervention, with frequent authentication popups, as opposed to just using Chrome/Edge and be done with it.

I'm not ruling out that some of it is due to service misconfiguration by the auth team and service teams, but configuration errors or not, the end user result is the same, Chrome or Edge simply offer the path of least resistance.

I'm using many commercial sites using Microsoft SSO. I don't think I've ever been aware of an issue with Firefox.

Name and shame I say.

I've almost never had an issue with Microsoft SSO in Firefox. Be that with corporate Azure AD or personal Microsoft accounts.

I have had an issue with Linux and Microsoft SSO. Though that was more down to IT policies in Azure AD than it was Microsoft SSO specifically.

The only time Firefox was an issue with Microsoft SSO was when I tried to buy Minecraft and something about the Xbox / Minecraft / MS SSO required Edge. But that was one instance out of hundreds of interactions with MS SSO

AzureAD doesn't work with Firefox on Linux if you need a yubikey or similar as a second factor.

At some point FF wasn't able to do the user verification under linux (ask for a pin). Even though that's been fixed now, azuread still throws an error.

Chromium on Linux works fine. I haven't tried FF on Windows.

Not my experience for what it’s worth.

I use Firefox only, and use it for work to open outlook apps as well. I'm on Linux. Last week though I was traveling so my setup was my wife's macbook, with Firefox. Outlook would hang at the password login, but it worked fine on Safari. No idea why. I tried multiple times, tried emptying my cache and deleting internwt files, nothing... Anyone else ever had this issue?

About 80% of the “for your consideration” sites I get links to each year in awards season don’t work on Firefox, they outright refuse to use anything but Chrome, Edge, or Safari. No doubt something to do with the fun stuff they do to visually watermark the stream such that they can prosecute my ass if I share it anywhere. My guess is loads of enterprise-internal websites also just refuse to support more than one blessed browser.

Still nobody can actually link a single site which doesnt work in Firefox.

I have been using it nearly 20 years, and still never seen a site I couldnt use in Firefox. Please somebody prove me wrong so that I dont just think everyone that says this is just doing something wrong!

EDIT: Not sure why I am getting downvoted, am I lying? If someone posts a link that doesnt work on FF I would be happy to concede. But I have been asking this for decades and nobody has ever given me one.

Chase.com does not work on Firefox.

Default setting disable all JS. With JS fully enabled. Still doesnt work.

Using ublock and privacy badger.

I will also say theres another browser that does not work. I believe it is mullwad

Happy FF user for about 10 years and I wouldn't change it even if I worked at chase

I've used Chase.com for decades with Firefox (on Linux and Windows)

About five-ten years ago, I saw a few problems, but creating a new Firefox profile fixed that.

And using it with multi-account containers is nice too.

Chase.com works fine on Firefox for Android.

Don't you guys love blanket statements?

I have zero problems with that site using Firefox on Linux, Android, or Windows.

Curiously, most complaints seem to be from Mac users, and not just for this site, leading me to believe that something different may be going on on MacOS builds or APIs that it has to use there.

https://mabanque.bnpparibas/, a major French bank.

Used to work fine on Firefox. But since a few months, behavior has been pretty wonky with blank pages. Works fine on Chromium.

Works fine here in Firefox for Android. Sorry to say, but you just got proven wrong.

The actual account pages? Can you go to the transfer page and fill in the form?

The public page works fine.

Chase.com does not work on Firefox.

Default setting disable all JS. With JS fully enabled. Still doesnt work.

Using ublock and privacy badger.

I will also say theres another browser that does not work. I believe it is mullwad

Happy FF user for about 10 years and I wouldn't change it even if I worked at chase

I refuse to use chrome and I use vivaldi, opera, brave , edge and mullvad as well. Each has a specific purpose.

But my only general browsing browser is FF.

I use ff/ublock and the chase site works fine for me.

The only issue I've seen is, that some apps -- Proxmox, Jitsi Meet (via jitsi-openid) -- fail to authenticate against Keycloak. Sometimes. Sometimes clearing cookies helps; sometimes not.

But the weird thing is that this failure happens only on one computer (running MacOS). I have another, with synced settings & extensions & ublock settings (running Linux) and there it always works?

For a normal, public site, I've not seen any issue.

There are definitely a few javascript differences from Chrome and Firefox. Just look at the landing page for caniuse.com to see there are definite things that are not available in FF.

microsoft teams

Indeed, take the "we care about your privacy/cookie" nags - the industry collectively decided it's still better for their bottom line to put these on every site, every time you visit in the hopes that you'd get fed up or click the wrong button.

I think most people are sleepwalking through life. They surely are gaining more than they lose. Just like the streaming services that have added advertising, or the car manufacturers who have climate control subscriptions.

Probably because for most people the important issues/choices in their life do not revolve around the choice of their OS, browser, streaming service, car brand, FOSS apps, etc. but around career, family, friends, kids, partying, traveling, having fun, etc. none of which depend on the choices of the former.

You might call this "sleepwalking through life", while other people will call it "just living life" and not worrying about the unimportant pieces.

Only HN tries to be an elitist stickler for these things which do not matter to 99% of people.

All the other techie sites are sticklers for - and this is true - bad behavior.

The reason is, techies live their lives more in browsers than other people. Just because most people don't, doesn't make it right.

Most people don't even read or understand that pop-up. My girlfriend for example used Bing and Edge for a few years without realising it. She only learned about different browsers and search engines when she started a trainee program in a performance marketing firm and managing ad campaigns became her job.

It reminds me when google, in the in the 2010s, was bundling chrome with random installers like a third rate spyware company, to push chrome everywhere. It worked for chrome, it will work with edge as well.

Or like the Google of today, where I get "Sign in with Google" pop-ups on every other web site I visit.

The whole tech industry is nothing but nag nag nag nag nag. Is that really the best strategy "the smartest people in the room" can come up with? Imitate a five-year-old?

Unfortunately its the money paying the smartest people in the room that control the choices and make the decisions.

They'll loose probably the same amount of users they lost with the (annoying) "Do you really want to open $app?" dialogs (which I assume is just a rounding error).

What strikes me is that such behaviour is legal (as a dominant software provider regarding OSs).

I just yesterday discovered the new S mode where you can only run apps from their store... You can disable it but you need to sign-in, after having had to work around that already during setup. They really treat the user like an idiot to be exploited, shamelessly.

Is that really new? Windows 8 has an S version that was exactly that, and I don't believe you could unlock it.

They are targeting users that did not install Chrome themselves.

It's not uncommon for one technical person to "support" several non-technical relatives and friends.

These are the targets, they are aplenty and MS wants them.

Here on HN, I was once complaining about those "Sign up for our newsletter" popups that every site seems to have these days, and mentioned that if I see that, I close the tab immediately. A marketing guy replied and told me that the bounce rate is so much smaller than the conversion rate that not doing it would be crazy.

You might be surprised how many people have absolutely no concern for software abusing them.

I agree, it's an extremely disrespectful user interface if it ignores my choices.

Considering Chrome gained its large user base through its own nag screens on Google.com I bet the people inside Microsoft consider it fair game. I don’t agree.

They use the tactics because people stay, because they're probably too afraid to leave. As MS knows this, they're free to abuse as they wish.

Internet Explorer being absolute trash means you cannot trust them to write a browser. I remember when Edge was coming out they did some AMAs on social media that didn't inspire confidence so I doubled down on my resolve to never use a Microsoft browser.

This news has me tripling down on never using a Microsoft OS. The double-down for that was stories of forced or unexpected OS updates.

Edge is just a chromium reskin so it's probably decent. Doesn't make the practice acceptable.

I'm never running windows again.

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