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Comment by noman-land | Hacker News Reader

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It's IE all over again. Sometimes you can't.

If you have those one or two very specific websites that just cannot cope with Firefox, just use Chrome for them. They're likely not the ad-filled pages anyway, but rather some specific companies.

We've done this for the IE in the past, we can do it today. It really doesn't take that much time.

There's only one thing that will fix this situation long term and it's lowering chrome's market share. Don't stick with it and get continuously abused - no, it won't get better, only worse from now on.

Most of those "cannot copes" can be fixed by changing the user agent to that of Chrome. Most sites that refuse to work in other browsers simply don't test on anything but Chrome and don't want the support burden.

> Most sites that refuse to work in other browsers simply don't test on anything but Chrome

Today yes, but that could start to change if most tech people stop using Chrome, which they will if they can't block ads easily. Plus many average semi-tech-savvy people use ad blockers and will kick up a fuss and switch if their browsing becomes suddenly ad-ridden. If Chrome gets a reputation like AOL or something, then it won't be as acceptable for a website to only support Chrome.

I can't really fathom a scenario where you can't install other browsers but you can run a command in Terminal to alter some root permissions.

I don’t see how that is true. There are a ton of chromium based browsers, many with privacy enhancements baked in, and Safari is well supported (iOS monopoly ensures that).

I’ll give you Firefox not working well due to Mozilla shitting the bed under Baker who I consider a vandal and a charlatan.

As somebody who lives through IE6 the trend of a dominant browser shitting on users is the same - but so many more options to switch now.

IE was technically garbage and people eagerly wanted to get away from it as it broke sites.

Sites are now mostly built and tested on Chrome. Firefox breaks sites.

I've been using Firefox exclusively for years. I have no idea what these people who say it breaks sites are talking about. If you absolutely need to use chrome for something just keep chromium around for that specific site.

Firefox is a decent browser. Some sites are coded like shit and then they futz around until it works in whatever Chrome your cousin used for development.

There's some very specific sites that are broken in non-chrome browsers. Writing this message took you more time than you'd spend starting chrome specifically for them for the next few months.

I see you managed to avoid encountering the Great ActiveX Catastrophe. Microsoft successfully managed to lock thousands of services behind proprietary extensions that only IE supported.

Also, IE wasn't technically garbage. There were a few, specific things wrong with it. Its main issue was that it implemented web features idiosyncratically, and Microsoft didn't document it, so you had to learn all of IE's "quirks" through trial and error: but apart from being undocumented, few of IE's idiosyncrasies were actually bugs. Its box model, for example, was arguably superior to the official W3C recommendation.

For sites that break when using Firefox, you can report them here: https://webcompat.com/

Firefox doesn’t break sites.

All browsers break sites. In the past few months we've had our stuff broken due to bugs in Safari, Chromium and even Firefox.

But the situation is nothing like when IE was alive. Webdevelopment is much more pleasant now.

If I had to pick a black sheep now, I would say it's Safari, simply because the updates are tied in with OS updates. That's a shame.

Safari is the one, nowadays, that seems to always be the outlier.

Removing ad blocking is what breaks the internet for me. Firefox is working 99.9% fine except 0.1% of site which I usually do not miss or in the worst case open in another browser. This is an insignificant nuance compared to the constant distraction of not using an ad blocker.

This is FUD. Firefox doesn't break any sites. There is functionally no difference between sites rendered in Firefox and sites rendered in Chrome.

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